From the looks of her mother, the child definitely inherited an obesity gene, but someone's also letting her eat way past the point of satiety, way past what's good for her. That's where I question the parental care she's received over the last few years. She didn't grow that obese overnight.

The sad thing about obesity is it makes itself worse. Fat is metabolically much less active than muscle. And belly fat, like in the apple-shaped body of that little girl, is the least metabolically active tissue of all. It's a fairly recent discovery that significant amounts of belly fat send uniquely damaging signals to both the cardiovascular and endocrine systems, putting folks with that shape at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

All that's a long way of saying what Slipknot already hinted at--that the more fat someone has (particularly torso fat like that child), the more easily the problem will simply continue to grow out of control unless it's fought very aggressively. That's why someone should have intervened to at least get that family some help with proper diet and exercise a long time ago.

The more I see her face, the more I wonder whether that child has one of those genetic syndromes where she's just terminally, unquenchably hungry all the time. I think the one I remember reading about is called Prader-Willi syndrome.