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This analysis is radically at odds with long-standing Mormon teachings.

Looking at truth Some longtime observers believe that, ultimately, the vast majority of Mormons will disregard the genetic research as an unworthy distraction from their faith.

"This may look like the crushing blow to Mormonism from the outside," said Jan Shipps, a professor emeritus of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who has studied the church for 40 years.

"But religion ultimately does not rest on scientific evidence, but on mystical experiences.

There are different ways of looking at truth." According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith in 1827 to a divine set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his New York home.

God provided the 22-year-old Smith with a pair of glasses and seer stones that allowed him to translate the "Reformed Egyptian" writings on the golden plates into the "Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ." Mormons believe these scriptures restored the church to God's original vision and left the rest of Christianity in a state of apostasy.

The book's narrative focuses on a tribe of Jews who sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 B.C.

and split into two main warring factions.

The G...

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"A person may have genetic liability for anorexia nervosa, but they also may have — from a different parent, for example — genes that buffer them from expression of the disorder," she said.

The person's environment might also provoke anorexia or prevent it.

Michael Strober, a clinical psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles and editor of the International Journal of Eating Disorders, said conventional wisdom is that genetic factors do play a role in susceptibility.

This latest study, published in the March issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, further confirms previous research, Strober said.

The study also found a link between anorexia and childhood "neuroticism," which Bulik describes as "a tendency to be depressed or anxious, and also to be emotionally reactive." "For some kids, insults come right off them like water off a duck's back," she said.

"These kids are more like emotional Velcro.

Things stuck to them, get under their skin, and it influences them." For Strober, the new study also lends support to the belief that personality traits, including neuroticism, are important in the development of anorexia.

He believes that nearly all anorexia sufferers exhibit neurotic behavior in childhood.

Bulik and Strober are both involved in a large, federally funded multiyear study of anorexia.

Heade...