March 6, 2012 “Two people can sit down at the same table and eat
the same amount of food,” says Michael Power, a scientist at the
National Zoo’s nutrition lab, which is based at the Smithsonian
Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. “But
metabolically, one will end up depositing more of that as fat
than the other one.” This fact is the bane of millions of
dieters everywhere. For scientists, it prompts an important
question: What makes certain people more likely to put on
weight? Power teamed with Suzette Tardif, Corinna Ross and Jay
Schulkin of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in
San Antonio, Texas, to take an unusual tack in exploring this
question. They looked at one of our relatives in the primate
family: a small South American monkey known as the white-tufted
common marmoset. “The marmoset does seem to fit with the
potential models of obesity for human beings,” says Power, the
lead author of the research team’s paper, published in the March
issue of the American Journal of