My hypothesis for pot would be the same - pot smokers may be less tempted to eat food all the time since they're getting their kicks from pot.
That graph looks quite suspicious -- 26% is rounded down to 0, and 31% is rounded up to 1.
Perhaps this is a regional thing? Its certainly not universally true around the world.
The title is incorrect. The why is unanswered and still unknown. The article simply states that there appears to be a correlation.
The downside to this body type is that the brain is always very active; it always has lots of calories to draw from. Makes for great programmers and problem solvers, but also leads to poor attention span and insomnia.
So my theory is that marijuana is a dampener on the brain for these people. It doesn't improve insulin control, it's just that people who like to use marijuana tend to have fantastic insulin control. The logic being good insulin control = noisy brain = marijuana use.
I don't think you could prove this, you'd need some way to quantify noise in the brain.
Interesting - that part about overactive brain, short attention span and insomnia matches ADHD very nicely.
In my case, since I began using stimulants to treat ADHD, my sugar cravings disappeared and weight stabilised. In the past I used to overeat, because it calmed me down.
> Current marijuana users had significantly smaller waist circumference than participants who had never used marijuana, even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels.
While that seems like an obvious factor, I'm sure there are other factors too.
For instance, people getting high on cannabis probably won't drink as much beer or other forms of alcohol. This probably contributes to a generally lower weight.
16 years ago, before adopting this rule, my strategy for coping with stress was to eat and watch TV or play video games. It was pretty obvious to me where that road ended. Weed is my gateway drug to a healthy lifestyle + pizza. It's illegal, but so is everything, so who even cares? I'm in good shape and I don't have to worry that there's no way out when stress piles up, which it still does. I gave this same advice to a friend suffering from stress in grad school. He was clearly in trouble... I invited him to spend the weekend in the countryside with me, shooting broken equipment and smoking up, but he felt he had to study. He killed himself at 8:30pm that Sunday evening. Psychology is counter-intuitive. Weed can be the key to being more intelligent at a healthy weight. The correlations found in the study may be explained by this. I think they are, in my case. Alternatively, perhaps weed just addled my brain and made me a successful and dedicated coder, entrepreneur, and machinist, by some insanely unlikely chance. Perhaps even it caused a marijuana-related tumor that is powering me? That would be copacetic.
I would guess, their metabolism is massively increased.
