FOR the past century, the advice to the overweight and obese has remained remarkably consistent: consume fewer calories than you expend and you will lose weight. This prescription seems eminently reasonable. The only problem is that it doesn’t seem to work. Neither eating less nor moving more reverses the course of obesity in any but the rarest cases.

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None of these notions [of eating less calories to lose weight] has a shred of evidence to support it, yet health authorities still repeat their mantra: obesity is caused by overeating; eating less is the cure. Any attempt to argue otherwise is treated as quackery.

In any other discipline, the failure to demonstrate that a superficially obvious therapy actually works might persuade researchers to question the assumptions on which that therapy is based. Yet in obesity research, it is never the basic hypothesis that is questioned. Instead, the patient is blamed for a lack of moral fortitude.