Medicine: Fat & Unhappy

The week's headline-catching medical pronouncement came from a woman doctor: fatness, said Dr. Hilde Bruch of Columbia University's departments of psychiatry and pediatrics, is caused by overeating.

The fashionable theory that glandular disturbances cause fatness, Dr. Bruch told the New York Academy of Medicine, is mostly tommyrot. In a recent study of heavyweights, it was found that fewer than one in 200 had a glandular ailment.

What makes people overeat? Insecurity and immaturity, as a rule, says Dr. Bruch: "Quite often it is the youngest or an only child who becomes obese. . ....