Pondering Ponderousness

This month's Popular Science highlights obesity -causation theories (artificial sweeteners, viruses, otitis, air conditioning) and treatments. They point out that mother nature builds lots of redundancy into physiologic systems that are as important as storing food as a safeguard against famine. So a drug that blocks one, or two, of these hormones simply allows a backup to kick in after a 3% weight loss. And candidate hormone systems tend to be good at signalling to eat more but not to eat less if they're switched off. To further complicate the problem, switching off the brain's desire for food turns off our desire for life, and suicides increase. It's a conundrum.