This may also explain the reluctance of poor, ill-fed people to spend extra money on food, preferring instead to buy such things as televisions or a fancy wedding.
Binyam Mohamed's allegation that British agents fed questions to his interrogators who ill-treated him in Morocco and elsewhere is under investigation.
Women are known to have a higher incidence of the condition - and this has fed into the idea that high heels or ill-fitting fashionable shoes are to blame.
The 38-year-old spent years caring for her seriously ill daughter Emily, 10, who was born with heart problems and had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.