When the service advisor returned my car key, he asked me to give only the highest possible scores on the survey that I would soon receive via email. He made that request even though the wrong part had initially been ordered to remedy the recall of my car, so this was the second time I spent an hour reading in the car dealership’s lounge and an hour driving to and fro.

And even though they were unwarranted, I did give the highest possible scores.

Years ago, when another service advisor made the same request, he me told that the parent company expects perfect scores. That’s why car dealerships pressure their customers to score competence as excellence.

Competence as excellence: that does seem to be the way society scores most things these days — which is why I don’t actively seek feedback about this column. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think long and hard about your unsolicited comments.

One made years ago, in fact, determined today’s topic. A man saw me at the bank and told me what he liked most about the column is that it’s “cutting edge.”

And nothing is more cutting edge at the moment than the research being performed on a protein in your fat cells that blocks the release of fat for fuel.

Better known by its acronym, RAGE, here’s what researchers at the New York University School of Medicine did when they realized the protein’s function: They removed it from a group of lab mice. Then they overfed those mice a high-fat diet and made sure that they did not get any more exercise than another group of mice fed the same diet that did not have RAGE removed from their fat cells.

Three months later, the researchers were not surprised that the mice that did not have RAGE removed from their fat cells had gained more weight than those that did. But the difference between the two groups was startling.

The mice with RAGE removed had gained 75 percent less weight.

Moreover, the researchers feel if RAGE could somehow be blunted or even blocked in humans it should do even more than reduce body weight. It should also reduce the sort of inflammation that’s been linked to atherosclerosis, certain cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease.

But there’s a cruel twist to all this.

The NYU researchers believe that RAGE evolved in ancient human beings over thousands of years as a way to retain body fat to stave off starvation. Back then as well as today, when the body is malnourished, it creates stress at the cellular level. This stress is not only combatted by the activation of RAGE to keep the body from burning fat for fuel, but also by the secretion of hormones, such as adrenalin.

Overeating highly processed, sugar-laden foods also creates a type of malnourishment, stress, and hormone secretion. The rapid increase in blood sugar from doing so causes such a secretion of insulin that too much sugar is removed from the blood and taken to the fat stores.

When blood sugar levels drop too low, your body sends out hunger signals. Unfortunately, they are interpreted no differently than starvation signals, so RAGE is activated.

And — irony or ironies — the body stops using fat for fuel because it’s receiving such an excess of it.

Because this research is so cutting edge, its direct application to the obesity epidemic could be decades away — or it could never amount to much. While mice are used in studies because they are so genetically similar to humans, there’s no guarantee that the blunting or removal of RAGE in humans will work as effectively.

So why did I feel so duty-bound to inform you of the NYU research now?

Because the end result of it closely aligns to a belief that Dr. David Ludwig held years before the research occurred. Ludwig, a practicing endocrinologist and Harvard professor, took this belief and turned it into a diet book titled Always Hungry.

During a January 2106 Public Radio International interview to promote the book, Ludwig said: “The highly processed carbohydrates we’ve been eating and a few other dietary and lifestyle influences have caused hormonal changes in the body, especially involving insulin that drive fat cells into a feeding frenzy. So they feast and the rest of the body starves.

“We think of obesity as a state of excess. But it’s really an issue of starvation to the body and [traditional dieting] makes that worse.”

Ludwig’s beliefs align with the RAGE research even further. “[Obesity] creates inflammation .... When that inflammation spreads to the lining of the blood vessels, that can contribute to atherosclerosis and heart attack. When it goes to the pancreas, it can contribute to diabetes.”

In short, knowing about the research on RAGE and Ludwig’s thoughts on obesity are significant for you today because they should strengthen your resolve to eat the way you should. And that means limiting — severely limiting — highly processed carbohydrates and high-fat foods.