The article is long, and I'm not sure it did a great job of conveying the core message. Looking at the comments here, I think some people may have missed it. H

The article is long, and I'm not sure it did a great job of conveying the core message. Looking at the comments here, I think some people may have missed it. Here's a paragraph that outlines the issue: > But even the ob/ob mutants make fat out of their food when, quite literally, half-starved. Friedman’s research was based on Douglas Coleman’s research at the Jackson Laboratory and Coleman, who shared a Lasker Foundation Award in 2010 with Friedman, dedicated two papers to this observation: “Even when maintained on 50 percent of normal food intake,” Coleman reported in 1985, “mutants still become obese.” Here, ob/ob mutants are mice that become obese and, not coincidentally, have abnormally high amounts of leptin. We often think of leptin as having a role in regulating appetite; something like "too much leptin makes you hungry, hungry people eat too much, people that eat too much get fat"; that matches the thermodynamic "calorie in/calorie out" model. But studies suggest that ob/ob mutants get obese even when given a restricted diet. In fact, they get obese even when given 50% of a normal food intake. That suggests something quite different is going on. It would seem ob/ob mice cannot realistically be starved into being a normal weight. Which is rather interesting. There are certainly many who would assume that, for any person who is at a stable weight X, reducing their calorie intake by even 5% would cause a sustained loss in weight and bodyfat percentage. It would seem that's might not be universally true.