Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes (English) Paperback Book

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Building upon this critical work in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, Taubes now revisits the urgent question of what's making people fat--and how they can change--in this exciting new book.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Clearly and concisely, Why We Get Fat corrects our understanding of calories, fat, carbohydrates, cholesterol, insulin resistance, metabolism, exercise, genetics, and the obesity epidemic. Complete with an easy-to-follow diet, this is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management, from New York Times bestselling author Gary Taubes.NATIONAL BESTSELLER . "Taubes stands the received wisdom about diet and exercise on its head."-The New York TimesWhat'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.

Author Biography

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.

Review

"Taubes stands the received wisdom about diet and exercise on its head."—The New York Times"Well-researched and thoughtful. . . . Taubes has done us a great service by bringing these issues to the table."—The Boston Globe"Compelling and convincing. . . . Taubes breaks it down for us from historical and, more importantly, scientific perspectives."—Philadelphia Daily News"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."—Men's Journal"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."—Scientific American"Important. . . . This excellent book, built on sound research and common sense, contains essential information."—Tucson Citizen"This brave, paradigm-shifting man uses logic and the primary literature to unhinge the nutritional mantra of the last eighty years."—Choice"Less dense and easier to read [than Good Calories, Bad Calories] but no less revelatory."—The Oregonian"An exhaustive investigation."—The Daily Beast"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."—Seattle Post-Intelligencer"Clear and accessible . . . Taubes's conviction alone makes Why We Get Fat well worth considering."—Bookpage"[Taubes] is helping to reshape the conversation about what makes the American diet so fattening."—Details"Taubes is a relentless researcher."—The Washington Post Book World"[Taubes's] major conclusions are somewhat startling yet surprisingly convincing. . . . His writing reflects his passion for scientific truth."—Chicago Sun-Times

Review Quote

"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." -Dennis Rosen, The Boston Globe "Less dense and easier to read [than Good Calories, Bad Calories ] but no less revelatory." -Jeff Baker, The Oregonian "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." - Men's Journal "Important . . . This excellent book, built on sound research and common sense, contains essential information." -Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen "Aggressive . . . An exhaustive investigation." -Casey Schwartz, The Daily Beast "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." -Karen Bentley, Seattle Post-Intelligencer "Clear and accessible . . . Taubes's conviction alone makes Why We Get Fat well worth considering." -Lacey Galbraith, Bookpage "An enlightening treatise that is meticulously researched yet approachable by all, this will captivate anyone interested in the science of diet and disease." -Starred review, Library Journal "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." -Tom Naughton, FatHead " 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." -John Durant, Hunter-Gatherer "Compelling . . . Gary Taubes has done it again . . . [ Why We Get Fat ] takes a hard look at the commonly held belief that the reason why we gain weight is because we consume more calories than we expend and turns it upside down . . . Packed with eye-opening information and elucidating studies." -Diets in Review "This is the book I knew was inside of Good Calories, Bad Calories . . . Why We Get Fat is the book to give to friends, doctors, congressmen, and anyone else who wants to understand the futility of our current nutritional advice . . . Clearly, obviously, succinctly, Taubes shows us how scientific theories that explained obesity as a hormonal rather than moral issue were abandoned during World War II for simplistic theories based on thermodynamics that work in physics, but make no sense when used to describe the behavior of complex biological systems." -LowCarbConfidential

