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Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, by Greg Critser
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What in American society has changed so dramatically that nearly 60 percent of us are now overweight, plunging the nation into what the surgeon general calls an "epidemic of obesity"? Greg Critser engages every aspect of American life - class, politics, culture, and economics - to show how we have made ourselves the second fattest people on the planet (after South Sea Islanders).
Fat Land highlights the groundbreaking research that implicates cheap fats and sugars as the alarming new metabolic factor making our calories stick and shows how and why children are too often the chief metabolic victims of such foods. No one else writing on fat America takes as hard a line as Critser on the institutionalized lies we've been telling ourselves about how much we can eat and how little we can exercise. His expose of the Los Angeles schools' opening of the nutritional floodgates in the lunchroom and his examination of the political and cultural forces that have set the bar on American fitness low and then lower, are both discerning reporting and impassioned wake-up calls.
Disarmingly funny, Fat Land leaves no diet book - including Dr. Atkins's - unturned. Fashions, both leisure and street, and American-style religion are subject to Critser's gimlet eye as well. Memorably, Fat Land takes on baby-boomer parenting shibboleths - that young children won't eat past the point of being full and that the dinner table isn't the place to talk about food rules - and gives advice many families will use to lose.
Critser's brilliantly drawn futuristic portrait of a Fat America just around the corner and his all too contemporary foray into the diabetes ward of a major children's hospital make Fat Land a chilling but brilliantly rendered portrait of the cost in human lives - many of them very young lives - of America's obesity epidemic.
- Sales Rank: #468023 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Published on: 2003-01-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
You reap what you sow. According to Critser, a leading journalist on health and obesity, America about 30 years ago went crazy sowing corn. Determined to satisfy an American public that "wanted what it wanted when it wanted it," agriculture secretary Earl Butz determined to lower American food prices by ending restrictions on trade and growing. The superabundance of cheap corn that resulted inspired Japanese scientists to invent a cheap sweetener called "high fructose corn syrup." This sweetener made food look and taste so great that it soon found its way into everything from bread to soda pop. Researchers ignored the way the stuff seemed to trigger fat storage. In his illuminating first book (which began life as a cover story for Harper's Magazine), Critser details what happened as this river of corn syrup (and cheap, lardlike palm oil) met with a fast-food marketing strategy that prized sales-via supersized "value" meals-over quality or conscience. The surgeon general has declared obesity an epidemic. About 61% of Americans are now overweight-20% of us are obese. Type 2 (i.e., fat-related) diabetes is exploding, even among children. Critser vividly describes the physical suffering that comes from being fat. He shows how the poor become the fattest, victimized above all by the lack of awareness. Critser's book is a good first step in rectifying that. In vivid prose conveying the urgency of the situation, with just the right amount of detail for general readers, Critser tells a story that they won't be able to shake when they pass the soda pop aisle in the supermarket. This book should attract a wide readership.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Childhood obesity, diabetes, and related illnesses are becoming major health problems in America. Nutrition journalist Critser presents a critical analysis of the many social and economic factors that make Americans, contrary to the book's subtitle, the second-fattest people in the world (the South Sea Islanders are fatter). He blames parents' reluctance to monitor their children's eating habits; the marketing tactics of fast-food companies, which influence us to overeat; the preponderance of fad diets; the phasing out of physical education programs in schools; and the sale of fast foods at schools to save money on dining facilities. Lower-income families have higher rates of obesity regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, which the author attributes to lack of information about diet and exercise and the wide diversity of cultural beliefs about weight, body size, and self-esteem. Critser urges Americans to tackle obesity head on, concluding with descriptions of initiatives that worked when communities launched a cooperative effort to change their eating habits and avoid the path to lifelong obesity. An important work that belongs in all nutrition and public health collections. [See also Robert Pool's excellent Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic and Eric Schlosser's scathing Fast Food Nation.-Ed.]-Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New Yor.
--Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New England Journal of Medicine
The pen is mightier than the sword. In fighting for the health of whole populations, it can also be mightier than the surgeon's scalpel or the physician's medical armamentarium. Sir Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1843) hastened the passage of Great Britain's Public Health Act, laying the groundwork for a cleaner water supply. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) helped to push forward the Pure Food and Drug Act in the United States, ending uncontrolled sales of dangerous medications. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) laid bare the health risks of pesticides; dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was banned soon thereafter. Greg Critser's Fat Land attempts to focus attention on a new health crisis: the growing prevalence of obesity and poor physical fitness in the United States. During the past several years, both the popular media and the medical literature have drawn attention to the growing numbers of overweight persons. The prevalence of obesity has risen from 12 percent of adults in 1991 to more than 20 percent in 2001. Obesity rates for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 have tripled in the past 25 years, increasing from 5 percent to the current 15 percent. Critser does an excellent job of synthesizing this information, making historical sense of the trends, and citing references for those interested in further reading, and he does so in a fashion that is as pleasurable to read as it is informative. Critser ascribes the rise in obesity to the confluence of several political, social, and economic trends. The early 1970s were a time of peak food prices. President Richard Nixon, fighting an unpopular war in Vietnam and eager to quell dissatisfaction at home, assigned his Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, to the problem. Butz enacted two reforms that had a lasting influence on Americans' girth: he eased regulations on corn production, and he lowered import restrictions on basic staples such as palm oil. The effects of these policy changes were multiplied by new forms of technology. A method was developed to turn the bumper corn crop into a low-cost sweetener: high-fructose corn syrup. Another innovation allowed the transformation of palm oil -- previously referred to as "axle grease" by American importers -- into a palatable substance suitable for use in processed foods. In his reference section, Critser points out that historians have paid very little attention to this area; he should be commended for his good work here. Fast-food marketing efforts also aligned to change the way, and the amount, we eat. As Critser explains, once the staples used to make fast food became cheaper, marketers induced consumers to buy and eat more of them. French-fry vendors in the 1970s noticed that even though consumers "`scrape and pinch around the bottom of the bag for more and eat the salt,'" fear of looking "`piggish'" kept them from buying two bags. Consumer reluctance to go back for seconds was overcome by increasing portion sizes, and "super-sizing" was born. A serving of McDonald's fries "ballooned from 200 calories (1960) . . . to the present 610 calories." Satiety expanded to meet the larger portions. Critser cites research showing that our appetites are not fixed; when presented with more food, we learn to clean our larger plates. Between 1977 and 1995, average daily food intake increased by almost 200 calories. Critser's observations of general cultural trends are less substantiated than his historical arguments, but they are nonetheless interesting. He describes the emergence of a "new boundary-free culture" facilitating the consumption of all these fat-rich, nutrient-poor foods. In earlier times, families sat down for home-cooked dinners, but "the new parent [of the 1980s] had no time for such unpleasantness" and ate out or ordered in. Popular childcare books promoted the theory "that a child `knows' when he or she is full," encouraging parents to cede control over their children's eating habits. Strapped for funds, schools began selling name-brand fast food during lunch. Critser's cultural observations also encompass discussions of religion, the marketing of "easy-fit" clothing, and sports utility vehicles. Most of the material is simplified to support his thesis, but all of it is easy to read, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Overall, Critser's review of science and medicine is good. The relation between poverty and obesity is well documented in the medical literature, and Fat Land gives that association needed attention. In areas where there is less consensus, Critser emphasizes certain studies but admits that more research is needed. For example, he describes changes in the recommendations for exercise over the past 20 years but points to the need for further study. The medical complications of obesity and diabetes are discussed in detail, although diabetic nephropathy, now responsible for approximately 40 percent of incident cases of end-stage renal disease, is not mentioned. Despite his medical omissions, Critser's occasional criticisms of physicians are still compelling. He charges the medical profession with complacency in the face of this growing epidemic, but in doing so he is accusing physicians only of faults they have already pointed out themselves. Most of his arguments come from the Journal of the American Medical Association and other major journals. Reading these critiques in the format of a well-written expose, however, rather than the cooler prose of a medical journal, gives them a more bracing effect. In the last chapter, entitled "What Can Be Done," Fat Land loses a bit of its focus. Rather than offering population-wide solutions to what he sees as a national epidemic, Critser gives anecdotal descriptions of small programs targeted at limited numbers: a modestly successful school intervention designed to combat obesity, an exercise class for "a group of fifteen or so" children with type 2 diabetes, and a pilot program aimed at getting residents of Colorado to walk more. Critser devotes much of his book to describing the way federal policy, crafty marketing techniques, and insidious changes in cultural mores colluded to place Americans, especially poor Americans, in "the first circle of fat hell." It is surprising and a little disappointing that he calls for "individual willpower" -- and the return of gluttony and sloth to their prominent positions among the seven deadly sins -- to "get [us] out of that hell." Commentaries in the medical literature, cited by Critser in his references, suggest more systematic approaches, similar to those promoted in the Surgeon General's campaign for smoking cessation. Fat Land falls short of suggesting an overarching approach to an overarching problem. That is left up to others. Despite these minor shortcomings, Fat Land deserves to be read by all who deal with the medical consequences of obesity and overweight. Jay E. Gladstein, M.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Buy this book
By David L. Andrews
This is a book that everyone from the person struggling with obesity to policy makers should read and everyone in between. From your health professionals to your local school board members.
