Dieting on the brain

If you're having trouble shedding those extra pounds, it might be because your brain may be too evolutionarily challenged to let you diet.

That's the idea being tested in a massive, five-year European Union research project involving scientists from 13 countries, BBC News reports.

The theory is that the brains of overweight people have accepted obesity as normal and interpret attempts to diet as a threat to survival. They respond by slowing the body's metabolism to retain calories. It's a natural defense that developed in times when starvation was a common threat. But famine has been wiped out so quickly in the developing world that our brains haven't had time to adapt.

As Professor Jonathan Seckl, an expert in molecular medicine at Edinburgh University, tells the Beeb:

"We are facing the pressure of millions of years of mammalian evolution. ...Yet the phenomenon of a McDonalds on every street corner is only something seen in the last 20 years."