Fumento is at his best debunking nonsense, and his chapters on diet gimmicks and "Big Fat Myths" are thorough, informative, and entertaining. He refutes the notion, promoted by government-required labeling as well as diet gurus and food manufacturers, that limiting fat is the key to losing weight. It's true that one gram of fat has more calories than one gram of carbohydrate or protein, so reducing your fat intake may reduce your total caloric intake, thereby helping you lose weight. But calories are the bottom line: If you eat virtually no fat but take in more calories than you burn, you will gain weight, no matter what Susan (Stop the Insanity!) Powter says. Furthermore, Fumento reports, there is no evidence that restricting fat to 30 percent of your calories--a goal urged by the federal government--will have any effect on your risk of heart disease.
Fumento argues that the 30 percent formula and the general fixation on fat distract people from the fundamental importance of total calories. "The government doesn't say how many calories the fat should be 30 percent of," he notes. "Thus, some people, bizarrely enough, have taken this to mean it's OK to eat more calories just in order to reduce the percentage from fat." One diet book author "says it's OK to order a fatty (and high-calorie) sandwich or side order at a fast-food restaurant so long as you drink enough orange juice along with it." Similarly, "low-fat" foods may have just as many or nearly as many calories as the regular versions. Even when they are significantly lower in calories, the advantage may be erased by people's tendency to eat more than they otherwise would. Writes Fumento, "Low-fat and no-fat foods are a Siren call to gluttony."
Fumento debunks easy excuses as well as easy solutions. He discredits the notion that your "setpoint"--the weight where your body "wants" to stay--is an insurmountable barrier. While your metabolism does tend to adjust over the short term to maintain a given weight, he says, the fact that formerly slim people get fat to begin with shows that behavior can overcome this tendency. He notes that the setpoint excuse is pushed by "fat acceptance" advocates who had to defeat their own setpoint again and again to reach their enormous girth. These activists assert that losing weight is not only futile but harmful, that the risks of obesity are outweighed by the risks of "yo-yo" dieting. Fumento shows there is little basis for this claim.
Fumento also refutes the idea that your weight is determined by your genes. Whatever the role of heredity, he says, it clearly cannot explain the dramatic increases in obesity we've seen in recent decades. "There are genetic differences, but they aren't things that can't be overcome by eating right and getting exercise," one researcher tells him. "A lot of my patients say they're exercising regularly and eating very little, and I look them square in the face and tell them they're violating the laws of physics."
Fat activists like to cite studies in which self-reports indicate that obese people don't eat more than thin people. But as Fumento notes, what these studies really reveal is one of epidemiology's dirty little secrets: Subjects lie. To be more charitable, their recall is skewed in a direction that reflects favorably on them. The more unhealthy their habits, the greater their tendency to misremember.
On the constructive side, Fumento offers sound but unsurprising advice for chubby people who want to slim down and are prepared to face reality: Lose weight gradually; exercise regularly; make changes in your lifestyle you can stick to in the long run; fill up on foods rich in fiber; cut out needlessly caloric beverages; learn to distinguish true hunger from mere appetite; watch portion sizes and don't habitually clean your plate; don't rely on food for emotional support. He draws effectively on his own experience to illustrate the pitfalls of weight loss and motivate the discouraged.
The downside of Fumento's personal stake in this topic is that he sometimes displays the zeal of a convert, with rhetoric reminiscent of the anti-smoking movement: "Overeating kills....most fat people desperately do not want to be fat....obesity is a socially contagious disease." He decries "the overveneration of personal autonomy" and criticizes those who "acknowledge obesity as a personal health problem but deny its importance nationally, thereby relegating it to a simple matter of choice and assumption of the risk."
