A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of luminaries Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated.

Now scientists were arguing about the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 per cent of US adults and costs the health system about US$173 billion (S$239 billion) each year. At the meeting’s closing session, biologist John Speakman offered this conclusion on the subject: “There’s no consensus whatsoever about what the cause of it is.”