Fat people are unhealthy. We tire easily. We breathe heavily. We die early. Tune in any news story about poor health, and there you have our bloated, anonymized bodies heaving ponderously and painfully along urban city streets was the backdrop. Everyone knows fat people are unhealthy, unsightly, and unsafe. Everything in our society screams “FAT IS BAD”.

But if being fat is so bad, how on Earth did the genes allowing (and encouraging) fatness survive the long cruel crucible of evolution in order to pose a public health problem today?

The answer, as it turns out, is that until quite recently, historically speaking, those very same genes that lead to heart disease, social outcast status, and an early grave today were actually extremely good genes to have if you wanted to live.

To understand why, you have to remember that until the coming of the modern age, the vast majority of human beings in the European gene pool (and hence, the North American genepool of the future) were subsistence farmers living in the temperate regions of the world.

Even primitive hunter-gatherer peoples innocent of agriculture had to deal with the fact that, for some substantial part of the year, there would be no food to speak of.

So the ability to build up a large store of energy in the form of fat was extremely important, as was the hearty appetite to encourage it. Add in the large frame to support it all and a body-form built for long term endurance doing backbreaking labour for hours at a time, and you have both the blueprint of the modern enormous fat person, and the medieval excellent farm worker and/or mate.

The thin person with a light appetite who stores little energy in the form of fat might be svelte and attractive in the summer, but come the long cold months of winter, they will be the first to feel the ravages of malnutrition and the ones least likely to be around to plant crops when spring returns anew.

Especially when you take into account how efficient food storage and refrigeration are quite recent inventions, and so for thousands of years, the best and most effective way to store food for the winter was to eat a great deal while the food is still fresh, get fat, and thus be able to survive a long period of very little to eat. It’s highly efficient, and makes that person an excellent choice of mate.

After all, a smart peasant chooses a mate who will still be around this time next year over a handsome Lothario who might not make it till Christmas.

And with a daily routine of hard physical labour, all or most of the health problems of modern obesity simply never occur. It’s largely the sedentary lifestyle, rather than the fat itself, that causes the host of health problems associated with obesity today. In earlier times, the body upon which that fat hangs would have been, thanks to an extremely demanding outdoor rural lifestyle, tough, strong, and extremely powerful. It could handle the increased blood pressure and strain on the heart of the extra weight with ease.

Given that, it’s extremely clear that the urge to and the capacity to eat a great deal and store it as fat was a massive evolutionary advantage. A big fat husband was one who obviously could provide well for your family because he was big and strong and prosperous. A big fat wife was a strong worker who was built for hard labour and giving birth, and who could be with you through the winter months when it gets very cold at night and you need someone big and warm to cuddle.

It is only in this modern world, where we can get as much as we like of things we are born to crave (sweetness, fat, and salt, all rare in the state of nature) and where hard physical labour is something we have largely eliminated, or at the very least made entirely optional, that these same genes that were so advantageous in the agrarian era have become a liability.

Even then, fatness does not always been poor health. A physically active and robust fat person is just as healthy as a thinner person.

And even us less-healthy ones do not start to have serious problems until we are middle aged, and are perfectly capable of being good mates, good earners, and good people are whole lives.

And with the inevitable slowdown of metabolism and loss of energy that comes with age, everyone joins the Fat Club sooner or later.

So you see, we fat people are still very good to have around, and what’s more, until recently, we are the proud bearers of the genes that not just survived but flourished and thrived all through the cruel winters of Europe and North America over the centuries.

So be nice to a fatty. It’s not our fault our genes are an outmoded model.

Used to be, our kind was King.