Fatty acid composition as an early determinant of childhood obesity.

Recent evidence from animal and human studies favor the possibility that changes in the balance of essential PUFAs are altering the early stages of adipose tissue development, not only during fetal life and infancy which are periods showing the highest adaptability and vulnerability to external factors but also afterwards. Consistent with these data, cellularity of human adipose tissue from obese patients depends on the age of obesity onset, particularily the adipocyte number more than the adipocyte size, in agreement with the fact that only precursor cells divide and that adipose tissue expands dramatically at early age [2]. Both in rodents and humans, long-chain fatty acids act at the preadipocyte stage and trigger the formation of adipo