Wikipedia: Fat/Talk

Huh? The human body burns fats to supply the energy to contract and relax muscles? (whereas the electrical energy needed for neural activity is provided by burning carbohydrates?). Unfortunately what seems to have been overlooked, is that humans come in two types with two types of 'engine'. Those with an 'engine' which can burn either type of fat and those whose 'engine' is tuned to run at its most efficient on animal fat alone. How do you tell which type of 'engine' your body has? If you have the former, you get an equal pleasure response when you eat either butter (an animal fat) or margarine (a vegatable oil) and if you are the later you prefer the taste of butter. There is an actual difference in physical response too. The former salivate over the taste of either fat and the later only salivate over the taste of animal fat. Because the latter type run on animal fat and animals come in two types, diurnal and nocturnal, this has led to all the weight problems. People who have weight problems prefer the taste of animal fats and have been advised to eat the lower caloried vegetable fats because they have put on weight when they ate the food they preferred. That was the wrong answer! They two fall into two catagories, diurnal and nocturnal. To find out which, simply ask them when they would prefer to go out for a special meal, lunchtime or in the evening for dinner. Diurnals choose lunch and should never eat after dark and nocturnals choose evening and should only eat after dark. Were they to only eat the food the like at those times of day, they have as perfect a 'built-in' weight control system as any of the former type with the bodies tuned to run on either type of fat, i.e. thin people.

That sounds like a crackpot theory from some weight-loss author; do you have any evidence that this is actually accepted by real biochemists? --LDC

I let it remain on the page because i had never heard of _that_ strange theory before, and there are a couple of actual factoids in it...I'll extract them and add to the article. --[[Anders Törlind]]

Animal fat and vegetable fat. Where do you put fats stored by other sorts of living things - fungi and protozoa?

: Is there a chemical difference between these types of fat?