Rethinking Thin

Part of the reason why Gina Kolata wrote Rethinking Thin is she wished that dieters who lose significant amounts of weight on only to gain it back would stop blaming themselves for not being disciplined or lacking willpower.  And she also wanted everyone else to stop blaming fat people for being fat. 

Rethinking Thin is a fascinating book about diets, dieters and the discovery of leptin, a hormone that affects appetite and metabolism.  The book follows Carman Pirollo, Graziella Mann and Jerry Gordon, all participants in a diet study at the University of Pennsylvania.  They are waging a quiet but fierce war against their own metabolism.  At the same time Kolata, a science reporter for The New York Times, weaves in a history of diets—from Lord Byron who drank vinegar to lose weight to Brillat-Savarin’s injunction against the practice.  There is Horace Fletcher who advocated chewing a mouthful of food 100 times a minute before swallowing to Dr. Robert Atkins, the popularizer of the Atkins diet that is the subject of the Penn study.

But the most compelling part of the book traces the scientific research done on obesity. For some reason, the implications of this research have not filtered down to the general public.  Some of the most groundbreaking work is Jeff Friedman’s research at Rockefeller University.  Kolata makes what must have been painstaking and arduous study actually seem suspenseful.  After a decade of work, Friedman isolated the genetic marker for leptin, a hormone which plays an integral role in body fat.  Leptin assists in a chain reaction that acts an appetite suppressant.  The end result is the feeling of being full—a feeling that obese people lack.  Scientists studying the brain’s weight control mechanisms are constantly uncovering new properties—like the fact that leptin could possibly re-wire the brain, permanently changing a person’s appetite and weight. The researchers say that the science of obesity is still in an early phase, but they are working on developing leptin to treat obesity. “The brain’s weight control mechanisms keep turning out to be much more subtle and much more complicated than anyone expects,” Kolata writes. 

There is no doubt that Americans are fatter now than ever—and no one knows why.  But scientists are finding that much of the current thinking about obesity is just plain wrong.  Research has found that weight is largely determined by genetics.  Studies of children who are adopted have shown that 80% of the children of obese parents have also become obese—regardless of what the adopted family fed them, their exercise levels or their family environment. 

The deck is stacked against the participants in the University of Pennsylvania diet study.  Kolata paints an intimate portrait of the dieters.  During the first six months of the study, they all lose weight.  But, little by little, the loss slows and the weight eventually returns. Inevitably, the dieters blame themselves.  Kolata says this is wrong.  She compares losing weight to being able to run a 5K marathon at a 5 ½ minute mile pace.  No matter how hard she trains, she could never run at that pace, even though that’s how fast her son can run.  “No one tells me I’m weak willed or that I should just train harder or just try a different program.  But that’s what we tell dieters when they run up against their biological limits.  Why is it any different to have a biological limit on how fast you can run than to have one on how little you can weigh?” –Sherry Mazzocchi

Comments

[PJ]

Kolata spent years kowtowing to pharmaceutical industry interests as a writer for the "New York Times," where she asks exceedingly leading questions in her stories. I'm happy to skip her work from now on.

[ingrid]

"There is no doubt that Americans are fatter now than ever—and no one knows why."

Really?