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local Mexican-American residents. Forty percent of the men in their thirties are obese, although most of them are “employed in agricultural labor and/or work in the oil fields in the country.” More than half the women in their fifties are obese. As for the living conditions, Mueller later describes them as “very simple.… There was one restaurant [in all of Starr County], a Mexican restaurant, and there was nothing else.”
    So why were they fat? What makes the overeating, calories-in/calories-out argument so convenient—suspiciously so—is thatit always provides an answer to this question. If the population was so poor and malnourished that even the most stalwart believer in immoderate eating as the cause of obesity will have trouble imagining that they had too much food available—the Pima, for instance, in the 1900s or 1950s, the Sioux in the 1920s, the Trinidadians, or the slum dwellers of Chile in the 1960s and 1970s—then it can always be claimed that they must have been sedentary, or at least
too
sedentary. If they were obviously physically active—the Pima women, the Chilean factory workers, or the Mexican-American agricultural laborers and oil-field workers—then it can be claimed that they ate too much.
    The same arguments can and will be made for individual cases as well. If we’re fat and we can prove that we eat in moderation—we don’t eat any more, say, than do our lean friends or siblings—the experts will confidently assume that we must be physically inactive. If we’re carrying excess fat but obviously get plenty of exercise, then the experts will assume with equal confidence that we eat too much. If we’re not gluttons, then we must be guilty of sloth. If we’re not slothful, then gluttony is our sin.
    These claims can be made (and often are) without knowing a single other pertinent fact about either the relevant populations or individuals. Indeed, they’re often made with little desire or inclination to learn more.
    In the early 1970s, nutritionists and research-minded physicians would discuss the observations of high levels of obesity in these poor populations, and they would occasionally do so with an open mind as to the cause. They were curious (as we should be) and hesitant to insist they knew the answer (as we should be).
    This was a time when obesity was still considered a problem of “malnutrition” rather than “overnutrition,” as it is today. A 1971 survey in Czechoslovakia, for instance, revealed that nearly 10 percent of the men were obese and a third of the women. When these data were reported in conference proceedings a few yearslater, the researcher who did so began with this statement: “Even a brief visit to Czechoslovakia would reveal that obesity is extremely common and that, as in other industrial countries, it is probably the most widespread form of
malnutrition.
”
    Referring to obesity as a “form of malnutrition” comes with no moral judgments attached, no belief system, no veiled insinuations of gluttony and sloth. It merely says that something is wrong with the food supply and it might behoove us to find out what.
    Here’s Rolf Richards, the British-turned-Jamaican diabetes specialist, discussing the evidence and the quandary of obesity and poverty in 1974, and doing so without any preconceptions: “It is difficult to explain the high frequency of obesity seen in a relatively impecunious [very poor] society such as exists in the West Indies, when compared to the standard of living enjoyed in the more developed countries. Malnutrition and subnutrition are common disorders in the first two years of life in these areas, and account for almost 25 per cent of all admissions to pediatric wards in Jamaica. Subnutrition continues in early childhood to the early teens. Obesity begins to manifest itself in the female population from the 25th year of life and reaches enormous proportions from 30 onwards.”
    When Richards says “subnutrition,” he means there