Many people think that overeating results from flagging willpower. But feeding behaviour is actually under intense biological control. Bradford Lowell, a neuroscientist now at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, realized this in the late 1970s when, as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, he made tiny nicks in the brains of rats to see which regions might be responsible for the obesity observed in earlier brain lesion studies. As the animals began to overeat and became massively obese, Lowell "was amazed that such tiny lesions could have such an enormous effect."
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