Some Aspects of the Problem of Regulation of Food Intake and Obesity

IN 1953 I attempted to present inclusively evidence then available on the nature and the pathogenesis of obesity.1 I also attempted to introduce new ideas, some of them at the time frankly controversial, into a subject that I then considered to be in a state that could only be characterized as "stultified chaos."On one side were the fundamentalists, who saw only the undeniable fact that, as first pointed out by Lavoisier in the eighteenth century, matter and energy are not created de novo in biologic systems; for obesity to develop, energy intake has to be greater than output. Blandly . . .