Account Deleted By User Quotes from this shit article But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar myths about the overweight: They’re weak-willed, indolent, and stupid. It ought to go without saying that this stereotype of the “obese lifestyle” is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.  It plays off the easy analogy between obesity and ecological catastrophe, pushing the notion that Western culture has sickened both our bodies and our planet with the same disease of affluence. According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. It portrays it maybe because it's true? Like other spurious estimates of the “cost of obesity,” they leave out important, mitigating variables. (Fat people tend to have shorter life spans, for example, thus reducing their lifetime carbon footprint.) It’s pure fantasy to say that overweight Americans are causing global warming and misleading even to suggest that the two phenomena are related. It's pure fantasy to say that idiots that waste resources they don't need are harming the environment?