tendency for us to lose muscle mass and gain fat pounds as we age. In part, this is due to life style changes. Instead of flying kites we fly desks! Nevertheless, our capacity to increase our muscle mass is undiminished with age. The lack of exercise rather than the abundance of candy is thought to be the primary cause of childhood obesity. 

Eating a low-fat, high-fiber diet will produce some weight loss even in normal weight subjects. The reason for this may well be the balance between fullness and satiety. It is a proven fact that we can easily eat an excess of fat before we feel full or satisfied. This is because fats are twice as energy dense (9 calories/gram0 as carbohydrates or proteins (4 calories/gram). By the time we are full, we have over eaten. Increasing our fiber intake helps us feel full. (Of course expensive gastric bypass surgery is another alternative.) Eating a high-fiber diet helps us feel more than just full. Low-fat, high-fiber diets are found to lead to a general lowering of cancer rates. Through the above combination of exercise, low-fat, and high-fiber may work in theory; making the theory work in practice is quite another story. 

Technology works against us in some ways as evidenced by this comment a woman made about her husband’s physique: “He has added 20 pounds of lap since he got his lap-top [computer].” And just try to get a low calorie over your lunch hour. In February 1996 McDonald’s, an international fast food franchise, announced that it would be dropping its five-year experiment with the low-fat McLean burger (12 grams of fat). Also gone from the menu will be the Chef’s salad and the side salad. The taste of the Big Mac (35 grams of fat) has apparently won out over its McLean competition. The salads seem to be a casualty of convenience. Eating a salad in the car after a quick pickup at the drive-through can be a bit challenging. Fortunately, state-of-the-art research in the area of weight loss has discovered that through the addition of certain supplements and nutrients, the process of decreasing the amount of fat we process in the stomach and boosting the amount of fat we burn can be expedited. For those of us who suffer from a “fat imbalance” or a condition where we can store more fat than we burn, it is often a matter of life or death to lose fat in order to protect our arteries and heart. 

The Secret to Weight Loss ……….An Ounce of Prevention 
Most weight-reducing strategies have to confront the “after the fact” problem of burning already stored fat. Like most of our medical practices, we routinely become sick or fat and then go about the business of trying to remedy our ills. Despite Poor Richard’s advice that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, “ we continually eat high-fat diets, and wait until we have to pay the piper before most of us take serious action. It’s much easier to prevent a fat build-up than to reverse the damage that carrying extra fat stores can cause. Going on a diet is nothing less than torture and usually means giving up all the foods we like to eat. Yet dieting seldom gets the root cause of our excess weight which most often is that we eat too much fat, when not dieting. The body begins to digest lipids in the stomach and intestines. 

The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates the steps involved in getting fat into our bloodstream. There are four steps in fat digestion: 

1) acidolytic breakdown of food in the stomach; 
2) enzymatic breakdown (lipolysis) of the fats (triglycerides, TGs) into mixed micelles with bile acids; and 
4) absorption through the intestines. 

If we could tie up