The message Kolata brings to the table is that body weight is inherited, at least within a range that can’t be varied -- except through starvation (taking a person below the range, toward anorexia) or bingeing/overeating practices (driving a person toward obesity).

And yet, just a year previously, Cornell professor Brian Wansink wrote about mindless eating and how the everyday person is cleverly manipulated by:

• portion sizes


• food packaging


• even the sights and sounds in a restaurant

I interviewed Wansink for an article about food ambience called “The New Diet Math,” for Health magazine. He gave strong evidence that that environment plays an extraordinarily powerful role in influencing our food choices and our weight. My favorite experiment is Wansink’s mischievous trick with Hershey’s kisses, placed near office secretaries’ desks. The secretaries ate nine Kisses daily when the candy was on their desks in transparent bowls but only six and a half candies when the sweets were placed in opaque containers with lids. And they ate a mere four Kisses when the bowls were positioned three steps away. The killer was that the secretaries didn’t compensate for eating more sweets by eating less at lunch or dinner. Here’s the math: the extra chocolate adds up to 2,500 calories a month, 12 pounds a year, and one explanation for how obesity happens.

As a molecular biologist, I add in my own knowledge that the epidemic of obesity worldwide is happening too fast to be explained by evolutionary changes in the gene pool.

Thus, in our nature/nurture war about body weight, we end up with one of those complicated mixes that the media abhors because it is not all that sensational. We do inherit a genetic predisposition that sets our body weights within a range. How great that range is, 10, 20 or 30 pounds, remains to be determined. And then, as children, teens and adults we face a culture bombarding us with temptations to eat more than we should, more than we think we do.

My main interest is how people react in this contemporary milieu, changing daily as marketers get increasingly more sophisticated at guerilla tactics and geneticists get better at deciphering which genes make us… well, us.

Here’s what happens: Individuals with anorexia, of which I am one, shun all the food marketing, closing themselves up in a bubble of rigidity and refusal. People with bulimia, indulge, feel guilty, purge and wind up with a biological mess within their bodies. Individuals with binge eating disorder simply indulge and feel ashamed. Others grab a hodge-podge of these practices and end up with food issues that don’t have names but still cause immense preoccupation and suffering. These patterns begin in adolescence, gather steam as people age, and erupt at stressful times in life.

Kolata argues biology. Wansink asserts culture. One huge factor missing from both influences is the psychological factors that prompt people to eat – or not. Some call it emotional eating or nervous starvation. People eat for all kinds of reasons that are personal, not cultural or genetically-driven. The triggers of unhealthy eating can easily hoist people out of their normal range and place them at risk for eating disorders, the consequence of bodies gone way off center.

If we understand this complexity, then our reactions to obesity and eating disorder epidemics will be more in tune with their causes. Treatments should go beyond giving diets and meal plans or putting food in covered bowls. Treatments should also include delving into what’s behind our eating; how we use food to soothe, distract or control our lives; and the stresses we face so that we can time therapy and support (or simply a vacation or mini-break) when life is spinning out of control. That grounding can help us discover healthier ways to solve our problems, sans food. And we can take charge of our lives.