Grotesque Science

Call me conservative, but I find this article highly disturbing:

Baby Formula that Fights Fat

"Infant formula and other baby foods that provide permanent protection from obesity and diabetes into adulthood could be on shop shelves soon, reports Lisa Melton in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. The foods will be supplemented with leptin, the hunger hormone. Those who take the foods early in life should remain permanently slim."

In plain language, the science behind this article boils down to this:

Through time, humans have evolved to get the maximum amount of energy out of a minimal amount of food. From an evolutionary viewpoint, this makes perfect sense: your chances of survival go up. Energy expenditure is a very strong drive in animal life and evolution. A cheetah needs to be successful at his kills, because he loses a lot of energy on the chase of prey. The energy lost at acquiring prey must be far less than the energy gained by eating the prey, otherwise there is no point chasing. Likewise, your survival chances increase if you become more efficient at getting energy out of the food you managed to catch.


These days, we no longer have to struggle to find food. In the Western World, food is no longer scarce and processed foods are far richer in energy (fat, sugar) than most other natural sources of food. So, because we are so efficient in terms of energy acquirement, we get fat. That is to say, those making no effort at a balanced diet and exercise regime, get fat.

Instead of working on incentives to drive people to think more consciously about their diets, scientist have decided to take a short-cut:

Leptin is a hormone that regulates energy metabolism. By giving leptin to babies, you re-train their bodies to become LESS efficient at getting energy out of food. So their body, on all accounts, becomes inefficient at dealing with food. They can eat lots, but their body will only absorb small amounts of energy, and will therefore be unlikely to become fat.

I am all for investigative research, if it aims at explaining how our bodies work. But when that knowledge is used to undo years of evolutionary fine-tuning, I start to feel slight shivers down my spine. The product is expected to be on the shelves in a year's time. I wonder how many people will choose to feed it to their new-borns. I fear there will be rather a lot. Ignorance rarely is bliss.