If vertical growth is hormonally driven, couldn't horizontal growth be too?

If vertical growth is hormonally driven, couldn't horizontal growth be too?

You've heard it before and no doubt you'll hear it again: the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. And, mentally tagged with this, usually, is the idea that overweight individuals are gluttonous, or lazy, or both. Actually, not everyone (including me) takes this view. One 'new' theory about why people put on weight has recently been put forward Gary Taubes', author of The Diet Delusion (entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories in the States). Taubes' suggests that as people put on weight, hormonal imbalance drives them to eat more, which perpetuates the problem. Taubes likens this situation to the hormonally-provoked voracious appetites children and adolescents can exhibit when they're going through a growth spurt. Taubes' quite reasonably suggests that if vertical growth and appetite can be driven by hormones, why can't the same be true for horizontal growth? On Wednesday, I write about a recent study which appears to provide support for Taubes' quite compelling ideas. For more on this, click this link.