Dietary exposure to environmental pollutants and the risk of obesity

The obesity epidemic is known being caused by improper nutrition and inactivity, together with genetic predisposition, but it is generally agreed that these factors alone cannot entirely account for the epidemic.
The obesogen hypothesis suggests that dietary exposure to low doses of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in early periods of vulnerability may increase the risk of obesity in adult life. Also, most EDCs accumulate in fat tissue, which is of concern since it is known that body fat is not merely a depot for storage of triglycerides, but an endocrine gland crucially involved in energy regulation.
We study early markers of the metabolic syndrome in relation to the body burden of chemicals in four longitudinal cohorts in whom we have longitudinal measures of growth and metabolism during various stages of development. In addition we test relevant mixtures of chemicals in cellular models of interest for obesity development.