Read a March 25, 2011, article from NBC News about the link between attending religious events and obesity in young adults.

Visit the website of the Material History of American Religion Project to read a paper by Daniel Sack on the meanings behind the church potluck supper. See also an interview with Sack about his book, Whitebread Protestants.

Read a series of articles on obesity published by The New York Times in 2000.

A 2009 survey found that medical costs associated with obesity were $147 billion–up from $75 billion in 2003.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains a website charting overweight and obesity trends in the United States among adults and children from 1985 to the present.

Ashram Vrajabhumi is an organization in Brazil that offers resources for “simple living and high thinking” through Hindu meditation and prayer.

Theodore C. Bergstrom holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the economics department at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is the author of On the Economics of Polygyny (University of Michigan, 1994), which is available online.

Armand L. Mauss, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University who now lives in Irvine, Calif., has written extensively on Mormonism. His most recent book is All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

Jenifer Kunz, an associate professor of sociology at West Texas A&M University, has researched the attitudes of 21st-century members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints toward polygamy.