How Stress Gives You a Fat Gut :

When I first saw this research - it seemed almost farcical: stressed out mice, eating junk food got fat.

Did the mice work 60 hour weeks - stopping by the McDonald's drive-thru on the way back to the lab? Did they manage to force two cohabiting mice to get a divorce? Or maybe moving from one mouse house to another was enough stress?

Not so farcical - almost all major media outlets around the world heralded this as "landmark" research" heralding a new way to lose fat without surgery .

The research showed this:

Mice who were stressed AND who were also eating a high-sugar high-fat diet got fat: they tended to gain more visceral abdominal fat.

What was strange was that it was only the combination of the above factors that produced the result. Stress and a good diet was okay. No stress and a junk food diet was okay.

The scientists concluded that the stress and bad diet increased amounts of a brain chemical called neuropeptide-Y - which resulted in more fat cells in the abdominal area.

Incredibly - many news reports immediately focused on possible pharmaceutical developments.

Here's an idea: Change your lifestyle to reduce stress and don't stop by Mickey-D's on the way home.

And exactly how did they stress those mice? For an hour a day over 2 weeks they got the rodents to stand in a puddle of cold water - or to be in the presence of an "aggressive alpha mouse".

Poor mice. They didn't even have a jar of Prozac to dig into.

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