Fat Chance
The bitter truth about sugar
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4.3 • 33 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
In ‘Fat Chance’, Robert Lustig documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of metabolic syndrome – whose symptoms include obesity, diabetes and heart disease – over the last 30 years. He exposes for the first time how changes in the food industry and in our wider environment have affected our collective metabolisms and our waistlines, and he shows how industry and political forces, motivated by greed, don’t want things to change.
In the late 1970s, when the US government mandated the removal of fat from food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control.
To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, and suggests societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.
Customer Reviews
Oleo Strut
Tasty yet terrifying! I should like to read this book, but am concerned that I will not like what I read. A very tempting and thought-provoking sample. Worrying!
Not particularly revelatory
Boo! Sugar is the bad guy. Get over it. Lustig takes forever to get round to the points, and each as preeminently obvious as the next: corn syrup is cheap to make and there is a large corn industry and the industry has a strong economic and political influence in the US. As such it is used in many of the foods people eat in the US. Sugar is addictive and makes you fat. Avoid sugar and eat sensibly and you should grow up fine. Now you don't have to waste your time reading this book.
Probably worst of all is Lustig's apparent political agenda, which is patently obvious. Barometric healthcare is not funded by many US health insurance policies so his work is particularly lucrative. Lustig tries to put this front and centre and explain that it's not really the problem of people stuffing their fat faces, but really sugar making them do so and that it makes them victims. While I understand that food is addictive removing the element of control (i.e. will power) from the equation does not empower those that most need it (presumably because stomach stapling, stomach balloons, liposuction and other surgeries are more lucrative than diet and exercise tips). You may learn something new from this book, but there is certainly better written and more honest.
This will change your mind about sugar
A really interesting and well written book.
Try and read pure white and deadly by John yudkin before reading this book.
Both books clearly implicate sugar as a toxin.