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.
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.
Why We Get Fat: Diet Trends and Food Policy
A conversation with Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, and Dr. Christopher Gardner, Associate Professor of Medicine and the Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.
Stanford Medicine on YouTube.
Why We Get Fat Quotes
“Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious–obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth–is what makes it so alluring. But it’s misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.
It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world – while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat – but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”