David Cutler: evaluation

Transcript context

…But lab animals — we control what they eat, right? There’s some kind of regimen. And obesity seems to be rising in cases where relative prices facing humans are not obviously the culprit. Is it that people are buying more cat food, and labs are spending more for their rats? It seems odd. Yes. I don’t know quite about the labs. I presume that they’re feeding them more since my guess is the exercise is controlled, and there wouldn’t have been genetic change that rapidly. It could be that components of the food are different as well. The first approximation what matters is total calories in, but they’re probably types of calories and combinations of calories that lead to more or less weight gain. It also depends on what time of day one eats and a variety of other things like that, too. What do you think of the — I call them the residual theories? That there’s something unknown in the environment. It could be a chemical, something in the way we live that’s causing obesity levels to increase, and we just haven’t identified it yet. Do you take this seriously? Or are they just made-up stuff?…

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