Weight Loss Harmful for Health?

By Geoff Michaels, | Health | 1 Comment

Researchers from America have turned our natural assumptions on their head, by suggesting that weight loss can lead to illness.

Despite significant evidence that losing weight reduces your risk of diabetes, cancers and heart problems, Duk-Hee Lee and her research team from Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea, believe that long-term weight loss can release pollutants into the bloodstream. These substances are stored in fatty tissues, but get into the blood stream when fat breaks down during weight loss, Lee suggests. “We are living under the strong dogma that weight loss is always beneficial,” she told. “But we think that increased (pollutant) levels (in the blood) due to weight loss can affect human health in a variety of ways.”

Lee and her colleagues studied 1,099 participants in the US and examined the level of these pollutants in their blood.

Those who lost weight over 10 years had the highest concentrations of the compounds in their blood. The chemicals, known as POPs, have been linked to type 2 diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Age, gender and race were all factored in to explain the differences in concentrations. Now they want to carry out more studies to established whether the harm from long-term weight loss could possibly outweigh the benefits.