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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Taubes stands the received wisdom about diet and exercise on its head.” —The New York Times What’s making us fat? And how can we change? Building upon his critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, bestselling author Gary Taubes revisits these urgent questions. Featuring a new afterword with answers to frequently asked questions. Taubes reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century—none more damaging or misguided than the “calories-in, calories-out” model of why we get fat—and the good science that has been ignored. He also answers the most persistent questions: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Persuasive, straightforward, and practical, Why We Get Fat is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management.
Complete with an easy-to-follow diet. Featuring a new afterword with answers to frequently asked questions.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Taubes stands the received wisdom about diet and exercise on its head.” —The New York Times What’s making us fat? And how can we change? Building upon his critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, bestselling author Gary Taubes revisits these urgent questions. Featuring a new afterword with answers to frequently asked questions. Taubes reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century—none more damaging or misguided than the “calories-in, calories-out” model of why we get fat—and the good science that has been ignored. He also answers the most persistent questions: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Persuasive, straightforward, and practical, Why We Get Fat is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management.
Complete with an easy-to-follow diet. Featuring a new afterword with answers to frequently asked questions.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The Original Sin
In 1934, a young German pediatrician named Hilde Bruch moved to America, settled in New York City, and was “startled,” as she later wrote, by the number of fat children she saw—“ really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.” Indeed, fat children in New York were so conspicuous that other European immigrants would ask Bruch about it, assuming that she would have an answer. What is the matter with American children? they would ask. Why are they so bloated and blown up? Many would say they’d never seen so many children in such a state.
Today we hear such questions all the time, or we ask them ourselves, with the continual reminders that we are in the midst of an epidemic of obesity (as is the entire developed world). Similar questions are asked about fat adults. Why are they so bloated and blown up? Or you might ask yourself: Why am I?
But this was New York City in the mid- 1930s. This was two decades before the first Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s franchises, when fast food as we know it today was born. This was half a century before supersizing and high- fructose corn syrup. More to the point, 1934 was the depths of the Great Depression, an era of soup kitchens, bread lines, and unprecedented unemployment. One in every four workers in the United States was unemployed. Six out of every ten Americans were living in poverty. In New York City, where Bruch and her fellow immigrants were astonished by the adiposity of the local children, one in four children were said to be malnourished. How could this be?
A year after arriving in New York, Bruch established a clinic at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons to treat obese children. In 1939, she published the first of a series of reports on her exhaustive studies of the many obese children she had treated, although almost invariably without success. From interviews with her patients and their families, she learned that these obese children did indeed eat excessive amounts of food—no matter how much either they or their parents might initially deny it. Telling them to eat less, though, just didn’t work, and no amount of instruction or compassion, counseling, or exhortations— of either children or parents—seemed to help. It was hard to avoid, Bruch said, the simple fact that these children had, after all, spent their entire lives trying to eat in moderation and so control their weight, or at least thinking about eating less than they did, and yet they remained obese. Some of these children, Bruch reported, “made strenuous efforts to lose weight, practically giving up on living to achieve it.” But maintaining a lower weight involved “living on a continuous semi-starvation diet,” and they just couldn’t do it, even though obesity made them miserable and social outcasts.
One of Bruch’s patients was a fine- boned girl in her teens, “literally disappearing in mountains of fat.” This young girl had spent her life fighting both her weight and her parents’ attempts to help her slim down. She knew what she had to do, or so she believed, as did her parents—she had to eat less—and the struggle to do this defined her existence. “I always knew that life depended on your figure,” she told Bruch. “I was always unhappy and depressed when gaining [weight]. There was nothing to live for. . . . I actually hated myself. I just could not stand it. I didn’t want to look at myself. I hated mirrors. They showed how fat I was. . . . It never made me feel...
About the Author-
GARY TAUBES is cofounder and senior scientific advisor of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). He's an award-winning science and health journalist, the author of Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, and a former staff writer for Discover and correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and has been included in numerous Best of anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Science Writing (2010). He has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. He is also the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. He lives in Oakland, California.
Reviews-
-Dennis Rosen, The Boston Globe
"Well-researched and thoughtful . . . Reconsidering how our diet affects our bodies, how we might modify it to be healthier, and being less harsh with those who struggle with their weight are all worthy goals. Taubes has done us a great service by bringing these issues to the table."
-Jeff Baker, The Oregonian
"Less dense and easier to read [than Good Calories, Bad Calories] but no less revelatory."
-Men's Journal
"Taubes's critique is so pointed and vociferous that reading him will change the way you look at calories, the food pyramid, and your daily diet."
-John Horgan, Scientific American
"Gary Taubes is a science journalist's science journalist, who researches topics to the point of obsession--actually, well beyond that point--and never dumbs things down for readers."
-Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen
"Important . . . This excellent book, built on sound research and common sense, contains essential information."
-Choice
"This brave, paradigm-shifting man uses logic and the primary literature to unhinge the nutritional mantra of the last 80 years."
-Casey Schwartz, The Daily Beast
"Aggressive . . . An exhaustive investigation."
-Karen Bentley, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Passionate and urgent . . . Backed by a persuasive amount of detail . . . As an award-winning scientific journalist who spent the past decade rigorously tracking down and assimilating obesity research, he's uniquely qualified to understand and present the big picture of scientific opinions and results. Despite legions of researchers and billions of government dollars expended, Taubes is the one to painstakingly compile this information, assimilate it, and make it available to the public . . . Taubes does the important and extraordinary work of pulling it all together for us."
-Lacey Galbraith, Bookpage
"Clear and accessible . . . Taubes's conviction alone makes Why We Get Fat well worth considering."
-Starred review, Library Journal
"An enlightening treatise that is meticulously researched yet approachable by all, this will captivate anyone interested in the science of diet and disease."
-Tom Naughton, FatHead
"This is the book you can give to people who want to understand the science of why you're finally losing weight . . . without being hungry and miserable doing it."
-John Duran
"Why We Get Fat is nothing short of tremendous . . . This is a seminal book . . . What if the calories-in/calories-out hypothesis is wrong? What if we've spent two generations and billions of dollars re-engineering our food system and altering our eating habits away from fat . . . and making ourselves fatter and unhealthier as a result? That's what Taubes convincingly argues with clear logic, specific evidence, and brilliant illustrations on every page."
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