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Kevin Knight, MD, MPH
UCLA School of Public Health Los Angeles

JAMA. 1986;256(21):2958.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Stunkard and colleagues¹ have convincingly demonstrated different concordance rates and correlation coefficients for monozygotic and dizygotic twins for various measures of overweight. However, the conclusion that human obesity is under substantial genetic control is valid only in the context of the range of environmental factors experienced by the study subjects. The data presented do not support general conclusions regarding the relative roles of heredity and environment in producing human obesity.

One can easily imagine a situation in which similar heritability factors might be calculated in the face of a substantially different overall obesity prevalence caused by environmental factors.

For example, the twins participating in this study probably experienced Western patterns of diet and exercise. It is conceivable that under a different set of diet and exercise patterns the overall prevalence of overweight might have been much lower, even though the heritability factor would have remained the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Senior Contributing Editor; Sharon Iverson, Assistant Editor.

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