When's the last time you saw a fat insect? Odds are, you haven't and that fact could have implications for the human obesity epidemic, says a Texas scientist.

In a story by Health24.com Dr. Spencer Behmer, an entomologist with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, says a factor in the fat fight may be that humans haven't evolved enough to deal with the high carbohydrate load in our diets.

He says that like insects, we require carbohydrates as well as proteins to survive. However, in his experiments, insects were able to adapt to extreme changes in their nutritional environments.

For example, when he fed eight generations of caterpillars an Atkins-like diet that was rich in protein and low in carbs, they showed an ability to store ingested carbs as fat. The caterpillars he put on a carbohydrate-rich diet developed the ability to eat excess carbs without adding fat to their bodies.

So who knows, perhaps in a few generations, we will have outgrown our fat. One can only hope.

-- Amanda Barrett, amNY.com