Beyond Overeating

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Abstract
The folk belief that overeating causes obesity has influenced clinical thinking with remarkable tenacity, despite two fatal flaws in the theory. First, the proposition is logically vacant, inasmuch as the definition of overeating is circular; only if one is fat can one be said to have overeaten. Second, whenever the proposition has been reframed so as to have meaning and then tested in a well-designed experiment, eating behavior has appeared to be the dependent variable, rather than the independent variable.The best evidence, derived mostly from studies in animals but increasingly confirmed by difficult experiments in humans (such as that . . .