Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

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!

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.

I love how the author puts together all of the factors that led the nation to the poor food choices. No stone left unturned, so to say. He is very detailed in his description of the studies ever performed to determine best and worst lifestyle choices which affect our overall health and he is very detailed when it comes to describing what food additives, such as high fructose corn syrup, do to our bodies. Highly recommend!

While many cumulative factors inducing the ever increasing girth of Americans are noted, the introduction of High Fructose Corn syrup and it's use in nearly every food "made" now is quite compelling. A slice of bread goes from 30cal to 90+ with the inclusion of Corn Syrup as a preservative/sweetener. Hopefully this expose with result in some meaningful public health awareness and policy. The authors swipe at a low carbohydrate diet (Atkins) is ill thought out, and somewhat interesting as one facet of an Atkin's diet is the exclusion of High Fructose corn syrup. While no single factor can explain the prevalence of obesity in America, the infiltration of the food supply by High Fructose Corn syrup is an impressive single suspect. Read your content labels and be mortified! It's the surgeon general's time to act.

it was great to read finally read a book that not only addresses the problems of our food system, but suggests solutions to these problems. As a child i was always overweight, but not obese. I lost the weight and became an athlete by the time i left high school, as a result i have been a student of nutrition ever since. I have always had a sweet tooth and after reading about some of the studies mentioned in this book i decided to try giving up on corn syrup. Since i started this experiment 9 months ago, i am 5 pounds below my normal weight and enjoying and eating more than ever. By simply following many of the principles in this book about avoiding corn syrup and fructose, i have been able to get back to the same weight i competed at and without starvation. Wonderful book. Hopefully america will finally come around and realize the evils of high fructose corn syrup, this book is a start in the right direction.

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.

I read this book a number of years back, lent it out to a fat bird that, after reading it slimmed down but passed it on, rather than returning it.It is really good and very relevant even to today's population. I recently bought it again to revise the facts in it. the book is not a Boffins approach but a fly on the McDonald's wall look at why fast food chains want to stuff more and more of their products down your throat. Meal deals because your embarrassed to order this that and the other off their menu. Drive thru, so you can be a pig in the car. Even bright colors in their venues to stimulate and speed up your digestion. Buy this book it is well worth it.

Having seen a couple of scary documentaries about the obesity epidemic, I was interested to read Critser’s take on what the causes are, who can be blamed, and what can be done.Critser focusses his attention initially to the cultural revolution in the 1970s and 80s which he sees as being the underlying cause of how the huge increase in calories basically got into the human diet – he is open and honest in his blame for government officials who with hindsight put their priorities in the wrong place and turned a blind eye to what would be considered now to be detrimental to society.Critser then explains a little more of the science involved in the human body, what causes calories to stay, and of course the side-effects associated to obesity.Finally he focusses on what can be done now to tackle obesity and highlights some of the problems in society and in particular schools where excuses are being made to avoid tacking the key problems head on.Throughout the book, Critser does not hold back.. he says exactly what he thinks needs to be done and paints a frightening picture for the life expectancy of the next generation of American society.An excellent albeit somewhat frightening read.

I read this book very quickly and thought it was well written. So much information to take in with lots of studies and statistics. But by the last 20 pages I was glad it was over to be honest!I feel that this book is more about the "culture of eating and exercise" more than about nutrition and it still holds on to the (outdated) notion of "saturated fat is bad"! The parts that touched on fructose & sugar was (in my opinion) going in the right direction to explaining the reason why people are getting fatter quick. Would of been nice if there was more on this.Overall I would recommend reading it.

This book is a great read and I agree with the previous 2 reviewers but the thing I found truly brilliant about it, was the psychological effect it had on me. Reading a few pages a day was sufficient to 'nudge' me into starting and continuing to eat healthily, as its message about junk food and similar comes through loud and clear. If someone else can benefit like I have from a book like this, then it's got to be a good thing.

Easy to read and the style raises a smile occasionally, really enjoying this book, covers the subject I was interested in as comparing it to the UK problems of obesity

What this book describes is Americans lost in a wilderness of food outlets while no-one with knowledge and authority dares to tell them, self-indulgent children that they are, that there are still the cardinal sins of gluttony, sloth and greed, and so they are living in a self-made hell of obesity and ill-health. Only the rich, he says, understand that the price of abundance is restraint.Critser is very strong on the politics and economics of food production. Sensibly enough he does not go too deeply into the medical controversies surrounding diet, sticking to the simple, single argument that calories in ought to equal calories out In my opinion, though explains very well how food in the US came to be bastardized through the processing of convenience foods and sold to a public too unaware of real nutritional values to realize they were being fobbed off with poor substitutes, he does not make the distinction emphatically enough between quality and quantity,. It is possible to starve the body of essential nutrients while gorging on chemically altered fake food. If the rich, quoted above, are slim it is not only that they understand that more is not necessarily better, they also understand that a fillet steak from a prime steer is better than any size hamburger made from the minced up remains of 100-odd cows made palatable with "legally permitted flavor enhancers".Critser denigrates publishers who bring out the latest hot, new diet. I agree with him here.. While the medical profession cannot reach consensus people are at the mercy of any unproven theory that strikes their fancy. Nevertheless there is some excellent advice available so it is not helpful to dismiss them all as mostly "pure schlock". The extreme antidote to Fat Land is probably the Paleo Diet (Loren Cordain) which recommends eating on stone age principles - i.e. fresh, unprocessed food limited to what one could in theory hunt, fish or gather on the principle that that is what evolution conditioned us to thrive on. Not a lot of people are going to give up the advantages of civilization for a theoretical ideal, but it is worth keeping in mind when overwhelmed by an abundance of choice.

Der Autor erklärt sehr detailliert, welche verschiedenen Dinge er verantwortlich dafür sieht, dass die amerikanische Bevölkerung so übergewichtig ist wie sie nun mal eben ist.Das macht er sehr gut, doch man kann ihm manchmal schwer folgen, weil seine Kapitel große Kausalketten bilden, die du nicht mehr verstehst, wenn dir ein Teil entgangen ist. Unterkapitel würden helfen, die man aber leider vermissen muss.Aber alles in allem ist es ein sehr interessantes und lehrreiches Buch, das ich nur empfehlen kann!

...vielleicht hätte es jetzt schon eine drastische Veränderung in Sachen Ernährung gegeben! Das Buch ist wirklich sehr gut geschrieben, der Autor hat wahnsinnig gut und detailliert recherchiert und es macht wirklich Spaß zu lesen. Auch (und evtl. sogar GERADE) für Deutschland halte ich dieses Buch für sehr sinnvoll und zukunftsorientiert, denn in Sachen Ernährung streben wir sehr dem schlechten Beispiel der US-Amerikanern nach...mit allen Folgen. Zusammengefasst: LESEN SIE DIESES BUCH! Es werden Ihnen einige Lichter aufgehen und man wird das eigene Ernährungskonzept überdenken.

The book was cheap, but perfectly fine, which surprised me. I am very satisfied with everything, the seller was also nice and polite.

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