A very curious experiment, which no Italian newspaper has talked about , dispels the myth that obesity can be fought through diet and exercise: an American professor, Peter Ferket, of North Carolina State University, has shown that two mice, animals metabolically similar to humans, and who like humans cannot control their metabolism, fed the same foods, the same number of calories, and subjected to the same physical activities, will not have the same body weight. One of the two will be fatter. This, if it were proved, would lead to understand how many people suffering from obesity cannot solve the same either with diet, nor with physical exercise, nor with prayers to the Lord.Obesity is not curable, for everyone, with diet and exercise : some obese people will respond well to such a treatment and lose weight, others will not. Not really good news. To prove this, Peter Ferket analyzed mice that remained obese, from droppings to their bacterial flora, also studying their energy levels. The fat mice and the lean mice had no difference in nutrition and activity: the obese mice on physical tests had the same energy as the lean ones, they were not constipated, but they remained fat.
According to Ferket, the reasons are partly genetic, partly of different reactions to the environment (stress), partly in the composition of their bacterial flora. But diet and sport are not the solutions at hand for all obese people, as we erroneously think.