KEY POINTS:
Peoples perception of obesity and fat may be key to solving the weighty issue not just in Samoa but regionally.
Doctor Annamarie Christiansen, Editor of the Pacific Islands Journal and Professor at Brigham Young University, Hawaii, says cultural perceptions of food and the body determine Polynesians eating habits
and management of their bodies.
According to Christiansen, historically size represented wellbeing and wealth of a person and community.
Traditional foods and lifestyle however maintained the health of Polynesians, until, according to Christiansen, "it was disrupted by colonialism".
She said: "With the introduction of technology, Pacific Islanders do not move as much anymore to feed and clothe themselves".
According to the professor, the international media has also fuelled the perception of Pacific Islanders and in particular Polynesia as people of larger sizes.
Samoa was recently ranked 6th on the Forbes World's Fattest Countries.
Except for Kuwait and America, all of the top 10 countries were in the Pacific Islands.
Such reports, and sensationalism of statistics, further encourage the perception that indeed Polynesians are big people, Christiansen says.
But genetics have also played a part in the obesity story, with the discovery of an obesity gene by British geneticists in April this year.
The discovery, reported by the Guardian newspaper in England, will lead to a better understanding of why some people tend to put on weight more easily then others.
Known as the FTO gene, it is reported to influence the likelihood of obesity in a person.
"We know that FTO is expressed in many tissues in the body and is found in regions of the brain associated with regulation of appetite," said Frances Ashcroft, a physiologist at Oxford University.
According to the researchers the FTO gene is capable of repairing DNA and switching the activity of other genes on and off.
Oxford University Chemist Chris Schofield said: "What we have here with FTO is something that is causing obesity in the general population, not a rare mutation in a single gene that causes a dramatic effect on body weight. Obesity is a common disease and that means it probably will occur in combination with other genes to make obesity phenotypes."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) states that 75 per cent of urban Samons and 1.6 billion adults in the world are overweight.
That number is projected to grow by 40 per cent over the next 10 years.
According to WHO, obesity is a complex condition in developing countries, with serious social and psychological dimensions, affecting virtually all ages and socioeconomic groups.
"Increased consumption of more energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats, combined with reduced physical activity, have led to obesity rates that have risen three-fold or more since 1980 in some areas of the Pacific Islands, Australasia and China. The obesity epidemic is not restricted to industrialized societies; this increase is often faster in developing countries than in the developed world," WHO states.
In addition to the FTO gene, earlier research suggested that the high prevalence of obesity leading to diabetes in Samoa is due to a unique gene known as the "thrifty genotype", combined with the rapid modernized lifestyle.
Thrifty genotype was a concept coined by the late James Neel, a geneticist from the University of Michigan to explain the reason for heavy Islanders.
In 1962, the year Samoa became independent, he wrote an article on diabetes saying that, under conditions of scarcity, natural selection weeds out people unable to store food efficiently in their bodies, and that a thrifty genotype encourages the conversion of calories into body fat.
According to Neel thrifty genotype worked well in maintaining energy and nutrients in the bodies of our ancestors during long periods of starvation when they were sailing from island to island.
He suggested that the Islanders bodies stored and maintained energy from food in preparation for times of food scarcity.
Thrifty genotype was also included in a Samoa Studies Project, a research by Jim Bindon in 1997 titled "Coming of age of human adaptability studies in Samoa ".
The findings which were published in the Oxford University Press defined the gene further.
"The thrifty gene was an adaptation that allowed more efficient energy storage in the body, and is present among Amerindians and Pacific Islanders."
Bindon said that both groups of people adapted with the thrifty gene in response to an environment that did not consistently provide carbohydrates.
But Christiansen says such genetic theories and discoveries do not help the obesity issue in the Pacific Islands.
"We have to question what such research would justify, it is dangerous to blame genetics," Christiansen said.
She is convinced that obesity can be blamed on a lot of things, but it is the solution to the problem that Pacific Islanders will have to adapt.
