Warmer Houses May Increase Obesity

...Unlike mice fed a typical low-fat laboratory diet, adjusting their intake to the ambient temperature, mice fed high-fat diets do not decrease their food intake at higher temperatures and gain weight.

"These human and animal experimental models suggest that while intake is somewhat suppressed at higher temperatures, this is unlikely to fully compensate for the reduced energy expenditure of a warm environment particularly where highly palatable foods are available," Johnson and colleagues observed.

This research argues in favor of a causal link between increased time spent in thermal comfort and weight gain in the population, they said...