War Liberal

What's weird is that this jives with a theory I heard in a Sports Nutrition class awhile ago. Basically, the theory went that most Americans were susceptable to obesity because their ancestors usually came from impoverished countries or were from perpetually impoverished classes. This meant that natural selection would favor those with bodies geared towards famine-coping. While this tendency was an advantage in the Old Country, once they came to America, it turned into a distinct disadvantage for they and their progeny, as their bodies would tend to store energy much more aggressively than what's usually considered the norm. As these immigrants and their descendents moved out of their traditional centers of concentration in the States and moved around, they mated with a greater percentage of the extant population (as well as each other), propagating the genetic tendency nationally. Hence, fatties shuffling around all over the place.

I always favored the "too much leisure time/decline of continual strenuous labor" theory myself. I think there was even something about an actual "fat virus" that someone offered as an explanation.