Psoriasis.

metabolic needs or energy sparing mechanisms they were left with only one other possibility: the underestimation of food intake.They concluded-that the obese people must have be-en consuming an average of 530 kcal a day m6re than the lean controls in order to sustain their obesity.The cause of the obesity must, therefore, be sought in the control of food intake and eating behaviour.This raises several questions.Is the deception deliberate?In this study did the obese misread the scales when they weighed their food or did they "forget" to weigh and record some foods?The size of the postulated underestimation appears too great to countenance accidental omission-.-it is equivalent to nearly a third of all the food they did record.Apparently these obese-women were unable to admit to the experimenters (and probably to themselves) their actual food intake.Furthermore, the data from the lean group also included one substantial underestimation of intake; it might be difficult to prove that the lean were more consistent than the obese.The paper also adds to the growing evidence that energy expenditures in normal life are lower than the currently accepted estimates of energy requirements.6Nutritionists will need to bear this in mind ifobesity is not to become more common than it is.The central finding, however, is that this type of.obese patient should nolonger be able to claim inherently lower metabolic requirements.We should treat with -scepticism all claims from obese patients that their dietary intakes are modest.In such people, possibly evenrmore than in the lean ones, habitual intake is impossible to measure accurately, at -least with existing techniques-a message that needs to be appreciated much more widely.The measurement of food intake is so crucial that it might be argued that research on these techniques is more important than other more prestigious topics.