The total amount of fat a human female carries is seven times that of other animals, and much more than men! Only bears ready to hibernate, penguins facing a sunless winter without food, or whales swimming in arctic waters have fat percentages that approach those in normal, healthy, trim young women. Women, however, don’t regularly swim in arctic waters or hibernate for the winter. Why, then, have they been designed to store so much fat in their hips, buttocks, and legs? One clue is that the fat stored there is protected; it doesn’t figure into weight fluctuations. Fat in the upper body is like a checking account with frequent deposits and withdrawals. But hip and leg fat is more like a certificate of deposit—it usually remains untouched by weight shifts. Only during the last few months of pregnancy and while nursing do women start breaking down this lower-body fat, making it exclusively available to the rapidly growing infant. Something stored there seems very important for their children. It couldn’t be just a matter of calories, because it’s easy for the mothers to get them simply by eating more of anything. Just as human mothers have seven times more body fat than other animals, human babies have a body part that is seven times larger than the one in other animals—an enormous brain that grows fastest in the first two years of life. Other than water, the human brain is mostly fat and has a lot of a particular kind of fat: an omega-3 fat called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). We can’t make omega-3 fats; they have to come from what we eat, and women tend to stash their DHA in the same hip and leg fat that men value.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:07:48 +0000