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EVOLVING TOWARD FAT: The ultimate reason for obesity may lie with ancestors who ate Atkins-like diets but lived like marathoners...
...earliest ancestors probably ate much as their cousins the apes did, foraging for fruits, shoots, nuts, tubers and other vegetation in the forests and savannas of Africa. Because most wild plants are relatively low in calories, it took constant work just to stay alive. Fruits, full of natural sugars like fructose and glucose, were an unusually concentrated source of energy, and the instinct to seek out and consume them evolved in many mammals long before humans ever arose. Fruit wasn't always available, but those who ate all they could whenever it was were more likely to survive and pass...
...more important, unlike the big cats, which rely mostly on strength and speed to bring down dinner, our ancestors depended on guile, organization and the social and technological skills made possible by their increasingly complex brains. Those who were smartest about hunting--and about gathering the plant foods they ate as part of their omnivorous diets--tended to be better fed and healthier than the competition. They were thus more likely to pass along their genes...
...appetite for meat and sweets were essential to human survival, but they didn't lead to obesity for several reasons. For one thing, the wild game our ancestors ate was high in protein but very low in fat--only about 4%, compared with up to 36% in grain-fed supermarket beef. For another, our ancestors couldn't count on a steady supply of any particular food. Hunters might bring down a deer or a rabbit or nothing at all. Fruit might be in season, or it might not. A chunk of honeycomb might have as many calories as half...
...blood vessels that feed fat cells. The fat cells die and those extra pounds melt away--but only, so far, in rodents. In one experiment, mice that had doubled in size on a high-fat diet were back to normal weight in just a month, no matter what they ate. "If even a fraction of what we found in mice relates to human biology, then we are cautiously optimistic that there may be a new way to think about reversing obesity," says Renata Pasqualini of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Promising research to be sure...