Adam Ozimek, Alex Tabarrok, Andrew Sullivan, Miss Cellania, and others post this picture of “Human Freight Car” Chauncey Morlan (1869-1906), one of the freak show fatties who traveled with the Barnum & Bailey Circus: Alex wonders, “What would the circus goers of 1890 have thought if they were told that in the America of 2010 [...]

A new CDC study suggests that Americans may have reached the limits of human obesity. Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday. The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among [...]

Ezra Klein points to a two-year-old paper titled “Cheap Donuts and Expensive Broccoli: The Effect of Relative Prices on Obesity.” The abstract, which is all I’ve read: Americans have been getting fatter since at least the mid 1980s. To better understand this public health problem, much attention has been devoted to determining the underlying cause [...]

Following a link from Glenn Reynolds to a Salon piece by Frances Kissling on whether “Regina Benjamin is too fat to be surgeon general,” I was instead struck by a closing that took a wild tangent: Watching the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, I’ve found myself thinking about our president’s nominees and how many of them share [...]

Glenn Reynolds passes along news of a Japanese study that finds “People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.” Sweet!  I’ve apparently gotten out of shape [...]