Excerpt from Book

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 happy to eat and get fat--but I never could see a solution for it and so I kept on getting fatter." Like Bruch''s fine- boned girl, those of us who are overweight or obese will spend much of our lives trying to eat less, or at least eat not too much. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail, but the fight goes on. For some, like Bruch''s patients, the battle begins in childhood. For others, it starts in college with the freshman twenty, that cushion of fat that appears around waist and hips while spending the first year away from home. Still others begin to realize in their thirties or forties that being lean is no longer the effortless achievement it once was. Should we be fatter than the medical authorities would prefer, and should we visit a doctor for any reason, that doctor is likely to suggest more or less forcefully that we do something about it. Obesity and overweight, so we''ll be told, are associated with an increased risk of virtually every chronic disease that ails us--heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, dementia, asthma. We''ll be instructed to exercise regularly, to diet, to eat less, as though the thought of doing so, the desire to do so, would never otherwise have crossed our minds. "More than in any other illness," as Bruch said about obesity, "the physician is called upon only to do a special trick, to make the patient do something--stop eating-- after it has already been proved that he cannot do it." The physicians of Bruch''s era weren''t thoughtless, and the doctors of today are not, either. They merely have a flawed belief system--a paradigm--that stipulates that the reason we get fat is clear and incontrovertible, as is the cure. We get fat, our physicians tell us, because we eat too much and/or move too little, and so the cure is to do the opposite. If nothing else, we should eat "not too much," as Michael Pollan famously prescribes in his best-selling book In Defense of Food , and this will suffice. At least we won''t get fatter still. This is what Bruch described in 1957 as the "prevalent American attitude that the problem [of obesity] is simply one of eating more than the body needs," and now it''s the prevalent attitude worldwide. We can call this the "calories- in/ calories- out" or the "overeating" paradigm of excess fat--the "energy balance" paradigm, if we want to get technical. "The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight," as the World Health Organization says, "is an energy imbalance between calories consumed on one hand, and calories expended on the other hand." We get fat when we take in more energy than we expend (a positive energy balance, in the scientific terminology), and we get lean when we expend more than we take in (a negative energy balance). Food is energy, and we measure that energy in the form of calories. So, if we take in more calories than we expend, we get fatter. If we take in fewer calories, we get leaner. This way of thinking about our weight is so compelling and so pervasive that it is virtually impossible nowadays not to believe it. Even if we have plenty of evidence to the contrary--no matter how much of our lives we''ve spent consciously trying to eat less and exercise more without success--it''s more likely that we''ll question our own judgment and our own willpower than we will this notion that our adiposity is determined by how many calories we consume and expend. My favorite example of this thinking came from a wellrespected exercise physiologist, a co- author of a set of physical-activity and health guidelines that were published in August 2007 by the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine. This fellow told me that he personally had been "short, fat, and bald" when he first took up distance running in the 1970s, and now he was in his late sixties and was "short, fatter , and bald." In the intervening years, he said, he had gained thirty-odd pounds and run maybe eighty thousand miles--the equivalent, more or less, of running three times around the Earth (at the equator). He believed that there was a limit to how much exercise could help him maintain his weight, but he also believed he would be fatter still if he hadn''t been running. When I asked him whether he really thought he might be leaner had he run even more, maybe run four times around the planet instead of three, he said, "I don''t see how I could have been more active. I had no time to do more. But if I could have gone out over the last couple of decades for two to three hours a day, maybe I would not have gained this weight." And the point is that maybe he would have anyway, but he just couldn''t wrap his head around that possibility. As sociologists of science would say, he was trapped in a paradigm. Over the years, this calories- in/ calories- out paradigm of excess fat has proved to be remarkably resistant to any evidence to the contrary. Imagine a murder trial in which one credible witness after another takes the stand and testifies that the suspect was elsewhere at the time of the killing and so had an airtight alibi, and yet the jurors keep insisting that the defendant is guilty, because that''s what they believed when the trial began. Consider the obesity epidemic. Here we are as a population getting fatter and fatter. Fifty years ago, one in every eight or nine Americans would have been officially considered obese, and today it''s one in every three. Two in three are now considered overweight, which means they''re carrying around more weight than the public- health authorities deem to be healthy. Children are fatter, adolescents are fatter, even newborn babies are emerging from the womb fatter. Throughout the decades of this obesity epidemic, the calories-in/ calories-out, energy-balance notion has held sway, and so the health officials assume that either we''re not paying attention to what they''ve been telling us--eat less and exercise more--or we just can''t help ourselves. Malcolm Gladwell discussed this paradox in The New Yorker in 1998. "We have been told that we must not take in more calories than we burn, that we cannot lose weight if we don''t exercise consi

Details ISBN0307474259 Author Gary Taubes Short Title WHY WE GET FAT Series Vintage Language English ISBN-10 0307474259 ISBN-13 9780307474254 Media Book Format Paperback Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Imprint Anchor Books DEWEY 613.712 UK Release Date 2011-12-27 Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-12-27 AU Release Date 2011-12-27 NZ Release Date 2011-12-27 US Release Date 2011-12-27 Subtitle And What to Do About It Illustrator Gustaf Tenggren Birth 1930 Affiliation University of Wisconsin-Madison Position Former senior instructor and associate head, English (deceased) Qualifications PhD Pages 288 Publisher Random House USA Inc Illustrations 20 PHOTOS AND LINE DRAWINGS Audience General We've got this

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