Why We Eat (Too Much): The New Science of Appetite

by Andrew Jenkinson

You can imagine the hardship and risk involved for those people to safely reach the Pacific Islands. Quite often only those people who were ‘strong enough’ to withstand the starvation of a long trip survived to live in these islands. There was therefore automatically a huge selection bias for anyone settled there. Those people who had enough fat reserves before the journey, or those with metabolisms that could shut down in the face of starvation, had a much better chance of surviving the long journey. The sailors and passengers who did not have this insurance perished and did not have the opportunity to pass their genes on to the next generation.