Why should I be fat?

It's good for our economy.

In some ways, we are better off in this Fat Economy. Many people work in easier, better-paying jobs, which help pay for their big homes in the suburbs. Women don't have to spend two hours preparing dinner every night; many have risen to unprecedented levels of corporate and political power. Flat-panel plasma TVs hang over fireplaces, which can be lit using the same remote control for flipping channels. But the unintended consequence of these economic changes is that many of us have become fat. An efficient economy produces sluggish, inefficient bodies.

"The obesity problem is really a side effect of things that are good for the economy," said Tomas J. Philipson, an economics professor who studies obesity at the University of Chicago, a city recently named the fattest in America. "But we would rather take improvements in technology and agriculture than go back to the way we lived in the 1950s when everyone was thin. Nobody wants to sweat at work for 10 hours a day and be poor. Yes, you're obese, but you have a life that is much more comfortable."

RELATED: Weight control drugs up for review

Two new approaches to weight loss are up for review by federal regulators. And they represent vastly different solutions to the nation's obesity epidemic -- for consumers and for the companies behind the drugs. One, called Acomplia, would be a prescription pill to control appetite by blocking the same brain receptors that stimulate the "munchies" in marijuana smokers. Some financial analysts see Acomplia as the most promising new drug of the year, and they predict eventual multibillion-dollar sales for its maker, the French company Sanofi-Aventis. The other, with the proposed name Alli, is a weight-loss drug that works by blocking the body's absorption of fat. Since 1999, it has been sold in the United States as the prescription medication Xenical.