Some obese people may have excessive numbers of fat cells. This type of obesity, hyperplasia, usually begins to develop in early childhood and perhaps, due to the mother’s dietary habits, even prior to birth. The most critical periods for the development of hyperplasia seem to be the last two to three months of fetal development, the first year of life, and between the ages of 9 and 13. Parents who allow their children to eat without restrictions and to become overweight may be setting their children up for a lifelong excess of fat cells. Central to this theory is the belief that the number of fat cells in a person’s body does not increase appreciably during adulthood. However, the ability of each of these cells to swell and shrink, known as hypertrophy, does carry over into adulthood. Weight gain may be tied to both the number of fat cells in the body and the capacity of each individual cell to enlarge.
An average-weight adult has approximately 25 billion to 30 billion fat cells, a moderately obese adult about 60 billion to 100 billion, and an extremely obese adult as many as 200 billion. People who add large numbers of fat cells to their bodies in childhood may be able to lose weight by decreasing the size of each cell in adulthood, but the large numbers of cells remain, and with the next calorie binge, they fill up and sabotage weight loss efforts. Additional research must be conducted to determine the accuracy of these theories.
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WEIGHT MANAGEMENT: DEVELOPMENTAL FACTORS FOR OBESITY
Posted by 2011-06-01T16:11:01+00:00"> – June 1, 2011
