In that, he said, it is on par with human body fat.

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It utterly ignores the fact that for most of human history, fat has been praised for its virtues and celebrated for its beauty.

BBC: A VAT on fat?

The firm is deploying organically grown bacillus bacteria, which is commonly found in the human gut, to eat the fat, oils and grease.

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Together with a local NGO and the Agriculture University of Lima, the quality of inputs and outputs have been constantly monitored, showing no perils for human health depicting quiet surprising results concerning growth rates, fat contents and flavour.

UNESCO: Background

But fat is also a fundamental, necessary component of the human diet, and only one piece of the complex dietary puzzle.

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As Sugen headed toward costly large-scale human testing of SU5416 in 1999, it needed a collaborator with a fat wallet.

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"For most of human history, people didn't have enough to eat, so fat was something you really needed to seek out, " says Marcia Pelchat, a food psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

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If the results of human trials are just as good (not a sure bet), a pill to make fat people thin--one of the holy grails for drug companies--will have been discovered.

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