ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses food consumption and risk of obesity. While excess weight and its associated health risks have been at the forefront of the concerns of medicine since ancient times, it was not before the mid-nineteenth century that the issue of obesity became particularly important for medical research, which was undergoing something of an upsurge at the time. While today norms are calculated in relation to the Body Mass Index (BMI), for many years this measurement was not used and the assessment of obesity was based on a visual analysis which was entirely relative an increase in the volume of the body, and change in the individual's appearance. Obesity is an abnormal increase of this adipose tissue and an accumulation of fat in the body as a whole such that the functioning of the organs is affected. In order to establish a link between obesity and food consumption it is necessary to consider the big eater.
