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The skinny on thinness
Muscle & Fitness/Hers, April, 2004
With more than 65 percent of our country's population considered overweight, scientists are lining up to study what's making us so fat. So Dan Bessesen, a Denver endocrinologist, thought, Why not reverse this idea and study what keeps some people thin? The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Bessesen $1 million to answer that question.
For years, Bessesen had studied the lifestyle habits of laboratory rats, putting them on myriad diets and exercise programs to see why and how they gain weight, lose weight, and then gain it back again (think rodent yo-yo dieting). He found that the rats who had a propensity for thinness were self-regulating eaters; they naturally tended to cut back on calories whenever they plumped up a little, leading him to speculate that perhaps there was something genetically different about their metabolisms. Bessesen is now going to put his theories to the test with humans. He'll study 200 men and women, half of them obese and half of them "weight stable," to see if he can pinpoint why some people remain perpetually thin despite the odds. Who knows? Perhaps he'll discover some genes that will make us all look good.--N.C.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Weider Publications
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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