Don: Hey Yael, remember that movie, "Supersize Me," about that guy who ate at      McDonalds every day and gained a lot of weight and felt sick all the time?

Yael: Sure. It did a great job of showing what eating too much fast food does to your      body, at least on the outside. But it's just as important to understand the kind of      havoc that burgers and fries and sugary drinks wreak on the body's insides, too.

D: Such as?

Y: Well, researchers at the St. Louis University Liver Center have been studying the      connection between a high fat, high sugar diet and fatty liver disease...

D: Fatty liver?

Y: Yeah--that's when fat builds up around the liver and can damage it permanently.      Anyway, the researchers experimented with mice. They fed them the mouse      equivalent of burgers and fries and soda and made sure they just sat around instead      of running around on those spinning wheels. In other words, the mice lived like a lot      of Americans do.

D: And?

Y: And after sixteen weeks or so they looked at the mice livers and saw that they'd      doubled in size and had a kind of sickly, yellowish hue.

D: Yuck. And it only took sixteen weeks for that to happen?

Y: Yep. It's not certain that the same thing happens in people, but it at least suggests that      it doesn't take long for fatty foods to fatten up the liver. Eat more healthful food,      though, and the liver will slim down.

D: Sounds like a no-brainer.  

To hear this program click here

A Moment of Science®