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From my observations of men and women, I think men crave meat more than women do, whereas women crave pastries more than men do. If the team would offer chocolate éclairs, the PET scans might show more prefrontal cortex activity in women’s brains, less in men’s. Since men’s brains showed more, I suspect the liquid meal was meat broth.

Camille Holser
Oakland, Calif.

The liquid meal was the product Ensure-Plus. –K. Cobb The article says that “women have higher rates of obesity . . . than men do . . ..” This is not true. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ s Web site, in the year 2000, 19.4 percent of women in the United States were obese, while 20.2 percent of men were. Even among children, more boys are obese than girls. Perceptions that more females are obese may be due to sexual bias, which determines that overweight women are unattractive while overweight men are “big guys.”

Marcia E. Herman-Giddens
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Pittsboro, N.C.