Michael Fumento

What makes you fat? Eating cheesy-poofs while watching Sex in the City reruns? Wolfing down a Wendy's "Baconator," comprising a double cheeseburger with six strips of bacon that could feed everyone in Darfur for a week? How about when you get the urge to exercise you lie down until it goes away, as one CEO famously put it?

Yes, to all of the above. But these are all specific contributors to obesity driven by larger forces that are making us, well, larger. One of the most important of these, as a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows, is that having fat social contacts makes you fatter. Read my article in The American Spectator Online on why obesity is contagious.