And I didn't know we had accurate information about the fat content of the members of the Donner party...

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Intra-abdominal fat (the kind that gives you a bulging belly) is metabolically different from subcutaneous fat: it's resistant to the actions of insulin, for instance. Pound for pound, your coronary heart disease risk is higher with intra-abdominal fat than with subcutaneous fat. Males tend to deposit more fat intra-abdominally than women do, which is why you see more males with those disproportionate bulging bellies: a woman will likely lay the fat subcutaneously around hips and thighs instead.
I suspect the insulin resistance will become relevant under starvation conditions, but I don't know if this is what was thought to be relevant for the Donner party. It does seem like we might be able to guesstimate the intra-abdominal fat content from old photos, at least into "high" and "low"; I can't think how we could glean any other knowledge, as Disinfo Agent points out.

Grant Hutchison

Edit: A bit of Googling shows that the women in the Donner party survived better than the men. It's suggested that this may have been due to their subcutaneous fat distribution, which in the Donner setting might have simply provided better insulation. But of course there are lots of potential cultural confounders.

So what's your take on the OP, Grant? It seems that fatter people might burn calories faster, but slower per kilogram. The latter seems more relevant when its your own internal caloric reserves that are being burned up!

Very interesting. Is the kind of fat laid down affected by diet? I mean, are there food sources that promote the deposition of one kind of fat over the other?

clop

hi bad astronomers,

I'm just back from 1st semester immersion in chinese archaeology and chinese langage. ni hao. rensi ni wo hen gaoxing.

Can we factor meditation into this argument? Ohmmmmm.
Would a slim mellow monk outlive a stressed out person with more fuel reserves. Are these poor lab rats getting vitamns?
I fasted for a week once. Didnt feel hungry after 3 days. I felt great, and had to fight the urge to get busy.

I think there's probably little doubt that being moderately fat will help you survive longer: that's what body fat is "for", after all, in the sort of teleological view of evolution that Warren Platts might favour. We've got plenty of examples from biology of animals storing up calories against predictable need, and failing to survive if they fail to store calories. There's even some slight evidence from human biology, if you look at the sort of evolutionary "just so" stories that are used in relation to the high incidence of obesity in Polynesians, for instance.
I don't know what to say about the "very fat" of the OP, however. Being "very fat" (in the sense of morbid obesity) is something that evolution hasn't had time to get a handle on, and there's no doubt that it is attended by various metabolic derangements which make it difficult to cope with acute physiological stress.

Grant Hutchison