[Steve]

That's really the gist of it. Our society and technology has allowed for changes in the availability of food and lifestyle requirements far faster than our genome has been able to adapt to them.

As far as our physiology is concerned, we're still living without any food surplus, in a situation where it's actually an advantage to store fat whenever possible. Throw such a conservative system into an environment where such a scarce resource becomes absolutely plentiful......

Is the obese person responsible? I'd say both yes and no. I think "blame" is a more complex thing than just saying the obese person is lazy, because of the above. I don't think a great many people understand how relatively easy it is to be not-fat; but at the same time it's an outside context problem. The problem isn't hard, just that people aren't thinking about it in the right way, and even once it's explained to them, they have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea. Or simply don't want to do it.


So in one sense, the obese person certainly is responsible for his/her own condition. After all, the obese person is the one that took in 7000 calories a day and did no exercise. For years. Though in another sense, people that have been in that state from childhood might simply have never thought any different.

On the other hand, the physiological situation and a simple lack of information or concern (see the correlation to the poor and uneducated) can make it more than simply a matter of "lazy".