I was at a cocktail party a week or so ago and had the chance to talk to one of the leading bariatric surgeons in our area and was curious what his thoughts were on why obesity seems too be such a recent phenomenon. We didn't have herds of butter huffers roaming the plains back in the 50's. I wasn't around in the 50's either but everything I've seen shows a population of fit healthy people. Bypassing (No pun intended) everything else we talked about he said exactly that, metabolism doesn't vary much person to person. No metabolism in the world is going to make up for force feeding yourself 10 thousand calories a day!