Eating and obesity--the new world disorder

Obesity is not a new phenomenon. Paleolithic artefacts, some almost 35,000 years old, depict obesity in its classical gynoid form, suggesting that early hunter-gathers were not entirely safeguarded by the assumed Stone Age diet. Nevertheless it has been convincingly argued by Boyd Eaton and others that the 21st century epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including obesity, is attributable to mankind no longer enjoying the diet of our ancestors for which we remain genetically and metabolically programmed. Even if our forebears seemed to revere obesity sufficiently to carve out stone "venuses", it is still unclear if they were documenting a commonplace feature, although the frequency with which these venuses appear across thousands of years and even thousands of miles apart might suggest that obesity, in women at least, was not a complete rarity.