Word: fats
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...cost of food--quality food--is perhaps the best place to start. Calorically speaking, the best bang for the buck tends to be packed with sugar, fat and refined grains (think cookies and candy bars). In general, processed foods hog ever larger portions of all Americans' diets--one reason we spend just a tenth of our incomes on food today, compared with a fifth in 1950. But a pound of lean steak costs a lot more than a pound of hot dogs. "The stomach is a dumb organ," says J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty...
...BIOLOGICAL REASONS Our desire for food--and lots of it--is hardwired into our cells. Do our bodies want to be fat...
There's no question that some pretty strong social, emotional and behavioral forces play a part in determining what, when and how much we eat. But if you really want to know why some people are fat and others aren't, you have to take a good look at biology as well. Mother Nature simply can't afford to leave anything so important to human survival as eating to the whims of cultural fashion. Ten years after the discovery of the first obesity gene, scientists are only beginning to understand just how hardwired our desire for food--and lots...
What they are finding is an exquisitely fine-tuned system of chemical and neurological checks and balances that regulates both what we eat and how much our bodies store as fat. The average American consumes about 1 million calories a year--and, under normal circumstances, burns almost exactly that amount. The body achieves that balance by automatically increasing or decreasing the efficiency with which it performs various tasks, thus consuming fewer or more calories. (Most of the calories we expend are used to breathe, maintain body temperature, keep the brain chugging along, etc. Depending on how much you move, physical...
Accomplishing that feat requires a lot of communication and coordination among the fat cells, the liver, the muscles, the brain, the stomach and the gastrointestinal tract. Sometimes the signal is a molecule. Other signals are actually conducted along nerve paths. There are even mechanical signals, like the stretching of the stomach, which is one way the body says, "I'm full...