WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT FAT

摘要

It was one of the biggest medical stories of the 1990s and, consequently, one of the biggest disappointments. In 1994, researchers at Rockefeller University, working with mutant mice that grew to be three times the size of normal ones, discovered what made them different: the absence of a hormone they named "leptin." When injected with leptin the mice suddenly changed their eating habits and began shedding those unsightly grams. Not since Charles Atlas had there been such a convincing set of before-and-after pictures; to millions of Americans who secretly identified with the tangerine-size balls of fur, leptin seemed like the long-sought willpower-in-a-pill. But what worked in mice didn't work in people—or, rather, it worked only in a handful of people who, like the mice, lacked the gene to produce leptin on their own. For a young woman in England who had weighed 207 pounds at the age of 9, it has been a lifesaver. For everyone else who thought it might succeed where low-carb diets, low-fat diets, Slim-Fast and Richard Simmons had failed, it's been a bust.