Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.
Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory?
A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of
body-mass index (BMI)
scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship between volume of the hypothalamus and BMI.