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The Evolution of Obesity
40 to 70 percent of the inter-individual variability in obesity or body mass index is accounted for by genetics. There was once upon a time an evolutionary advantage for people who were able to store energy more effectively as a result of their genetics, but now there's an abundance of food available to us so it's no longer as advantageous as it once might have been. The unfortunate thing of storing excess calories as fat is that those fat cells are not metabolically inert they're active and sending mischievous signals around the body.