Fat chance : beating the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease / Robert H. Lustig, M.D.

  • Lustig, Robert H.
Date:
[2013]
  • Books

About this work

Description

"Robert Lustig's ninety-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has been viewed nearly three million times. Now, in this highly anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that have led to the personal misery and public crisis--the pandemic of obesity and chronic disease--over the last thirty years. In the late 1970s, when the U.S. government declared that we needed to get the fat out of our diets, the food industry responded by pumping in more sugar to make food more palatable (and more salable), and by removing the fiber to make food last longer on the shelf. The result has been a perfect storm for our health, disastrously altering our biochemistry to make us think we're starving, drive our eating habits out of our control, and turn us into couch potatoes. If we cannot control how we eat, it's because of the catrastrophic excess of sugar in our diet--the resulting hormonal impalanves have rewired our brains! To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents strategies we can each use to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, as well as societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. With scientific rigor and even a little humor, Fat Chance categorically proves that "a calorie is not a calorie", and takes that knowledge to its logical conclusion--an overhaul of the global food system."--Book jacket.

Publication/Creation

New York : Hudson Street Press, [2013]

Physical description

xv, 320 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Contributors

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Pt. I. The greatest story ever sold. A fallacy of biblical proportion ; A calorie is a calorie : or is it? ; Personal responsibility versus the obese six-month-old -- Pt. II. To eat or not to eat? that's not the question. Gluttony and sloth : behaviors driven by hormones ; Food addiction : fact or fallacy ; Stress and "comfort food" -- Pt. III. "Chewing" the fat. The birth, care, and feeding of a fat cell ; The difference between "fat" and "sick" ; Metabolic syndrome : the new scourge -- Pt. IV. The "real" toxic environment. The omnivore's curse : low fat versus low carb ; Fructose : the "toxin" ; Fiber : half the antidote ; Exercise : the other half of the antidote ; Micronutrients : home run or hyperbole? ; Environmental "obesogens" ; The "empire" strikes back : response of the food industry -- Pt. V. The personal solution. Altering your food environment ; Altering your hormonal environment ; Last resorts : when altering your environment isn't enough -- Pt. VI. The public health solution. The "nanny state" : personal versus societal responsibility ; What hath government wrought? ; A call for global sugar reduction.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    Medical Collection
    WD212 2013L97f
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 159463100X
  • 9781594631009