Researchers want to know: How much butt and belly spread begins in the brain?

Are we a nation of "fatheads"?

The percentage of overweight and obese individuals in the United States and elsewhere has soared far too high and far too quickly to be attributable to genetic heredity; our DNA simply doesn't change that drastically in one or two generations.

But if our unwillingness to stop eating so much springs not from our genes, a lot of evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, is beginning to point those looking for the source in the direction of our brain.

Item: Former Food and Drug Administration head David Kessler, now at the University of California San Francisco medical school, will release a book next week that suggests many of us are overweight due to "conditioned hypereating," and that our inability to resist unhealthy foods could be a mental aberration.

Item: Penn State researchers find that kids who demonstrate a lack of self control and a desire for immediate gratification when aged three to five are measurably more likely to become obese in adolescence.

The good news is that such kids, exposed to programs designed to boost their self-regulation skills, begin opting for healthier behavior patterns (less TV, better food choices, etc.) and lose weight.

Item: A University of Alabama study of obesity and "delay discounting" — a measure of how much a person is able to choose greater rewards later on over the immediate gratification of a smaller reward right now — finds that obese women have less resistance to their own impulses than normal weight women.

In short, the heavier the woman, the more impulsive she is by nature. So there's the answer: impulsive personalities impulsively eat too much and get fat, right? Not really. There was no correlation between impulsiveness and obesity in men.

Item: According to an article in the International Journal of Obesity, obese people are three to five times more likely to suffer from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and in fact ADHD is a primary cause of many people's inability to lose weight.

A neurological irregularity, ADHD triggers a chemical imbalance in the brain that weakens the victims' willpower and causes them to behave impulsively and to use food as a self-medication to soothe their own restlessness, anxiety and fatigue.

Researchers found that 32 percent of obese study subjects had ADHD, compared to around 6 percent in the general population, and that when treated for the condition, they were able to lose 12 percent of their weight in a little over a year, versus just 2.7 percent for those not treated. The researchers concluded that while ADHD does not cause obesity, those afflicted with it will find it more difficult to avoid weight problems.

Conclusion: The keys to solving our national outbreak of obesity may not all be found in our heads, but that seems to be the smartest place to start looking.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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Researchers want to know: How much butt and belly spread begins in the brain?