PETER ENGEL
DSM Nutritional Products Europe Ltd., P.O. Box 2676, 4002 Basel, Switzerland

My grandmother was at a loss: why did she constantly struggle with her weight although she only ate a “tiny piece” of cake or chocolate “every once in a while” or, better, “almost never” did. Yet her peers, who ate just as little or even more sweets, were thin. It was a similar case with her elevated blood glucose levels: it was a mystery to her. And her doctor, whom she would reassure time and again that she adhered strictly to his dietary recommendations, was (as she said) at his wit’s end. Even back then, in the 1970s, she would call it the “curse of her genes,” a proclamation inspired by an article in Reader’s Digest. Yet the genetic burden of her miraculous weight gain was invalidated by both photographs of her ancestors and observations made by her grandchildren, all of whom were of normal weight. The unofficial nutritional protocol we produced after our grandmother’s visit to have coffee one Sunday afternoon suggested that the old lady had been significantly underestimating the amount of sweets she consumed. We smiled quietly. But she was not the only one who suffered from such a problem: there was also my ...