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For some people, the desire to be thin is not a personal obsession, rather seen as a demand of society: Even if you are a female and are perfectly healthy at 155 pounds, health is not associated with how far you can walk, how many push-ups you can do or even at times what you consume: it is all about how thin or fit you look.

And according to a recent study published by women from the University of Michigan state, the need to be lean may be perpetuated by people who genetically are predisposed to desire thinness.

"We're all bombarded daily with messages extolling the virtues of being thin, yet intriguingly only some women develop what we term thin-ideal internalization," said Jessica Suisman, lead author on the study and a researcher in MSU's Department of Psychology. "This suggests that genetic factors may make some women more susceptible to this pressure than others."

In order to test this theory of genetic involvement in buying into the media perpetuated idealization of thinness, researchers took more than 300 female twins from the MSU Twin Registry, ages 12-22. Subjects were questioned by how much they wanted to look like people from movies, TV and magazines and were treated to genetic mapping tests. Once the levels of thin idealization were assessed, identical twins who share 100 percent of their genes were compared with fraternal twins who share 50 percent.

Results showed that identical twins had more of a propensity for and higher levels of thinness idealization than the fraternal sets and that genetic markers indicate a 43 percent chance of inheriting this ideal.

What was most surprising, said researchers, was that differing environmental factors had significant involvement in this ideal.

Exposure to the same media, did not have as big an impact as expected," Suisman said. "Instead, non-shared factors that make co-twins different from each other had the greatest impact."

The point is that broad cultural and media risk factors  that were thought to be most influential in the development of thin-ideal internalization are not as important as genetic risk and environmental risk factors (friends, lifestyle, and cognitive characteristics)  that are specific and unique to each twin.

Obesity, seen as a rising epidemic in America, and which has since loosened its belt to encompass people who are overweight, is a concern that is both medical and social.

Overweight children are far from excepted as growing bodies who will come into their own, or people who have feelings and futures, rather they are seen simply as works that need improvement;. They are failing, flailing large medical bills; they are pestiferous tax-dollar expenditures that must be 'dealt with.'

Instead we see abusing fat people as the last acceptable form of prejudice.

And we revel in it.

We can not point laugh and stare at people with facial or cognitive deformities. We are no longer allowed to defame or harass people because of the color of their skin or their religious preferences.

But we can and probably never will always judge those undesirably big bodies; we will make no apology for those who we see as those sad, sloppy overweight fools who are fair game to be filmed, photographed, physically and mentally abused. They are not people, says the masses, they are problems and should be handled.

A sad example we are setting for our children.