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How come when almost all teenagers gorge themselves on fast food, not all of them become fat? A group of researchers in the United States did the adolescent's dream study. They paid lean and overweight teenagers $30 to eat as much fast food as they wanted to stuff in their mouths over a one-hour lunch period. A parallel study compared eating patterns and calorie intake at home on days when they ate fast food to days when they didn't. When offered unlimited fast food, both lean and overweight adolescents over-ate to a huge extent. They took in about 60 per cent of their daily needs at that one sitting. Fat kids, though, ate more than the thin ones, even allowing for their greater energy needs because of their size. In the second study, lean teenagers ate the same number of calories on non fast food days as fast food days, suggesting they were compensating for their indulgence. With overweight adolescents though, their fast food days had much more energy intake than non fast food days. The implication is that when confronted with fast food, overweight young people are less in control of their food intake during the binge and afterwards.
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