Missing Microbes by Martin Blaser

Author:Martin Blaser [Blaser, Martin J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443420259
Publisher: 2014

12.

TALLER

We were on a back road, taking what on the map looked like a very direct route to Chichén Itzá, a large pre-Columbian city built by the Mayas. It was dry and dusty, but the dirt road was good. Now and again, we could see the roofs of houses through the bush. Other than the road, there wasn’t much evidence of progress amid the seared landscape. Yet the Yucatán had once been one of the centers of a civilization encompassing millions of people, stable over centuries. Now, not far from the ruins of a great ceremonial site, the land was mostly scrub forest, desolate and monotonous.

But down the road I could see two children. As we got closer and drove past them, their faces came into view. They were purely Mayan, with jet-black straight hair and broad, smooth features, the type we see in murals or sculptures on a classical Mayan stele. But something was immediately askew. These kids, maybe eight and eleven years old, were much too heavy. They were obese. I could expect to see obese children on the roads of Arkansas, Ohio, or Bavaria, but here in the Yucatán it was a shock.

“It’s even happening here,” I said to Gloria, who was traveling with me. She knew that I was studying obesity, so my implication was evident. I was surprised how far the epidemic had spread, reaching even to remote areas in developing countries. Later, when I related what I saw on the road to one of my colleagues at NYU, he told me that he had observed the same thing in Ghana: “When I started working there more than thirty years ago, the major problem in children was malnutrition. Now it’s obesity.”

Why are people all over the world getting fatter? For the first time in human history, overfed people outnumber the underfed. Globally, one in three adults is overweight. One in ten is obese. By 2015, the World Health Organization estimates that the number of chubby adults will grow to 2.3 billion, equal to the combined populations of China, Europe, and the United States. Children and adolescents are also heavier everywhere we look. Are people eating too much junk food and exercising too little?

As a doctor and scientist who studies human health, I am both disturbed and fascinated by this question of why people are getting fatter. And I have found what I believe are some promising leads for answering it. But before I get to them, I want to discuss a related question that led me, circuitously, to those answers: Why are people all over the world getting taller?

Average human height has been increasing in many countries for the last one hundred years. When I ask most people why they think this is happening, they say it is because of better nutrition, and it is hard to argue with that. In developed countries, we are certainly eating more than our ancestors did, although whether our diets are better is a whole other issue. Famine is mostly a thing of the past.

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