Milwaukee ? Imagine dining at your favorite restaurant, and instead of just sampling a bit of one or two of your 10 favorite dishes you devour them all.

Now, imagine being able to eat all this and not put on a pound.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Rockefeller University in New York have developed a strain of mice that can do just that. These mice can eat enormous amounts of food and they don’t gain any weight.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

The researchers believe that the repression of a particular enzyme, called SCD-1, may cause mice to burn their fat instead of storing it. And they believe their results could be translated to humans.

“We have already started working on drugs that will mimic this effect in humans,” said James Ntambi, co-author of the paper and associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers were examining the relationship between SCD-1 and leptin a hormone known to influence appetite regulation. And although they knew that SCD-1 interacted with leptin, they did not know how.

To investigate the interaction, the researchers decided to do some genetic analyses by cross-breeding strains of mice.

They started with a strain that did not produce the hormone leptin, called the ob/ob strain. Mice without this hormone express an insatiable desire to eat food. And not surprisingly, they are obese.

The researchers then crossed these fat, leptin-deficient mice with ones that did not produce SCD-1.

And the results were astounding.

Some of the offspring produced from this interbreeding the “double knockouts,” as Ntambi, described them lacked both leptin and SCD-1.

And the behavior and physiology of these mice were mind-boggling.

“They could eat as much as they wanted, but they didn’t gain any weight,” Ntambi said.

Because the double knockouts lacked leptin, they acted like their obese parents, and ate everything in sight.

But unlike their overweight progenitors, they didn’t put on an ounce.

At 16 weeks of age, female mice weighed 29 percent less than their ob/ob parents, while males weighed 34 percent less. That’s the difference between a 200- and 142-pound woman of the same height.