Dust can cause weight gain

PEOPLE should keep their homes spotless if they want to avoid putting on weight, research suggests.

A pioneering study in the US found that dust is capable of carrying hormone-altering chemicals that prompt cells in the body to accumulate fat.

Experiments found that even small amounts of dust, which can be inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin, were enough to provoke the effect.

The dust particles were found to contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals, synthetic or naturally occurring compounds that can interfere with the body’s hormones. The chemicals are derived from flame retardants, as well as phthalates, substances added to plastics to increase their flexibility.

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina collected 11 dust samples and introduced them to mouse cells. Seven spurred the mouse cells to accumulate more fat. The findings were published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Household dust makes you fat, scientists have found, and you don’t even have to eat it. Chemicals commonly found in such things as upholstery fire-retardants apparently make human cells absorb fat until they resemble elephant seals basking on the shingle. The chemicals do their beefy work even when they are breathed in or absorbed through the skin, and the dust in many households is thick with them.

This surprising tendency reverses the traditional associations of dust. Denizens of dusty places, such as Miss Havisham (“shrunk to skin and bone”) or Flay, Mervyn Peake’s feudal factotum in

Gormenghast (whose joints as he walked made “cracking sounds, one per step, which might be likened to the breaking of dry twigs”), were expected to be skeletal. The 21st century would have a Miss Havisham too portly to squeeze into her wedding dress, making her a tragic figure of a more familiar kind, perhaps. The modern Flay, swaddled in layers of adiposity, would have nothing to distinguish him from his mortal enemy, the slug-fat chef called Swelter.

For us in the so-called real world, the answer is some brisk housework. Quentin Crisp was wrong to say that it didn’t matter because after four years the dust gets no thicker. No, it must be open with the windows, out with the vacuum cleaner and to war against the unseen battalions of motes that threaten to smother us with lard.