Obesity in Samoa: A global harbinger?

About three-quarters of the U.S. territory’s adult population is obese, the highest rate in the world with independent Samoa quickly catching up. Rates of type 2 diabetes top one in five and a recent study found that the elevated obesity rates are present even in newborns.

This pandemic began only a few decades ago and for much of that time Brown University epidemiologist Stephen McGarvey has applied a highly integrative brand of scholarship to the islands to investigate the mystery’s one overriding question: How did all this happen?

McGarvey will explain where his quest has led him and what he has found at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago Feb. 16, 2014. He is part of a session on the importance to studies of human health and biology of performing field work and considering cultures in the developing world.

McGarvey is a biological anthropologist in the Brown University School of Public Health. With that that blended resume he is in the right position to tease apart the contributions that three main factors likely make to Samoa’s obesity crisis: genetics and epigenetics, culture and economics, and geography.

McGarvey and his Samoan and stateside collaborators have conducted several studies of genetics on the island to search for unique biological susceptibilities to obesity in the Samoan population. Looking deep into the migrations and history of Polynesian peoples, it’s conceivable that life might have been stressful enough or food may have been scarce enough to uniquely influence genes related to managing and storing energy.

So far there has been no clear genetic “smoking gun” that would lend such “just so” stories more credence.

McGarvey and colleagues are currently engaged in a National Institutes of Health-funded genome wide association study (GWAS) in Samoa to continue the investigation whether genetics or environmentally influenced gene expression have any role.

“We have found a few things that look like they could be unique to Samoa in our GWAS, but we are at the point now of doing replication studies of that finding,” McGarvey said. “We have to be careful. We have to replicate this in another Samoan data set and then we may try to replicate it in another population.”

And then would come the task of figuring out the interaction of those genes with environmental factors.

Certainly, with or without a definitive biological underpinning, the timing of the island’s obesity pandemic coincided with a change in diet and lifestyle. Where Samoans once engaged in subsistence fishing, Westernization has brought fast food, labor-saving devices, and other conveniences.

McGarvey co-authored and led a study in 2012 showing that the available