There are more obese children in the West than ever before in history, putting them at risk for type 2 diabetes and future heart disease. But when they try to diet, they gain more weight. How can this be happening?
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Icelandic researchers have isolated a gene that determines whether we’ll be fat or thin. And a cheap sweetener used in almost everything we eat may play a major role in the obesity epidemic in America.
“Obesity and thinness are two sides of the same coin,” says Kari Stefansson, of deCODE, who helped isolate the gene that determines what shapes our bodies will be. “This is an important step toward developing new drugs that can treat obesity, perhaps by utilizing the body’s own mechanisms for promoting and maintaining thinness.”
If you’ve got the fat version of the gene (and most Americans do), you have to watch what you eat. But what can you do when manmade, fat-producing substances are hiding in almost every food we eat?
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Periodic fasting is good for the health and can help you lose weight, even if you gorge afterwards. It’s known that mice live longer on a severely restricted calorie diet and it protects them from diseases and stress as well. But do we have to live a life of starvation? Scientists now think we can get the same benefits from alternately fasting and feasting.
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Your boyfriend can lose weight just by giving up desserts for a week, while nothing you do will budge that extra ten pounds. Researchers have discovered that different genes are responsible for obesity in different groups of mice, so they assume it must be true for humans as well. This means there needs to be different ways to lose weight. Some people may have a hormone problems, while others have flawed hunger message signals or emotional reasons to overeat. Pre-diabetic people have an especially hard time dropping more than a few pounds, since their bodies are programmed to grab onto extra weight.
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