Monday, Mar. 01, 1943

Obese Persons

People get fat from overeating not from glands. This blunt statement was made last week in the leading U.S. gland journal (The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology) by Stanford University's Dr. Windsor Cooper Cutting. As cautious as the next doctor, Dr. Cutting offered no pat explanation of why people overeat. Wrote he: "Certainly the girl disappointed in love may take to candy, or a mother may teach her child to stuff himself, but no such obvious cause is present ... in most obese persons." Dr. Cutting suggested that overeating may be caused by "some psychologic drive which requires satiation by eating"; or maybe in some cases the trait is inherited--there is a strain of laboratory mice that habitually gorges, grows pudgy. But Dr. Cutting insisted that those who gain weight on little food simply have more efficient metabolism than big eaters who stay thin. He was sure that fat comes from too much food, that the best way to fight fat is to fight appetite.

To help fat patients eat less, Dr. Cutting has tried many drugs supposed to cut appetite. None of these has worked satisfactorily. He has to depend on the patients' will power, a dubious aid--"all obese persons are poor candidates for reduction, as indicated by the fact that they have allowed themselves to become fat."

Dr. Cutting prescribes an unusually juicy 960-calorie diet, full of vitamins. A patient who fails to lose (goal is two pounds a week) has cheated, "because almost any adult, no matter how small or how inactive, requires at least 1,500 calories daily. ... A diet restricted to 1,000 calories will make him lose weight."

Some patients begin well, then reach a "plateau," stop losing. Only then, as a rule, does Dr. Cutting resort to thyroid. Generally he avoids it because, except in doses large enough to be dangerous (e.g., to the heart), thyroid is less effective than diet.

One group Dr. Cutting does not blame for being fat: the starch-fed people among the poor, who eat bread, beans and spaghetti beyond their caloric needs because they cannot afford the less fattening foods.

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