[Pining_4_TX]

Not true. People have been dealing with unwanted pounds since Greek and Roman times at least. I have family pictures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they all resembled one another - short and definitely on the chunky side. All these people did hard physical labor every day, but they were still hefty. No sodas and not wealthy enough to own a car.

Genes have everything to do with it, and for those people who continue to be hateful about this, I only hope they some day experience what it is to struggle with their weight.

[hellbender]

Short and chunky is not the same as morbidly obese. I have been alive well over half a century, and cannot recall anything like the prevalence of genuine obesity seen today. I have lost lots of weight at least twice during my life, and it was not easy, but it was basically simple: eat less and exercise more.

People like the Pimas and Papagos were endowed with an unusual capability to conserve energy and fat. All human races to some degree have this ability to store fat against famine, because for most of our evolutionary history, life was very hard, and survival "iffy." We needed the ability to survive famine .When the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels made it easy to grow a surplus of food year after year, people became vulnerable to obesity.