Misremembering What Makes Us Fat

Imagine studying respiratory problems in Beijing, China, by only focusing on the variation among individuals. You could note that some people are more vulnerable to asthma than others, some more apt to cough or wheeze on any given day. You could then devote yourself to a hunt for the variations in genes, or epigenomes, or microbiomes, or telomeres, or metabolomes of the more and less vulnerable Beijingians. And, of course, everywhere you looked for such variation, you would find some.