Word: fats
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...identity of most of the major players in this biochemical balancing act could for years only be guessed at. The first big breakthrough occurred in 1995, when the Rockefeller's Friedman stunned the scientific world by announcing that he and his colleagues had discovered a hormone produced by fat cells that actually caused fat to melt away, at least in laboratory mice. Genetically engineered mice that lacked the gene for making this hormone developed ravenous appetites and became grossly obese. When these same mice were injected with the missing hormone, they shrugged off a third of the weight they...
...level, there is no mystery about why we as a society are fat. We are fat because we consume too many calories and expend too few. Though it is true that the proportion of fat in our diet has fallen from 40% in 1990 to roughly 34% today, the calories available in the food we consume have gone up, from 3,100 calories per capita per day in the 1960s to 3,700 in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). "And that alone," says New York University nutritionist Marion Nestle, "is sufficient to explain the obesity...
...deeper question--one that has plagued anyone who has ever struggled to take off more than a few pounds. And that is: How do some folks manage to live in the same "toxic environment" and never gain weight? Indeed, the question of why so many of us are fat is just half the puzzle. "You can just as easily flip it around," says Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University, "and ask why--despite equal access to calories--is anyone thin...
...energy-balance equation. On one side of the equation are the calories we consume. On the other side are the calories we burn--through physical activity as well as whatever is needed just to keep the body in good working order. Anything left over gets converted to body fat...
...Researchers led by Dr. Bradford Lowell at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston last month pinpointed three genes that may account for at least some of that variation. Mice that lack the genes, they reported in Science, grow grossly obese when fed a high-calorie diet enriched with fat and sucrose. By contrast, normal mice fed the same diet gain very modest amounts of weight...