Last week Daedalus pointed out that our body fat, like that of all organisms, is stored in liquid form. He proposed an ‘oligomolecular diet’ of a few well-chosen fats, whose mixture melted only just below our core body temperature. In the body it would act as thermal ballast, giving out latent heat of solidification whenever its owner was exposed to cold.

He now wonders why we store our fat as a melt in the first place. The obvious answer is that biochemistry is a liquid-phase business. A solid fat cannot be digested, mobilized or metabolized. So he now sees his high-melting oligomolecular fat as a powerful new weapon in the war against obesity.

Many dieters complain that their efforts to lose weight remove fat from exactly the wrong parts of the body. Women, for example, may shed fat from their faces (making them loo k lined and anxious) or from their busts; men may shrink their thighs to emaciation while retaining a corpulent paunch. But the user of DREADCO's oligomolecular fat could simply put a cold pack on those regions that he or she wished to retain. The fat beneath would solidify, and biochemistry could not touch it. Other, less becoming regions would be depleted instead. At the cost of some thermal discomfort, the dieter could lose weight in all the right places, and none of the wrong ones. Better still, solidified fat should be very firm and resilient. Many people dislike their bodies, not for their size, but for their flabbiness. Oligomolecular fat should give a lean, taut appeal even to a fairly ample figure.

This hopeful conclusion is dogged by a converse argument. If solidified fat ceases to register on the body's inventory, the body's internal weight-stat may decide that there is no fat in that deposit at all. It will hasten to lay down new fat, which of course will solidify and vanish from view in its turn. The user will gain weight endlessly in the cooled region. Daedalus recalls that immigrants to northern parts from hot areas often become grossly obese. Perhaps their fat, optimized for the tropics, simply solidifies? If so, the traditional steam-room or Turkish bath may indeed be an effective slimming treatment; and the dietary benefits of low-melting polyunsaturated fats will be confirmed. Either way, varying the melting-point of our body fat seems to offer ways into the problem of obesity. Overweight DREADCO volunteers are now putting the matter to the test.