The bipartisan Mississippi legislation, which proposed to ban restaurants from serving fat people purportedly to help them lose weight, has highlighted the most popular misconception about fat people. One that even a lot of fat people have been led to believe: that they overeat and that’s why they’re obese.

This concept has been drilled into us and “everybody knows” it to be true. But is it? Suppose we’ve been convinced of this by the continuation of a fundamental misinterpretation of anecdotal evidence and certain studies — suggesting that a correlation between overeating and some obese people means that overeating causes obesity. You’re about to learn that this common fallacy of logic is precisely what has misled conventional wisdom to believe something that isn’t true — when, in fact, the science and far sounder clinical research for more than half a century has disproven it.

In a cruel twist, it is the solution to this belief that has created the very perception of “overeating” popularly pinned on fat people.

