Hosts: Mignon Fogarty and Adam Lowe
Transcript: This episode originally aired December 27, 2005
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Mignon: There's been a lot of news the last couple of weeks about obesity.
Adam: It certainly is an epidemic in the U.S. At least.
Mignon: They've found when they do research on mice, when mice are kept on dry kibble, they pretty much regulate their weight pretty well. But when they're put on a cafeteria diet, which is what we're exposed to – unlimited choice – mice balloon up just like we do.
Adam: One of the thoughts in terms of obesity is when people lived in a time when food was not abundant, there was a benefit to being able to store a lot of fat. So when you hit the lean times you are able to survive. So there is a lot of talk about diabetes and obesity and the “thrifty gene” hypothesis. Again, the idea being that people might have had a genetic background that in the past would have been very advantageous to be able to store a lot of fat and survive through winters where there wasn't a lot of food availability, or various kinds of famine, but in today's world, the developed world where food is abundant, it can be problematic when you start building up a lot of fat.
NEXT: OBESITY IMPAIRS MEDICAL CARE
