Apple or pear-shaped body? Blame it on your genes
By IANSMonday, October 11, 2010
LONDON - Our propensity to be apple- or pear-shaped lies partly in our genes. And they shape female shaopes more than males one.
A team from the Cambridge, Oxford and other universities has tracked more than a dozen genes that determine whether we store fat around our waists or across our thighs and bottoms.
They seem to affect the female body shape more than the male one. The discovery is important because the distribution of fat around the body is known to bear on health.
Apple-shapes, or people with beer bellies and muffin tops, are at higher odds of diabetes and heart problems than those who are pear-shaped or bottom heavy, reports the Daily Mail.
Working out why fat settles where it does could lead to more effective diet pills that would help millions shed unwanted pounds from their bellies, according to the journal Nature Genetics.
Scientists scrutinised data from 32 previous studies involving almost 80,000 people for clues to the genetics of body shape.
They then checked their findings against data from 29 studies involving more than 113,500 men and women.
They pinpointed 14 genetic patterns associated with waist-to-hip ratio, 13 of which were new.
Seven have much stronger effect in women than in men, suggesting they may underlie some of the normal difference in fat distribution between the sexes.
“By finding genes that have an important role in influencing fat distribution and the ways in which that differs between men and women, we hope to home in on the crucial underlying biological processes,” says Cecilia Lindgren of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the Oxford University.
