Obesity, genes and St Thomas Aquinas
SIR – Mary Kenny (Comment, February 1) says that a new report sheds light on the long-running debate about whether obesity is caused by genes or a lack of willpower.
I tend to believe it is genetic, but not solely for scientific reasons. Consider the example of St Thomas Aquinas. While we cannot be sure about his exact appearance, it is widely believed that he was severely overweight. GK Chesterton, for example, wrote: “St Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy.”
