A new study suggests that a chemical known to regulate appetite can cause your body to act against its own best interests. The science, I confess, is over my head, but this BBC News report gamely attempts an explanation:

The upshot is that a vicious cycle ensues once visceral fat starts producing neuropeptide Y: You get hungrier, you eat more, and you're more likely to store that excess food in these new fat cells accumulating in your midsection.

The news report concludes with hope for a new drug to slow down or reverse this process:

I guess that's true. But what happens if you intervene even earlier, and use diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes to prevent that accumulation of abdominal fat in the first place? Wouldn't that nip the entire process in the bud?

Thursday blog meat

• According to a new survey, people get happier as they grow older. Which reminds me of something I saw in the latest issue of The Atlantic: Unhappiness peaks at age 49 for men, and at 45 for women. (Here's that study's abstract.)
• This is interesting: When a type of fish is overharvested, the species goes into evolutionary overdrive. Younger, smaller fish -- the ones that get left behind they aren't worth anything to the fishing industry -- mature faster, and show evidence of rapid changes at the genetic level. Wouldn't this actually explain a lot about human evolution, particularly the rapid emergence of modern humans? If earlier humans were being hunted by the top predators of the time, then the few that survived would have included those best able to think in new ways, to form strategies that went beyond searching for the next day's meals. That would require more complex language, along with the invention of representational art to show what those plans might look like in action. If this extrapolation I just totally pulled out of my ass is correct, sometime in the next 50,000 years we should see fish arguing about politics and diagramming football plays on the ocean floor.