Life in a cage is a great way to stay thin
January 5th, 2010 by admin
For those of you who are hesitant to try a low-fat vegan diet as a method for healthy weight loss, University of South Florida researcher Barbara Hansen has a diet for you.
Hansen has spent over 30 years, and $13 million dollars in federal grant money, studying obesity in rhesus monkeys. She uses rhesus monkeys for two reasons: monkeys metabolize food similarly to humans, and they are good “research subjects.” According to an article in Sunday’s St. Petersburg Times, unlike humans, monkeys “can’t cheat on Weight Watchers. They aren’t tempted by drive-through french fries.” Later in the article, it’s made very clear why Hansen’s monkeys are so good at sticking to their diets: the monkeys are confined inside “cages that sit in white-walled, brightly lit rooms.”
The newspaper described Hansen’s “most famous experiment,” in which a group of monkeys was kept on a calorie-restricted diet from early adulthood until death. Not one of these monkeys developed obesity or diabetes. As a result of numerous similar experiments, Hansen has come to the conclusion that consuming less calories may prevent obesity. That’s science worth $13 million! (In another experiment described in the article, Hansen forced feeding tubes into the bellies of monkeys and pumped the nutritional supplement Ensure directly into their stomachs in an attempt to produce obesity.)
Thankfully, the article did include one dissenting view. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said that animal research may be of limited value in developing strategies to prevent obesity and its health consequences.