Although undernutrition and starvation continue to affect a substantial portion of the world's population, billions of people in both developed and developing countries are affected by the opposite problem: consumption of calories that exceed their daily energy expenditure, a condition of overnutrition. The body's response to a positive net energy balance is to store energy, predominantly as tr...

OBJECTIVE A variety of methods are available for defining undernutrition (thinness/underweight/under-fat) and overnutrition (overweight/obesity/over-fat). The extent to which these definitions agree is unclear. The present cross-sectional study aimed to assess agreement between widely used methods of assessing nutritional status in children and adolescents, and to examine the benefit of body co...

OBJECTIVE The global obesity epidemic continues, new approaches are needed to understand the causes. We analyzed data from an evolutionary perspective, stressing developmental plasticity. METHODS We present diachronical height, weight, and BMI data for 702,902 Swiss male conscripts aged 18-20 years, a representative, standardized and unchanged data source. RESULTS From 1875 to 1879, the hei...

OBJECTIVE The present paper reports the prevalence of underweight, overweight and obesity by gender, ethnicity and grade, among participants in a 2002 national survey among South African school-going youth that included height and weight measurements. DESIGN A stratified two-stage sample was used. Nationally representative rates of underweight, overweight and obesity were calculated using wei...

Chronic overnutrition drives complex adaptations within both professional metabolic and bystander tissues that, despite intense investigation, are still poorly understood. Xu et al. (2013) now describe the unexpected ability of adipose tissue macrophages to buffer lipids released from obese adipocytes in a manner independent of inflammatory macrophage activation.

The intake of known dietary carcinogens was compiled and the cancer risk was estimated on the basis of carcinogenic potencies in animals as derived from the Carcinogenic Potency Database by Gold and co-workers. The total cancer risk was compared with the number of cancer cases attributed by epidemiologists to dietary factors (one-third of all cancer cases, i.e. approximately 80,000 per one mill...

Human overnutrition has caused a rise in the prevalence of obesity in recent years. In addition to the deleterious effects of obesity during childhood, long-term effects in adulthood have been described as well. For instance, cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes are among the diseases associated with a history of obesity. Altered insulin secretion and action have been described as import...

Intrauterine stress induces increased risk of adult disease through fetal programming mechanisms. Oxidative stress can be generated by several conditions, such as, prenatal hypoxia, maternal under- and overnutrition, and excessive glucocorticoid exposure. The role of oxidant molecules as signaling factors in fetal programming via epigenetic mechanisms is discussed. By linking oxidative stress w...

Pulakat L, DeMarco VG, Ardhanari S, Chockalingam A, Gul R, WhaleyConnell A, Sowers JR. Adaptive mechanisms to compensate for overnutrition-induced cardiovascular abnormalities. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 301: R885–R895, 2011. First published August 3, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00316.2011.—In conditions of overnutrition, cardiac cells must cope with a multitude of extracellular signa...