This sort of talk makes me a little nervous. It's not that Fumento himself advocates much of a role for government in "the battle against obesity." He explicitly rejects the idea of imposing special taxes on "unhealthy" foods, and I doubt he would endorse, say, a ban on fast-food commercials. The specific policy changes he does recommend are unobjectionable: scrapping the "calories from fat" and "total fat" labeling requirements, revising official dietary recommendations, improving nutritional instruction in public schools.
But Fumento is a bit too comfortable with the puritans at CSPI and with public-health types like Yale obesity maven Kelly Brownell, who advocates better eating through taxation and compares Ronald McDonald to Joe Camel. More to the point, paternalists will be a bit too comfortable with this book, and they will be perfectly happy to take Fumento's arguments further than he does. By marking out an area--overeating and underexercising--where people's behavior is presumptively irrational, he undermines the utilitarian case for individual freedom.
Richard Klein recognizes the busybody implications of the imperative to be thin. "Big brother lies at the end of the dreams of some of those who want us, at all cost, to be healthy, slim, and beautiful," he writes. A professor of French at Cornell, Klein is best known for his 1993 book Cigarettes Are Sublime, which sought to explain the cigarette's appeal to an increasingly tobaccophobic society. He attempts something similar in Eat Fat, a 1996 book that will be out in paperback this year. Klein reminds us that fat, like tobacco, was not always hated. At various times in history, plumpness was considered fashionable and desirable, a sign of affluence and beauty. Fat things were rich, fertile, abundant, nourishing.
Now that thinness is the ideal, we are all getting fat. "But rather than regret this trend, as many with alarm so often do," Klein writes, "we ought to consider that what is actually happening might just have some good reason to happen. Perhaps we are all supposed to be getting fatter, since that's what we're doing anyway, despite all our efforts to the contrary....But instead of our celebrating what we are in fact becoming, the shrill voice of skinny is heard across the land, magnified by the chorus of doctors, nutritionists, beauticians, and insurers of all kinds who deplore what we already despise."
The "shrill voice of skinny" comes through clearly in The Fat of the Land, and Eat Fat is a useful supplement, offering a perspective that is missing from Fumento's book. When Klein rhapsodizes about a fat-laden breakfast at an Ithaca diner or cognac-soaked prunes stuffed with foie gras, he is making a case for pleasure as a value to be weighed against the benefits of always watching what you eat.
Concerning Kelly Brownell's policy proposals, he writes, "Nowhere in all this talk of taxing fat food do we hear a single good word for the blessing of chocolate, the balm of chicken soup, or the comfort of a nicely schmeared bagel." Though Klein quit smoking while writing Cigarettes Are Sublime, he apparently does not plan to slim down anytime soon.
By reminding us that standards of beauty have changed dramatically over the years, ranging from Rubens's zaftig nudes to the emaciated women in today's clothing and perfume ads, Klein calls our attention to the arbitrary dictates of fashion that drive so many to despair. By focusing on our paradoxical tendency to get fatter and fatter as our models get thinner and thinner, he suggests some troubling psychological truths. And by wondering how dangerous a few extra pounds really are, he raises a legitimate question for those who insist that we stick to our recommended weight range.
Too often, however, Klein's skepticism lapses into dismissiveness or self-delusion. While he concedes that obesity can seriously threaten one's health (as he witnessed in the case of his own mother), he insinuates that the evidence is not what it's cracked up to be. "The medical risk of obesity, this book aims to suggest, has been severely overstated," he says in the preface, but he never substantiates that claim. And while Klein, like Fumento, decries the low-fat/no-fat fallacy ("It's not eating fat that makes you fat," he says, "it's eating"), he repeats several of the fat-acceptance myths that Fumento so ably deconstructs, including the futility of losing weight, the hazards of yo-yo dieting, and the idea that many people are fat because of slow metabolisms, not because they eat too much. So if Eat Fat is an antidote to The Fat of the Land, the reverse is also true.
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It's not always about eating less, it's about eating sensibly, at the right time and in the right way. Increasing your daily exercise will contribute to incresead weight loss and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
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