Fat Man Disaster

FAT MAN

People can be divided into two groups according to the way they deal with the excess food when they eat more than they require for their daily expenditure of energy.
In 1950 at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, Professor Sir Charles Dodds, who is in charge of the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry at the Middlesex Hospital, described an experiment he had carried out.
He took people whose weights had been constant for many years and persuaded them to eat double or treble their normal amount of food. They did not put on weight.
He showed that this was not due to a failure to digest or assimilate the extra food and suggested that they responded to over-eating by increasing their metabolic rate (rate of food using) and thus burned up the extra calories.
He then over-fed people whose weights had not remained constant in the past and found that they showed no increase in metabolism but became fat.
So two people of the same size, doing the same work and eating the same food will react quite differently when they overeat. One will stay the same weight and the other will gain.