Army’s New Weight-Loss Plan: Transplant Soldiers With Extra Fat
Wired
By Katie Drummond
January 31, 2012
Army’s New Weight-Loss Plan: Transplant Soldiers With Extra Fat
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Just last week, military brass vowed that the force of the future would be “smaller and leaner.” Apparently, the Army’s taking that pretty damn literally. They want smaller, leaner soldiers. Their best idea to do it? Give GIs transplants of extra fat cells.
Seriously. In the Army’s latest round of small-business research awards, they’ve green-lit a proposal to manufacture transplantable brown fat cells, all in an effort to catalyze rapid weight loss. Portlier soldiers, you might recall, are turning into a major dilemma for top brass. An estimated 75 percent of today’s young Americans are either too fat, too sickly or too dumb to serve. The Army’s even overhauled their fitness program, in part to accommodate softer recruits, by swapping long runs and grueling drills for yoga and calisthenics.
Leg lifts and downward dogs, however, don’t offer much of a calorie-burning boost. Brown fat tissue, however, does. At first glance, the idea of adding fat to get rid of fat doesn’t exactly add up. After all, thousands of Americans dole out mad cash to have flab sucked out, not put back in.
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Wired has this Categorized in Bizarro so I guess it belongs in this group.