Uh oh! Seems like the air you breathe might not be safe anymore. In a recent study found out that air pollution can increase the risk for obesity and diabetes.
An alarming study published in Duke University found out that the highly polluted air of Beijing can actually cause metabolic dysfunction in lab rats which leads to obesity and diabetes when compared to lab rats that had not been exposed to the polluted air.
There have been countless studies pointing out the toxicity of the air in China's capital and it has become a major focus of health concerns, because of the bad air conditions, preceding the two red alerts in 2015.
"If translated and verified in humans, these findings will support the urgent need to reduce air pollution, given the growing burden of obesity in today's highly polluted world," Junfeng Zhang, a professor of global and environmental health at Duke University, stated in a press release.
The researchers exposed the lab rats to two controlled environment, one sample is from a polluted air from Beijing and the other sample is a filtered air for nineteen days.
The rats that have been exposed to polluted air had 50 percent higher bad cholesterol levels, 46 percent higher triglycerides, and 97 percent higher total cholesterol, as well as a higher insulin resistance level.
In spite of the same amount of food that was being fed to both sets of lab rats, it has been found out that the rats breathing polluted air also gained more weight eight weeks into the study, with female rats 10 percent heavier and male rats 18 percent heavier than their counterparts breathing the filtered air.
"Since chronic inflammation is recognized as a factor contributing to obesity and since metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity are closely related, our findings provide clear evidence that chronic exposure to air pollution increases the risk for developing obesity," Zhang said.
