Obesity: a hidden killer among us.

Picture this, a baseball fan jumps to his feet in the bleachers of The Rogers Centre, screaming at the top of his lungs for the Toronto Blue Jays to hold onto their 3-2 lead in the bottom of the ninth inning. He squeezes a Jays' pennant in his left hand while shoving a mustard-smeared hot dog into his mouth with his right. The Yankees have a runner on first, who is sneaking a big lead off the base. The Jays' pitcher has thrown three balls and two strikes to the batter, a notorious power hitter. The fan holds his breath while the pitcher winds up and fires a blazing fastball. "Crack!" The ball jets over the fan's head into the bleachers for a game-winning home run. The fan slumps to his bleacher seat and has a heart attack, and without creating any concern among the crowd, dies exactly five minutes later.

If you believe the old saying "you are what you eat," human beings are certainly not what they used to be. Did you know that calories are responsible for 300,000 deaths every year?

Before jumping into today's fashionable condemnation of calories, let us spend a moment on historical perspective and at least admit that for mankind's first couple hundred thousand years of existence, the basic human problem was how to get enough calories and micronutrients. Forget the caveman era, as recently as 100 years ago, most people were not receiving adequate nutrition. Malnutrition was rampant, stunting growth, hindering central nervous systems, and making people more susceptible to disease. Often, poor people begged on the streets because they did not have the sheer physical energy to work at a job, even if work was available to them. By modern standards even affluent people a century ago were too small, too...