Michael Moyer in Scientific American:
This kind of outsider’s perspective can be invaluable when attacking a problem as difficult and entrenched as the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Chow relates the story of starting work at the institute—a division of the National Institutes of Health—and finding a mathematical model created by a colleague that could predict “how body composition changed in response to what you ate.” The problem, as Chow describes it, was that the model was complicated: “hundreds of equations,” he told the Times. “[We] began working together to boil it down to one simple equation. That’s what applied mathematicians do.”
And what did Chow’s simple model reveal about the nature and causes of obesity? Basically, that we eat too much. “The model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.” Food in, fat out. Simple enough to be captured in a single equation.
Unfortunately Chow’s outsider’s perspective on the obesity crisis isn’t really an outsider’s perspective at all: it is the physicist’s perspective.
More here.
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