Obesity? Doing the Math Generates New Answers

The New York Times recently featured new work on obesity by Carson Chow PhD '92, an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Chow argued in an American Association for the Advancement of Science presentation this spring that mathematics can unravel the mystery of why two-thirds of Americans are overweight.

Why use mathematics? The MIT-trained physicist and mathematician says it's a lot faster than human trials that take years.

What are his findings? First, he challenges the conventional wisdom that 3,500 calories always creates a pound of fat on a human body. Sometimes that may be true, but bodies change as a person loses weight, he says.

"Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one," Chow told the Times.

He and his colleagues also found that slow weight loss is most likely to succeed: In fact, it takes about three years for a dieter to reach a new equilibrium.

And why are Americans fat? Chow says over U.S. overproduction of food is a major factor. Learn more in the New York Times interview.

What can you do with these new findings? To calculate your potential weight loss, use the NIDDK's free, interactive Body Weight Simulator to see how much you need to adjust intake and activity.

Other MIT work on obesity:

• Diet, Disease, and Dollars, a (video) presentation by Robert Lustig '77, M.D., a national expert on neuro-endocrinology, to the MIT Club of Northern California.
• On 60 Minutes, Alumnus Dishes Bitter Truth on Sugar, a Slice of MIT blog post about Lustig's recent work.
• Addressing the Obesity Epidemic: A New Role for Urban Planners, an MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) blog post.
• The Obesity Epidemic: Is the Metabolic Syndrome a Nutritional Deficiency Disease? A paper by a Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab senior research scientist on the role inadequate dietary fat plays in obesity.
• Fat Chance: the Biology of Obesity, a Whitehead Institute on Biological Research article that describes how better understanding of fat-cell hormones could help  attack the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes.