Preface.- Obesity: nature or nurture?.- The contribution of heredity to clinical obesity.- Monogenetic disorders within the energy balance pathway.- Ciliary syndromes and obesity.- Genome-wide association studies and human population obesity.- Known clinical epigenetic disorders with an obesity phenotype: Prader-Willi Syndrome and the GNAS locus.- Evidence for epigenetic changes as a cause of clinical obesity.- Epigenetic changes associated with intrauterine growth retardation and adipogenesis.- Exposure to diabetes in utero, offspring growth, and risk for obesity.- Maternal weight gain during pregnancy and obesity in the offspring.- Intrauterine growth restriction, small for gestational age, and experimental obesity.- Experimental models of maternal obesity and high-fat diet during pregnancy and programmed obesity in the offspring.- High carbohydrate intake only during the suckling period results in adult-onset obesity in mother as well as offspring.- Prenatal stress, glucocorticoids, and the metabolic syndrome.- Hypothalamic maldevelopment and developmental programming.- Adipocyte development and experimental obesity.- The obesogen hypothesis of obesity: overview and human evidence.- Perinatal exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals with estrogenic activity and the development of obesity.- The role of environmental obesogens in the obesity epidemic.