Females and Eating Disorders

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Females are four to 10 times more likely than males to have an eating disorder — presumably because of social pressure to be thin.

But female rats are also much more likely than male rats to have an eating disorder:

Klump and colleagues ran a feeding experiment with 30 female and 30 male rats over a two-week period, replacing the rodents’ food pellets periodically with vanilla frosting. They found that the rate of binge eating “proneness” (i.e., the tendency to consume the highest amount of frosting across all feeding tests) was up to six times higher in female as compared to male rats.

Comments

  1. Lucklucky says:

    Related to breeding?

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