New reports are emerging about yet another gene found to cause obesity in people. The news coverage on the internet has been tremendous. Google news lists over two hundred articles on this subject. In most of the articles, if an illustrative picture is included, it is usually a collage of a scientist experimenting against a technical looking background, or perhaps a 3-D rendering of some DNA. Some articles, though, included a picture of an obese person. I suppose such a picture is relevant, but a few of the pictures seemed a little excessive or unnecessary. Take the picture in this article. I don’t think all obese folks eat large amounts of chocolate with the maniacal cheeriness that this ladies seems to possess. Proprietors of a New Zealand News website thought it most appropriate to just show a picture of the biggest butt they had on file. That really adds nuance to the article. I did not realize what kind of butts were being discussed when referring to the obese before I saw that. The Washington Post went with the tasteful man with gut and pants being held up by suspenders. The New Zealand Herald went with feet on a clearly overloaded scale but chose to refer to this new gene as the “Fatso Gene.” That’s classy. My two favorite treatments of this story come from E Canada Now and a Dog and Human Health Website which both chose to go with pictures of seemingly nude, morbidly obese men, for a reason I cannot decipher. The Dog and Human website is most distressing as the obese, bearded man is naked and at a computer. I guess these pictures help the reader understand that the obese folks stricken by this genetic baggage spend their days naked and sedentary sometimes looking at who knows what on the computer. I just want to know who makes these pictorial decisions. Maybe its that bearded, naked guy from the Dog and Human Health site. That’s why he is depicted at a computer. He is making decisions about what pictures to include in these stories. That is the most logical explanation I can imagine. Anyhow, use caution when clicking some of those links.