This book puts many of the pressures of american society into perspective and shows how many of them have been detrimental to our health. He covers how school districts faced with severe issues of budgetary shortfalls make exclusivity contracts with Pepsi or Coke (and many other corporations) to distribute their products inside the schools.
He covers the history and how some well intentioned decisions at the national level have adversely affected our society so much that it has created a culture of creating fat people. He debunks the myth that minorities like their women "fat".
The book is not that thick and surprisingly a good quarter of the book is the bibliography documenting all his facts and figures. He's done a surprising amount of research and more importantly he's figured how it all interrelates. This is not a book about a single study, this is a book that puts all the studies into perspective and gives us both hope and fear for the future.
I think this is a book that our politicians and parents AND everyone should read. It's important and more importantly it shows how we can take steps to alleviate this alarming trend in American society.
This book is not a diet book, its a sociology book if anything, but it can help many people struggling to lose weight.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
The Business Behind The Bulge
By Schtinky
Whether you eat fast food or not, it is likely you still purchase your foods from the supermarket. For everyone who eats, 'Fat Land' is a must-read. Greg Critser uncovers not just the fast food industry but the slaughterhouse and meat packing industries, the soda industry, frozen foods, corporatized farming, and how these factors 'weigh in' at supermarkets and in school lunches.
Beginning in the early 1970's with Secretary Of Agriculture Earl Butz, following through with the infiltration of High Fructose Corn Syrup into all our foods, and rounding off with explosion of fast food and fad diets, Critser doesn't miss a beat in this condensed but highly informative look at the food we eat and why its making us FAT! If you read just one book on food, 'Fat Land' should be that book. Upon finishing, you may find yourself hungry for more knowledge.
One of the most powerful statements in the book is from page 149 where Critser writes, "A culture that condones obesity, whether consciously or unconsciously, undermines any attempts to convince people to pare down." Whether through powerless regulation agencies, advertising and providing unhealthy foods in schools, massive corporate greed and lack of corporate responsibility, or lack of personal responsibility, we as a nation are fatter and unhealthier than ever before.
Although Critser picks on the golden arches (after all, they are a major player in the food changes our country has made), he doesn't isolate his findings solely to them. High Fructose Corn Syrup and the "metabolic shunting" way our bodies digest it is a key factor in weight gain. Eating too much, eating the wrong foods, and receiving incorrect guidelines, along with a more sedentary lifestyle, are all contributors. Critser says of Television, "TV is an 'inactivity bubble' with billion dollar cues to eat." "Super Mario meets SuperSize."
Critser explores the way politics affect our food and the greed behind the corporatizing of agriculture, plus includes an extremely well written chapter on the biological functions of our digestive system and why these food products hurt us. The biology is explained in layman's terms, easy to understand and highly informative. While the book is slim (176 pages), it has an extensive section of notes including bibliography and an index, along with some statistical charts and graphs.
'Fat Land' is a complete account of our recent 'bulging', presenting origins and landslide effects of our diets, how we as a nation are being misled by both corporate and governmental misinformation, and includes suggestions on what we can do about it. While not as dense as Eric Schlosser's 'Fast Food Nation' or as graphic as Gail A. Eisnitz's 'Slaughterhouse', 'Fat Land' is a complete look at an industry we take for granted ... and that is killing us. Enjoy!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great!
By Queen Bee
This is an important read. We hear that obesity is a choice- both from those who want to demonize obesity and from those who claim to be "fat activists". It is important to understand which special interests and politics are behind our food choices. We aren't making our food choices as freely as we believe we are.
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