But where oh where were these fat genes when I was young? I'm 74, so my childhood and teen years were the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, some people were a bit overweight, but I never saw the massively obese people that you see now.
I spent a lot of my 1950s years in England where my Dad was stationed with the Air Force. I remember British babies looking much chubbier than American babies, not sure why. Two of my best friends there were chubby babies but they grew out of it by the time I met them at 8 or 9 or so.
My father got overweight in his 60's. I'm not sure how much overweight he was, maybe 50 or 60 lbs. He was an Air Force navigator and sat in front of radar screens in the planes for who knows how many hours over his 25 years in the Air Force. He died of cancer at 73.
My mother was a farm girl and was very thin her entire life. Growing up we always ate fresh foods and my parents almost never bought any junk at all. She never got cancer, and died at 95. My grandmother was similar and died at 99.
The obesity you see now seems odd, but it must be due to the processed foods so many people eat. So many people don't appear to know how to cook using fresh ingredients, so they resort to all these horrible processed foods.