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Title: Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser ISBN: 0-618-16472-3 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.82 (62 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A remarkable, sober-minded book--and I am a fatty
Comment: I was prepared to hate this writer, given the vitriol on this site. But once I read the book, I realized he was right: it's one thing for fact acceptance people like myself to want NOT to be discriminated against, it's quite another to deny a legitimate medical and public health problem in order to score sophomoric debating points--as if it is going to help the fat by denying clearly established medical issues. Mr C--not everyone in the fat acceptance movement is in denial. Many of us thank you for telling it straight--WE can take it.
Rating: 2
Summary: [modified 25 Jan 03]
Comment: [text 925 words]
With the talent for writing that gets him published in USA Today, Harper's Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, Critser has produced an easy-to-read, well-edited, and highly entertaining expose of American fattening. A number of unsurprising trends are highlighted and their origins uncovered, such as increasing portion sizes at fast food chains and in soft drinks; the pollution of school cafeterias by big junk food corporations; and the use of high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten and thicken almost everything. TV and other food ads aimed at children come in for their fair share of blame as well.
One of Critser's more glaring blunders, even if by omission, shared by The American Diabetes Association, which is cited, is that simple sugars do all the damage leading to type 2 diabetes and obesity. The notion of glycemic index (GI), now >80 years old, never entered Critser's mind. The GI is measured in humans by checking blood glucose levels after eating. The GI of a food shows the % glucose levels rise compared with the same weight of glucose (GI = 100). One of the things that creates high (bad) insulin levels is high blood glucose levels. Since all the common complex carbohydrates (starches) in foods are polymers of glucose, and some of them are metabolized very rapidly into glucose, and we eat more of them by weight, the contribution of wheat, corn, potato and other forms of high-GI starches to poor health is greater than that of many of the the simple sugars. The so-called low-carb diets must be low GI diets to be effective, and they really are for weight loss, and the prevention of type 2 diabetes (Bernstein 1997, Ottoboni 2002).
This relates to the next blunder claiming that the Atkins, Sears, Eades diets do damage because of Critser's false representation that unlimited calories are recommended or allowed. This was accompanied by the blunder that all carbohydrates were eliminated, including the ones with very low GI from fruits and vegetables. As it happens, clinical trials have shown that low GI diets are the only ones most people can maintain. The usual sensible recommendation is for 40% calories from low-GI carbohydrates, 30% from fats, and 30% from proteins (Eades 2000, McGee 2001, Ottoboni 2002).
On the same plane in blunderland, Critser actually succumbed to the biggest misinformation in the history of medicine: that eating saturated fat and cholesterol causes obesity or clogged arteries or heart disease (p15,140). This nonsense originated with a campaign by the American Heart Association (AHA) begun in 1961, and its anti-cholesterol, pro-polyunsaturated fat campaign, which peaked in the 1980s. Nothing in the Framingham, MRFIT, or any other honest study actually supports this anti-fat stand, despite the politically correct summaries of many of the studies. (Moore 1989, Smith 1991, Fehily 1993, Fraser 1997, Tunstall-Pedoe 1997, Eades 2000, Enig 2000, Kauffman 2000, Kauffman 2001, McCully 2000, McGee 2001, Ottoboni 2002, Ravnskov 2000). The occasional success of people on the Pritikin and Ornish diets may be due to lower total calories or avoidance of bad fat. Also, many other lifestyle changes were made in addition to diet. Fat makes the stomach empty more slowly, thus keeping the blood glucose concentrations lower (Enig 2000).
Speaking of bad fat, Critser's dump on palm oil (p13-19) is totally unfounded based on actual cohort studies (Wood 1993, Enig 2000). To "compound the felony" Critser failed to warn about the really bad fats, namely the omega-6 fatty acids among the polyunsaturated fats such as soybean, corn, safflower and sunflower oil (Wood 1993, Enig 2000, Vos 2003), nor was there much on eating the good omega-3 fats (Vos 2003). Not a word about avoiding trans fats, as though this were still in doubt (Willett 1993, Oomen 2001). Even the AHA began to warn about trans fats in 2002. Among the saturated fats, the medium-chain ones are lower in calories (8 kcal/g) than the unsaturated ones (9 kcal/g), and the 18-carbon stearic acid in cocoa butter and tallow are so indigestible that these fats provide only 5.5 and 7.5 kcal/g (Finley 1994).
