OVEREATING may ruin your looks in more ways than you think. Obesity impairs the body’s ability to fight gum disease, increasing the chances of tooth loss, studies in mice suggest.
Salomon Amar at Boston University Medical Center in Massachusetts and his colleagues infected both lean and obese mice with Porphyromonas gingivalis, a bacterium that causes gum disease, and then studied how their bodies coped. Some of the mice were infected directly in the gum area; others had the bacterium injected into their bloodstream. In both cases, fat mice were slower to kill the bacterium because their immune response was…
