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Show Overweight Is Not Always Due Simply to Overeating feels less need for food and eats less. This is largely automatic. As one advances toward middle age, he begins to add a little to the store of body fat, at 35 years weighing approximately ten pounds more than at 25, and at 50 ten or twenty pounds more than at 35. This takes place so regularly that it is conceded to be normal. It is probably due to lessened activity particularly of the glands, and perhaps per-haps to a more quiet life in every possible way. There are people, however, who gain much more weight than has been described as the normal gain. There are some families which tend to be fat. Just as there are animals ani-mals thin and fat, large and small, so also there are human beings of various shapes and sizes due to the heredity of the family and to racial type. A German woman tends to be fat, and a Japanese woman to be thin. By DR. MORRIS FISHBEIN Editor, Journal of the American Medical Association, and of Hygeia, the Hoalth Magazine It might seem from all of the discussion and disturbance th.it has taken place in recent years on tho subject of overweight that All of the problems of overweight have been fully settled by the investigators in-vestigators of medical science There are, however, still many unsolved un-solved problems which disturb the physiologist as well as the clinician. clini-cian. It has been argued that overweight over-weight is merely the result of bad physiologic bookkeeping; in other words, that overweight is practically practi-cally always due to overeating and that it can practically always be controlled by proper diet. The majority ma-jority of medical opinion is today against that point of view. Obesity or overweight is usually usual-ly due to an accumulation of larc amounts of fat distributed in the places where fat is usually distributed, but particularly in the abdominal wall, so that the obese person develops the appearance appear-ance indicating "that coming events cast thejr shadows before." Women normally have a little more fat under the skin than do men. As a rule the average person maintains for ten years approximately approxi-mately a certain weight, which varies hardly a pound in any one year from another. Obviously there is in the human body a regulating mechanism for balancing, the intake in-take and output so that the certain weight will remain fairly constant. If a person overexerciscs, he eats more; if he takes less exercise, hs |