What makes people fat? All sorts of things have been blamed, from too much eating and too little exercise to slow metabolisms and fast food ― even air conditioning.
But a shocking new study suggests that some cases of obesity grow out of sexual or physical abuse during childhood.
The study, conducted by scientists at Harvard Medical School, showed that women with a personal history of abuse are much more likely than other women to develop a food addiction.
For the study, a team led by Dr. Susan M. Mason, a postdoctoral fellow at the Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, studied the link between childhood abuse and adult food addiction in 57,321 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II.
Dr. Mason's team found that food addiction was almost twice as common among women who indicated that they had experienced sexual or physical abuse before age 18 than among women with no history of childhood abuse, according to a written statement released in conjunction with the research.
Women who had experienced both sexual and physical abuse were even more likely to have food addiction.
Overall, the prevalence of food addiction ran from 6 percent in women with no history of childhood abuse all the way to 16 percent among women who had experienced both sexual and physical abuse.
That's shocking stuff - especially since national surveys indicate that more than a third of American women endured such abuse before reaching age 18, according to the statement. More than two out of three U.S. adults are overweight or obese.
One 2009 study of more than 15,000 adolescents found that men with a history of childhood sexual abuse were 66 percent more likely to be obese than other men.
Mason said in the email that animal and clinical research suggests that people in "stressful environments may overeat so-called comfort foods - these are high-fat and high-sugar foods that can blunt feelings of distress by stimulating reward systems in the brain."
Food addiction involves behaviors such as repeated episodes of eating despite the absence of hunger and experiencing withdrawal symptoms when cutting back on certain foods, Dr. Mason told The Huffington Post in an email.