ABSTRACT

Heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and stroke have become epidemic health problems and constitute major causes of death and disability in the United States and globally. Each of these chronic metabolic health problems impacts millions of lives, costs healthcare consumers billions of dollars each year, and has provoked large-scale societal responses of disease prevention, biological testing, and medical treatment. Taken together, these conditions represent and embody something altogether different. As the scope and impact of these epidemics has grown, and the science of human metabolism has become an important site of technoscience, scientists and clinicians have developed new ways of thinking about and acting on the interrelationships among the biological processes that encompass human metabolism. Biomedical researchers, physicians, government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly using the term metabolic syndrome to describe the combination of biological risk factors that are statistically correlated with the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke: high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat/weight, and cholesterol.1 Supported by robust epidemiological findings that the group of people with three or more abnormally high biological risk factors are more likely to experience heart attacks, strokes, and the onset of diabetes compared to those with two or fewer factors, biomedical researchers are in the process of institutionalizing metabolic syndrome as a legitimate, diagnosable, and treatable disease. Metabolic syndrome is metabolic because it concerns the biological processes by which

bodies metabolize nutrients derived from food and describes these processes in terms of physiological or biochemical indicators of disease processes that are measured at the level of an individual body. Specifically, metabolic syndrome is comprised of so-called abnormal levels of several clinical and laboratory measurements that, if present in one body, represent a substantially increased risk of serious metabolic health problems: elevated blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, and elevated weight.2