My bolding in story. This demonstrates why low carb / high protein diets like Atkins and Protein Power are so successful. I find it so interesting that he postulates we have a built-in 'protein threshhold' that we have to meet each day. This sounds exactly what the Drs Eades state in Protein Power, although not in those words.

Skinniness gene imperils survival of the fattest
Deborah Smith – Sydney Morning Herald – September 21, 2006
THERE is a very good reason the Mormon crickets of western North America keep advancing, like a well-rehearsed marching band, across the landscape. These crop-eating insects are driven by a need to consume a fixed amount of protein. And the best source is the cricket in front of them. "Stop, and you get eaten," says Professor Stephen Simpson, a Federation Fellow at the University of Sydney.
Cannibalistic crickets may appear to have little to do with the world's obesity epidemic. But Simpson's research on these pests, as well as on locusts, ****roaches, rats, minks - and human volunteers kept in a Swiss chalet for almost a week - suggests people have a similar need for protein.
Ballooning waistlines are the result of consuming too much low-protein, high-energy, processed foods in a bid to get our daily dose, he says.
Simpson's research on caterpillars, on the other hand, shows that today's high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet may not always make us overweight. Our species could eventually evolve, like the caterpillars in the lab, to become less prone to obesity.
This would occur if those with a propensity for stacking on the kilograms cannot reproduce or they have less healthy children, while the lean survive to pass on their skinniness genes.
Signs of this are emerging. Children are developing type 2 diabetes. Overweight women are having difficulty conceiving. "For the first time we are seeing obesity-related health problems affecting significant numbers of reproductive aged and pre-reproductive aged humans," Simpson says.
Fat people now outnumber the world's starving. Studying why insects, with brains the size of a pinhead, are better than humans at balancing their food intake has given Simpson a fresh perspective on the issue.
He hit on the importance of protein after finding that insects given a diet low in protein but high in carbohydrates gorged themselves until they reached their protein target. With colleague Professor David Raubenheimer, of the University of Auckland, he devised an experiment to find out if humans did the same. "We incarcerated 10 people in a chalet for six days."
For the first two days they could eat what they wanted from a buffet. For the next two days, one group was restricted to high-protein foods, such as chicken and meat, the other to fatty, sugary, low-protein foods, such as croissants.
The first group consumed exactly the same amount of protein as on the first two days. "The second group went way off the mark and just kept on eating until eventually, through their over-consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods, they managed to fill their protein intake."
Humans evolved when fats and sugars were rare. Many social and psychological factors impinge on our eating habits. "But fundamentally our appetite control mechanisms are still quite primitive," he says.
In the 1960s protein made up 14 per cent of the average energy intake of people in the US. By 2000 this figure had dropped to 12.5 per cent. While it seems a small decline, intake of fats and carbohydrates rose by 14 per cent to make up for the fall."A slight shift in the diet towards a lower proportion of protein can have catastrophic effects," Simpson says. The message is to try to increase the proportion of lean protein in the diet. "Your body will stop you eating when you reach the right amount," he says.
Simpson's caterpillar research, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show that the disadvantages of obesity can change the course of a species' evolution. In one part of the experiment, hundreds of caterpillars that had been raised on a balanced diet were confined to a high-carbohydrate diet.
Over successive generations they evolved an ability to get rid of excess carbohydrate rather than lay it down as fat. They had become immune to obesity in a high-carbohydrate world. But were the world to change and food to become scarce, such a strategy would make these insects more prone to starvation.
Another group of the caterpillars put on a low-carbohydrate diet evolved to do the opposite: to be more likely to deposit carbohydrate as body fat.
"But were they, like we humans, to suddenly find themselves in a world where high-energy foods were abundant, they would be super-prone to becoming obese," Simpson says.
"This raises the possibility that our diet could significantly influence our genetic evolution over the next few generations."

What a way to get taken out of the gene pool!This statement shows a "fat" bias which is wrong. True sugars were rare, the most notable exception was honey. That was the only concentrated source in the "wild". But large animals, the most likely meat source for our prehistoric ancestors, would have a high amount of fat.

This was shown to be true by a dig in a cave in the British Isles, the reference now lost to me since it was on the old eatprotein.com site that got hacked and went away for ever. :-(( There were two animals that were predominantly found at the site. Both now extinct but one was in the 200 pound range and the other 500 pounds. The poster noted that the fat percentage for animals plotted against average normal weight was quite well known and thus these animals ranged from 30 to 60% fat (Think I remember this close to right) so the hunters using this cave as a butcher/feasting site were eating a goodly amount of fat.

We MUST have fat in our diet. When we do not we get things like "rabbit fever" which the Intuit Eskimos know about when the winter is longer than usual and they end up having only rabbit to eat. Not much fat on a wild rabbit!

Thanks for the interesting article. Is it available on the web yet?

Yes, I found the full text here http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/11/4152.

And aninteresting extract:
Preference for Protein Versus Carbohydrate. To test unequivocally whether mass-moving crickets select protein over carbohydrate, dishes containing chemically defined artificial diets [as used extensively in previous experiments on other Orthoptera (18)] were placed on a cattle trail in the face of a marching band and videotaped in 10-min trials. Four dry, granular diets were presented in 4-cm Petri dishes placed 4 cm apart perpendicular to the flow of insects: diet P contained 42% protein but no digestible carbohydrate, diet C had 42% carbohydrate but no protein, diet PC contained 21% of both nutrients, and diet O contained neither macronutrient. The relative positions of the diets were randomized across eight trials.

There was a clear preference for protein-containing diets, with the highest-protein diet (P) arresting the movement of the most insects upon tarsal contact, there being as many as 13 crickets clustered and jostling on the P dish at any one time (Fig. 1A; also see Movie 1, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site). Carbohydrate had no effect, with insects stopping as readily to feed on the carbohydrate- and protein-free O diet as the C diet.