The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat

by Stephan Guyenet

In 2000, Barry Levin, an obesity and diabetes researcher at Rutgers University, published a paper clearly demonstrating this effect in rats. Starting with a genetically diverse strain of rats, he fed them either ordinary rat pellets or a high-calorie palatable diet. On the palatable diet, some of the rats gained weight and fat, while others didn’t. Levin’s team took the rats that had gained weight and restricted their food intake while keeping them on the palatable diet, which caused them to lose weight and fat. So far this is what you might expect, but what they found next is more interesting: When they lifted the calorie restriction, allowing the animals to eat as much as they wanted again, the rats didn’t just resume their gradual upward trajectory of weight gain—they quickly bounced back up to the weight of rats that had been eating an unrestricted palatable diet and gaining weight the entire time. Levin’s findings suggest that there is a certain weight that the lipostat “wants” an animal to maintain, defending it against changes, and that this weight depends both on genetics and on the specific diet the animal is eating.

barry Levin was who ewan got the HFD DIO model from. i would dispute the characterization of the hfd as highly palatable. it is pretty disgusting, atleast in current formulation.