Inside The Fat Lab

At The Pennington Biomedical Research Centre, An Avengers-style Team Of Experts Are Working Together To Find New Ways To Win The War Against Fat. A Report From The Front Lines – And What The Findings Mean For You.

- Joseph Hooper

Every week over the past several months, a new volunteer has checked into the “metabolic ward” at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Each person stays for a total of 24 days in the inpatient unit. He or she is fed meals that are carefully prepared and meticulously measured down to the kilojoule, so that the daily total caloric consumption will be less than what his or her body burns, resulting in weight loss. How much is the question.

Each of the 15 people in the study starts by spending three days inside one of Pennington’s four metabolic chambers. Eric Ravussin, a professor of physiology, genially describes them as “like hotel rooms, but with a glass wall and precise sensors.” Every inhalation and exhalation is measured to calculate their metabolic burn rate – and whether they’re burning kilojoules from fat, protein, or carbohydrates. The participants next spend 18 days on the 222-acre campus, with every meal and step of exercise recorded. Then they go back in the chamber for three days of evaluation. Ravussin is measuring in an ultra-precise way not only how much weight the subjects drop, but also how their metabolic rate is affected by cutting back their kilojoules.

Losing weight is hard enough, but keeping it off is even harder. Ravussin made headlines with a recent Biggest Loser study that revealed the dramatic drop in kilojoule-burn rate of participants on the show, well below the rate of people who had always been at that weight. So to stay at the same weight, a person who weighed 115kg and lost 20kg would have to eat less than a person who always weighed 95kg.