Role of Micro-And Macro-Nutrients in Obesity Onset

The incidence of obesity has been increasing exponentially for the last 30 years, and it is posing a major health issue in the US and worldwide. The 2015 reports by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US indicate that approximately 1.9 billion people worldwide are overweight and more than 600 million are frankly obese, irrespective of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and socioeconomic strata [1]. As individuals become obese or overweight at a younger age, the incidence and severity of obesity-related long-term complications has also increased signifi cantly. Type 2-diabetes, particular forms of cancer (i.e. breast, ovarian, colon, and liver cancer), and cardiovascular diseases including hypertension and stroke represent the most common complications of obesity, and all carry expensive price-tags. In the particular case of diabetes, previous predictions estimating ~28 million people in the US to be affected by diabetes by the year 2030 have proven to be optimistic as 29.1 million individuals were reported to be diabetic by the year 2012, with an attached price-tag for the US healthcare system in excess of 250 billion USD between direct and indirect costs including lost productivity [2]. The trend continues unabated, with ~900,000 new cases of diabetes diagnosed every year in the US only [3]. In countries such as China, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. the increase is even steeper, and it predicts that more than 500 million individuals worldwide will be diabetic by the year 2030 [2]. These projections are an underestimate as pre-diabetic individuals may elude medical screening and go undiagnosed. More intriguing, epidemiologic and genetic studies indicate that specifi c ethnicities and races are more susceptible to develop obesity, diabetes, or hypertension, and show signifi cant discrepancies between genders, with women being more signifi cantly affected. For example, obesity affects ~57% of African-American women and ~46% of Hispanic women as compared to ~38% of African-American men, and ~39% of Hispanic men [1,2], raising the question as to whether particular genetic factors have been over-looked or underestimated that can explain the higher propensity to obesity in women of these two ethnicities.