For all its prominence in public health, there's little real understanding of overeating, being overweight, and how these things connect to each other and to illness. On Sept. 19, a widely circulated piece in the Huffington Post stated the obvious — "Smoking is a behavior, being fat is not" — which apparently needed to be pointed out because these factors so often appear together as the primary reasons to blame people for the high cost of health care.
There's a powerful cultural prejudice that overeating causes people to be overweight, and being overweight causes people to get sick and die. But this is an assumption, not a scientific observation. The assumption made it easy to believe the claims of America's most celebrated overeating expert, Cornell's Brian Wansink, whose headline-making work had propelled him into a prominent role in reshaping school lunches under the Obama administration.
On Sept. 20 Cornell announced that Wansink has resigned his professorship amid a misconduct scandal. Critics such as statistics professor Andrew Gelman had been warning for years that Wansink's conclusions were probably untrue. Wansink's claims centered on the assumption that eating too much causes poor health, and that subtle cues such as the size of bowls and the color of plates nudge people to eat too much.