What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

His studies aim to understand the way that the environment alters the body. While pharmaceuticals might be able to target specific bodily processes and tweak them to treat a specific acute ailment, van Marken Licktenbelt sees the twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity through a thermodynamic lens. Both conditions come from there being too much energy available for the body. When there’s too much energy in a system, then that system starts to malfunction. It’s a matter of physics. And there are really only three ways to fix it: You can reduce the amount of energy coming into the body, decrease the body’s efficiency of absorbing energy, or increase the rate that the body makes use of it. Most diets follow the first line of attack. To lose weight, you can simply significantly decrease your food intake. Working on the input side of the equation will result in some short-term success, but more often than not people struggle to restrict their calories and end up regaining their lost pounds over time. Several drugs follow the second line of attack by changing the efficiency with which the body actually processes food. In the 1920s, magazines sold tapeworms for people to ingest and host. With the help of the worm, people could eat whatever they wanted and still lose weight. But parasites are not the most friendly companions, and this treatment often led to severe anemia and malnutrition. A more recent iteration of the same idea is a drug called Xenical. It sets an artificial limit...