The simple answer is that genetics will cause you to be tall or short, heavy set or lanky. Genetics will dictate if you carry your weight on your hips, arms or stomach and back and are either the classic pear shape that carries most weight low or apple shape that carries most weight high on the torso. But give your folks a break their genes will not dictate your being overweight, and certainly not obese.

Recently there has been quite a bit of publicity about genetics in ancient cave man times adapting to deal with the suggested severe environment of starvation or feasting. It is suggested that this is the cause of obesity; even the reason for the dramatic increase of obesity of recent years.

Professor Sharman Apt Russsell a full time professor at Western New Mexico University in the humanities department teaching writing is cited in Time Magazine, June 11, 2007 in the article The Science of Appetite. She suggested that we are “hardwired to eat and eat – and particularly eat fatty foods because we didn’t get them often”.

A bit of logic and world knowledge quickly debunks this as an absurd idea. The idea that the environment of scarcity caused our ancestors to develop a genetic hardwire to overeat does not track with the real world. Clearly it does not hold with the thousands of generations of people who had plenty of food but remained thin in farming cultures around the world to include our own history. Even today in the rural farming areas of countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia where food is quite plentiful obesity is virtually nonexistent. Perhaps more importantly it doesn’t track with know populations of hunter-gather groups such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Obesity was virtually unknown in such groups. Even when they had sufficient food supplied on an extended period of time, they did not develop any recognizable overweight or obesity in their population.

Professor Apt Russell did a very good job of documenting many of the horrors of society and how food has been used as a tool of starvation and abuse. She should have stopped there. Her illogical assumptions on the cause of modern obesity are just that, illogical assumptions. Yet we find them quoted in national magazines. I don’t know about you, but a person who is a full time professional writer, not a researcher, and has written on many diverse subjects does not strike me as the authority on such a complicated matter as speculation on how the genetics of primordial man created obesity in modern day Americans. Perhaps my point is best made by a look at the diversity of topics in the books published by Professor Apt Russell.

• Hunger: An Unnatural History, (Basic Books, 2005)
• An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect (Perseus Books, 2003)
• Anatomy of a Rose (Perseus Books, 2001)
• The Last Matriarch (UNM Press, 2000)
• When the Land was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology (Addison-Wesley, 1996)
• The Humpbacked Fluteplayer (Knopf, 1994)
• Kill the Cowboy : A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Addison-Wesley, 1993)
• Songs of the Fluteplayer (Addison-Wesley, 1991)

This is not an attack on the good professor. It is just to make the point that what has crept into being a part of “common knowledge” is often not based in sound logic, much less real research or science.

When looking at a family where the parents and children are obese it seems reasonable to think it is genetics. It is even quite seductive to look at one’s own obese mother and think, “I got her genes; that is why I'm overweight." That just is not the case. (By the way, even though it is not genetics it sill is not your fault.)

The idea of our Neanderthal ancestors passing down a genetic trait that all of a sudden became active is downright silly. If it were true that we carried the genes from primordial populations to be obese when ever we had enough food, then obesity would have to be a common trait in any population where there was money to buy adequate food to overeat.

We have been a very rich country with the ability to buy many extras with huge surpluses of foods for well over 200 years. A review of American group photos shows that anytime before the 1970’s there were few obese people. Even as late as 1980 there was less than 10% obesity in every state in the USA. Today in 2008 all but two states have at least 30% and many have over 35% obesity. In past generations there simply were not enough overweight people to pass down the genetic materials to account for the explosion of the incidence of obesity and excess weight in the USA today.

While studying obesity in Asia in 2006 I surveyed the populations of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. One survey in Bangkok Thailand of approximately 2000 people in public places such as mass transit and entrances of public schools is representative of much of what I saw throughout the region. In the mature population above 50 years old there is approximately 1% who are modest obese. In the middle adult population between 25 and 50 there is approximately 2% who are modest obese. From age 25 up through old age I found none who are severely or morbidly obese. In the teen and young adult, middle school through college student population, there is close to 15% obesity. That represents a 750% increase in obesity in one generation. Also, of the youngest obese population about 20% were severely obese.

It is impossible for genetics to cause a 750% increase of a trait throughout any general population in one generation.

The situations in Vietnam and Cambodia are even more startling. Equally China is experiencing a dramatic explosion of obesity in their children. Interestingly among Chinese children the incidence of obesity is about double in boys than girls. That is opposite of what we see in obesity trends in other parts of the world. Women are dramatically more obese than men in the Middle East. In America, Europe and South East Asia the incidence of obesity in children is equally distributed between the genders. Such divergence of distribution of obesity also strongly argues against a genetic cause.

Since the history of obesity in the Southeast Asian countries is even considerably less than our history, clearly something other than genetics is causing the explosion in the incidence of obesity in the younger generations. If it were genetics, it would have surfaced long ago. After all, over the centuries these countries have all had extended periods of prosperity when there was plenty of food and a good sized middle-class that did not have to work long hours at physically demanding jobs.

No, it is not genetics that causes a person to be overweight or obese. So what is it?

While this article does not look into some of the other commonly thought “reasons” such as poor diet, western processed food, lack of exercise, emotional eating, these and all of the other commonly believed reasons are not the real cause and the subjects of other articles. The real cause is an underlying urge to eat that is actually a compulsion to eat. The compulsion is called the Food Monster. It is what has you looking in the refrigerator when you are already uncomfortably full from a big dinner but are still dissatisfied. The Food Monster compulsion is what makes dieting so amazingly hard and causes you to gain the weight back after you lost it.

To find the answer to what is causing us, and our Asian and Middle Eastern counterparts, to have this food monster compulsion we have to look to psychology and the subconscious where all compulsions lie. That is the subject of other articles or my book Taming Your Food Monster.