Why Men Are Better Dieters Than Women
By Jeffrey Kluger
You wouldn’t think a diet would be a cause of marital discord. But it often is — at least when couples try to shed pounds together and, as often happens, the husband drops the weight a lot faster than the wife does. Well, guess what, guys? It’s not your steely resolve or your trips to the gym or your superior genes that are entirely behind it. It might just be your brain.
It’s hardly a secret that men and women gain weight, lose weight and think about weight entirely differently. It’s also not news that body-fat percentage alone — with females naturally carrying an extra ladling of adipose tissue — gives males a head start in the slimming game. But a new study from Brookhaven National Laboratory looked deeper into the primal ways in which we react to the very presence of food — and if you like to eat, this is not a study you would have wanted any part of. (See the Year in Medicine 2008.)
Nuclear-medicine specialist Dr. Gene-Jack Wang first recruited a group of 23 male and female volunteers — none of whom were obese and all of whom were in good general health — and instructed them to fast for 17 hours. During that period, he and his team interviewed them about their favorite foods and asked them to rank each on a 1-to-10 scale. The researchers then selected one food for each subject, the only requirement being that it scored 7 or above in desirability. When the 17 hours were up, the volunteers were injected with a nuclear tracer, placed in a brain-imaging PET scanner and presented with a food they craved. Actually, they were more than merely presented with it.
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