by John Bach

Scientists at the University of Cincinnati are convinced the secret to obliterating obesity may have little to do with diet and exercise. In fact, they say, the ultimate panacea for fighting fat doesn’t lie within the body, but rather the brain.

To hunt down a remedy for significantly overweight people, professors Stephen Woods and Randy Seeley are working with UC's obesity project team to focus millions of dollars in private and public research funding on discovering how the brain controls how much we eat.

"We live in a society where the rates of obesity are climbing exponentially," says Seeley, associate professor of psychiatry. "It is a disease that has received woefully little attention from the medical community. People pay attention to weight a great deal, but for the wrong reasons. They want to look like Cindy Crawford. But the health impact of being overweight is unmistakable."

According to the American Obesity Association (AOA), more than half of Americans are overweight and more than one-third of all adults and one in five children are obese. That is more than 70 million obese people in this country alone.

Add those figures to these facts: People who are overweight increase their risk of dying from illness and disease by 60 percent, and those who make it to obese are at a 100 percent greater risk. The AOA blames obesity for at least 300,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.

"The deleterious effects of obesity on your health are enormous," Seeley says. "Most doctors know that. But how many times have you had a doctor discuss it with you? Almost never. Why? Because they don’t have a treatment."

Traditional advice from doctors is to eat less, eat better and get some exercise. Sensible guidance, but not a proven method for obese individuals to lose significant amounts of weight and keep it off. The same failure is true of weight-loss drugs, though Americans continue to spend billions of dollars on them every year.

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