Eating and Obesity—The New World Disorder

• Main Author: Neville Rigby
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2013-10-01
• Series: Nutrients
• Subjects: n/a
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/5/10/4206

Obesity is not a new phenomenon. Paleolithic artefacts, some almost 35,000 years old, depict obesity in its classical gynoid form, suggesting that early hunter-gathers were not entirely safeguarded by the assumed Stone Age diet [1]. Nevertheless it has been convincingly argued by Boyd Eaton and others that the 21st century epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including obesity, is attributable to mankind no longer enjoying the diet of our ancestors for which we remain genetically and metabolically programmed [2]. Even if our forebears seemed to revere obesity sufficiently to carve out stone “venuses”, it is still unclear if they were documenting a commonplace feature, although the frequency with which these venuses appear across thousands of years and even thousands of miles apart might suggest that obesity, in women at least, was not a complete rarity [3].