The hypothesis that the currently rising tide of obesity is caused by a toxic food environment, as Yale’s Kelly Brownell has proposed, is another example of an attempt to blame obesity on the behavior of overeating, even while sympathizing with the sufferers. “As long as we have the food environment we do,” says Brownell, “the epidemic of obesity is predictable, inevitable, and an understandable consequence.” That environment, in his view, is the fault of the food industry, aided and abetted by the makers of computer games and television shows that encourage sedentary entertainment. Following this argument, severely obese people have sued fast-food chains, the inventors of supersizing, which supposedly pushes extra calories on unsuspecting bargain-conscious Americans. “Our culture’s apparent obsession with ‘getting the best value’ may underlie the increased offering and selection of larger portions and the attendant risk of obesity,” as James Hill of the University of Colorado and his colleague John Peters of Procter & Gamble suggested in Science in 1998.

But if the environment is so toxic, as the Mayo Clinic diabetologist Russell Wilder asked seventy years ago, “why then do we not all grow fat?” After all, Wilder observed, “we continue to be protected against obesity, most of us, even though we hoodwink our appetite by various tricks, such as cocktails and wines with our meals. The whole artistry of cookery, in fact, is developed with the prime object of inducing us to eat more than we ought.” This brings us right back to the character issue. Some misbehave in this toxic environment and become obese. Some do not.*84

Albert Stunkard and Jean Mayer are among those investigators who argued that it was wrong to blame obesity on character defects, and yet still failed to extricate themselves from the circular logic of the overeating/ sedentary-behavior hypothesis. In his 1959 analysis of semi-starvation diets, Stunkard wrote that obesity research went astray once investigators concluded that “excessive body fat results from an excess of caloric intake over caloric expenditure” and then enshrined this thinking as the dictum that “all obesity comes from overeating.” After that, wrote Stunkard, the physician’s job became nothing more than to explain that “semi-starvation reduces fat stores, to prescribe a diet for this purpose,” and then to sit by and await the result. “If the patient lost weight as predicted, this merely confirmed the comfortable feeling that treatment of obesity was really a pretty simple matter,” wrote Stunkard. “However, if, as so often happened, the patient failed to lose weight, he was dismissed as uncooperative or chastised as gluttonous.” Mayer also ridiculed the logic that obesity was caused by gluttony or whatever was meant by the term overeating. “Obesity,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1955, “it is flatly stated, comes from eating too much and that is all there is to it. Any attempt to search for causes deeper than self-indulgence can only give support to patients already seeking every possible means to evade their own responsibility.”