1. How quickly does eating too much cause new fat cells to form?
"Incredibly fast," says Matthew Rodeheffer, who studies obesity at Yale University, on the basis of recent research his team conducted on mice. After just five days on a high fat diet, new fat cells had appeared. In humans the process could be even faster, he says, potentially within a day. Once the cells are present, though, it takes them several weeks to actually fill up with fat.
But Giles Yeo at the University of Cambridge Metabolic Research Laboratories says having more fat cells isn't necessarily a bad thing. Being able to spread your fat over a larger number of cells means they are less likely to overfill, so you can store more fat while staying metabolically healthy. "Imagine each fat cell is like a balloon, but there is a safe limit to how much fat it ...
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