Considering how much society despises fat people, that’s a little surprising. Could it be that people grow a bit obese, the world hates on them real good, they grow depressed and eat ever MORE, thereby initiating a viscious cycle? Worth thinking about, given that fat folks are in that select club of people you can still be reviled in public (other club members? white men, Christians).

What about bad spellers? Does the "select club" include people who misspell vicious as "viscous", or, like above, as the crazy mix that is "viscious"? So are you talking about nastiness, or phlegmatic behavior and the chemical cycles of viscosity?

I know many women who eat for comfort; some for whom a chocolate bar is a very purposeful self-medication for low spirits. I also know many people who do not care what society says about their weight. They are comfortable and find security in the numbers of those like to themselves in America.

Given this article and a couple of others in recent issues of The Economist on the chemistry of obesity, there is a comfort in the idea that the weight people carry is beyond their control and not a matter of self-control, or not simply a matter of self-control. One article cites the presence of certain bacteria in the gut, and another the effect of some plastics on the human system - which seemed a little more far-fetched to me. However, when I consider how little I may eat simply to remain zaftig, I am willing to blame just about anything.

But if this is true about insulin and serotonin (chocolate is also supposed to increase serotonin) then it justifies the Falstaffian figure in literature.

Too bad you "escaped" from Claremont when you did. If you’d stayed a few more days you might have learned that harassing someone for their spelling on a blog is a sign of extreme unmanliness.

Guess I shouldn’t post before 8 am. As for Mr. Escapee, KMA.

As Americans, we surely must be the happiest people on Earth.

I have to assume that a study with parameters as general as "fat" and "happy" will be meaningless. Maybe they were happy because someone asked them to be in a study - once it was done, they got all depressed again. Or maybe happiness provoked overeating for them, and once they became depressed again they lost the weight.