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Across the many species studied using nutritional geometry, one thing that stands out is the power of macronutrients. Once appetite responses have been mapped to variation in dietary protein:carbohydrate:fat mixture, including intake targets and responses to constrained imbalance, an animal’s behavior, health, and life history (for example reproduction and longevity) can be predicted and manipulated with a high degree of certainty. Of course, micronutrients also play an important role in biology, and for some, notably calcium [38] and sodium [39], specific appetites have been identified. However, they seldom, if at all, have the same leverage over the animal’s interactions with its environment as do macronutrients. This suggests that evolution has converged on low‐dimensional ingestive regulatory systems, and relatively simple models can go a long way towards understanding key aspects of nutrition [19].

Can obesity be understood within this framework? A first step towards empirically addressing this question is to determine whether the kinds of regulatory responses recorded in insects and wild primates also exist for our species.