“The drive to eat is as every much of a physiological drive and dominating thought as the feeling of being thirsty.” There’s a lesson here for humans, Raffan says. Most of the animals the researchers studied had one copy of the mutation, but fewer had two. For each copy of the mutation – which occurred in a gene called POMC – a dog was about 2kg heavier. She and fellow researchers discovered that a genetic mutation present in around a quarter of Labradors, was associated with obesity. “Labradors are consistently the headline act when it comes to overweight dogs,” says Eleanor Raffan, a veterinarian and geneticist at the University of Cambridge. The first animal clue lies at the paw of the obesity-prone Labrador retriever. The bizarre bias that affects how you shop.Why obesity damages your mind as well as your body.And childhood obesity has risen alarmingly too – an estimated 41 million children under the age of five are overweight or obese. The worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. Of these, more than 650 million are obese – that’s about 13% of the world’s adult human population. More than 1.9 billion human adults are overweight. If these findings are true, something else must be driving obesity and uncovering those could help tackle our own epidemic with the condition. But obesity also seems to be occurring even in some domestic and wild animals who aren’t being overfed or under-exercised.
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