i was just wondering if any of this could be tied into our genes and illevolution. guest: she brings up the question of obesity and genetics and evolution. other than swine flu, obesity seems to be on our public health mind the most. i talk about this in the book. there is a lot of inquiry about obesity and/á everyone seems to have a different take on what is causing the problem. it seems to me that the problem of obesity, based on current data, is overblown -- that the mortality associated with obesity really is not that great and that safe levels of weight are often miss estimated. it seems from the data that the extremely obese with an increased risk of mortality, so if you just go by data, it is not clear that this is such a big public health problem. and yet it is a big public health problem because we talk about it in that way. a lot of money and programs and research goes into obesity. as to the genetic hypothesis, there seems to be genetic components to obesity. they're sometimes seems to be dietary components. it is very hard to say this is the cause of obe