"When new immigrants were asked whether rest was more important or better for health than exercise, a large portion 'always says yes'. The attitude was doubly corrosive..." (p70-71). Critser seems not to be able to imagine that most new immigrants do hard manual labor in their employment, and they are correct to choose rest. Critser's unquenchable recommendations for exercise have some merit (Bernstein 1997), but the only prospective, randomized study of exercise after heart attack found no effect of exercise on all-cause death and a slight benefit of exercise on cardio-vascular mortality for the first few years, disappearing at 5 years (Dorn 1999).
While Critser was correct to pick on Reuben Andres, MD, for certain reasons, Critser fell for the nonsense that being leaner is better and leads to longer life. Granted there was confounding, but one of the best studies found that in both men and women the relation between weight or body mass index (BMI) and heart deaths or all-cause deaths was U-shaped, not inverse; that is, those of middle weight and middle BMI lasted the longest (Tunstall-Pedoe 1997). And so it was also with energy intake (Fehily 1993, Tunstall-Pedoe 1997). Smoking was indeed very bad for lifespan.
If the reforms Critser recommends were implemented, based on only the problems he described, my guess is that about 1/3 of the obesity problem in the US would disappear, thus a rating of 2 stars.
For complete references cited e-mail me.
Rating: 2
Summary: Pseudo-science with a grain of truth
Comment: Welcome, Savage Love readers, to the battlegrounds concerning this overpraised book.
Mr. Critser has one good, solid point in Fat Land: American society has largely decided that it is bad form to shame someone for obesity. This much I'll give him, especially when there are stores like Torrid, selling skimpy clothing that would look too revealing on girls with svelte builds.
But when he gets into his bizarre political diatribes about high-fructose corn syrup, palm oil and the Nixon administration, Critser loses me. He's just plain wrong about corn syrup's being a somehow magically diabolical chemical that forces your body to pack on extra fat. That's junk straight out of the fad diet playbook, and any nutritionist knows it. Feed rats 500 calories of pure corn syrup, lard or whey protein, and they're going to gain the same amount of weight. These discussions are so ignorant that it bores me even to entertain them.
Look, the American obesity problem is easy to figure out:
1. Animals biologically crave the basics: sugar, starch, protein and fat, in as concentrated a form as possible. That's pretty much what you get in a hamburger and a soda. Pure starch (the bun), pure protein and fat (the patty), and pure sugar (the drink). No shock there that this meal is popular. It's hard-wired into us to desire our food in such an efficient delivery system. And it's only been in the past 50 years or so that it's been feasible to get meals like this cheaply.
2. The poor are fatter than the rich because the rich are generally there because of their superior impulse control. Does it surprise anyone that a person who's smart enough to figure out how compound interest works is also probably smart enough not to stuff his guts with chili-cheese burritos and Whoppers every day?
3. Critser's point: People don't point and laugh at gigantic people openly. And when someone does taunt an obese person, the taunter is generally chastised sternly. Mr. Critser loves the French, but he has apparently not spent much time in a European or South American culture. There is an enormous amount of sexism implicit in shaming the fat. It is quite common to see Euro/Latin men, especially older ones, who would qualify as obese. Women are not allowed to get fat, however, as sexual attractiveness is FAR AND AWAY more important a barometer of that woman's worth in a European/Latin country than it is here. I have fat female friends who live in Europe and are verbally attacked every single day they venture out on the streets in Lyon, Bern or even Rome.
I know we just LOVE to blame a whitey conspiracy for everything negative that happens to poor minority citizens, but you literally cannot get more deranged than to try to blame their food choices on The Man. The poor eat like pigs for the same reason they burn through their cash like children: They generally have little impulse control, and our public schools teach sensitivity to "diversity" rather than real-life skills.
Try again, Mr. C.
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