Download The Hungry Gene: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry ePub

I heard the author speaking on public radio--she was fascinating (I sat in my car listening.) The book is fascinating, too, there is so much in there--the history of dieting and obesity surgery, the race to clone the first obesity gene, the politics of the food and drug industry, even a travelogue of sorts when the author travels to Micronesia, where almost overnight more than three quarters of the adults became obese. There is a chapter on something called prenatal programming that talks about how life in the womb can effect long term health--that was totally new to me (and I work in a medical field.) I read a lot of books on science and health, usually just for the information, but this one is different--the author is a wonderful writer (I'll admit to having read other things she's written, in the Atlantic Monthly and Discover) so the book just flies by. And I learned so much. Excellent read, great information...this one has got it all. I don't usually review books, but this topic is so important I thought I'd let people know...

While one can be grateful and admire the authors' acknowledgement of the marketing of obesity-just how much the obsessive desire of normal weight people to be stick thin body builders viciously escalated today's obesity epidemic is, of course as with all these eat less move more, political books never really examined. To her credit she is more sympathetic than scolding, and acknowledges homo sapiens' stunning ability to survive famine through "famine" metabolism control, (I wish I could regulate my heater so effectively in the winter!) and superior carb storing ability as fat. (If only I could get this kind of return on my bank acct. for such minimal but constant deposits!) The hope based on ignorance of this physiological truth is what the diet industries profits from with it's-hello-eat less! starvation sports drinks and reducing teas. This is the real evil cuplrit here-NOT Fast food! Who was believing that fast food supersized meals were beneficial to your health anyhow? No one, at least in that industry, was preying on false hope and America's moral obsession with thinness and fitness. In that sense "health bars" such as Jamba Juice, where one gulped down thousands of calories of fructose and fat free soy while the other hand slammed one's face with fat free carbs hoping to regain one's compromised modern health is the real problem. The junk food eaters woud've always been part of America's once stable fat percentage, but over looked is what compounded and created the Obesity epidemic one hears about ad nauseum: those miserable, self-loathing healthy eaters adhering tragically to the eat low fat replaced with earth sustaining carbs-move into the gymn self-flagelaters who found themselves more and more exhausted, deprived and self-blaming only to wake up fatter somehow. AT least anorexia had paid off-this was just killing you slowly and making you feel like a corpse in sweats. The majority of said "victims" were not cheating-which is truly heroic and unfathomable in the face of the kind of out of control cravings this way of eating sets you up for. Talk to the Great Generation who starved through the forties and rejoiced at having plenty again, bragging about having enough to even add back the more expensive meats. (This is why I don't buy the class argument! Produce, grains, low fat protein like soy and tuna recommended here for thinness are the cheap food! One has only to make a slight effort to eat these instead of Mc Donalds.) At this point obsesity was stable, appetites were satisfied, blood sugar was under control, and most importantly, the American obesity rate was stable. It is with the new food pryamid, (Any child attending school between the '70s and '90s remembers it.) when loading up on unsatisfying side dishes instead of building blocks stimulated a sort moral deprivation, fat cutting movement. Look at how the charts climb, notice how obesity rates, not to mention diabesity and all the other living deaths, (if not eventual deaths) became as out of control and all consuming as one's blood sugar. IT would be nice to see some acknowledgement of this reality, which could offer hope, since people can't very well give up eating altogether - Rather than chastising those already living like prsion camp laborers to do what they've been desperately trying to do-eat less, move more. I guess the shockingly frustrating trend where we've been eating less and weighing more is just something that will not be acknowledged for a very long time, and I keep hearing about how all of America will have eaten itself to death by then. The Roman empire certainly had a more admirable way of doing itself in, and we're not even enjoying the good stuff.

From the title and abstract, I'd hoped to find an interesting and readable exposition of the known biochemical mechanisms regulating appetite, from the insulin/glucose cycle to protein encodings for hormonal messengers that regulate appetite, and possibly some discussion of stress and crisis-related changes to the body's delicate chemistry.

The first half of the book delivered somewhat on the title's promise, recounting at high-level some of the early genetic research into obesity and identifying key scientific discoveries in the field from the last couple hundred years. The author's accounts of academic in-fighting and jockeying between competing genomics researchers in the early '90's was pretty interesting, and I looked forward to reading about more pieces of the puzzle falling into place as research continued with better and more widely available technology later in the decade.

But at this point, the book took a bit of a turn to discuss the impact of fetal (mal)nutrition on the expressed genome. While also an interesting field of research, I was really wondering where the author was going... unless there's been an invisible and widespread epidemic of starved and/or gorged mothers giving birth over the last 50 years, it's hard to see how the learnings about the role of fetal environment in could be actionable in reversing the alarming trend toward obesity. And then the book left biochemistry behind completely, reprising Schlosser's Fast Food Nation in the space of the last few chapters.

I guess the author meant to construct a single argument along the following lines against obesity/overeating being a behavioral problem: (1) There are genetic factors that (almost) deterministically control eating behavior, whether in mice or humans. (2) It's not completely deterministic, though, because ultimately a genotype interacts with an environment and expresses as a particular phenotype (as proved by the impact of fetal malnutrition), and (3) the environment we've provided in Western developed nations is terrible; it encourages all the wrong outcomes.

Unfortunately, this thread of reasoning is neither particularly cogent nor necessary... if your point is that the proliferation of fast food and sugary soda is causing the obesity epidemic, you really don't need to detail the impact of leptin or CCK on the hypothalamus to explain what's going on. The Hungry Gene ends up reading like two separate books: a brief but interesting introduction to the biochemical nature of appetite, and one on the evils of Big Food. I don't disagree with the author's polemic against McDonald's et al, but it feels a little out of place given the book's title.

This is a spirited investigation of all the genetic and environmental cues that make us fat, and all the paths scientists are hurtling down to prevent it. Ellen Ruppel Shell has written one of those indispensable books that makes you re-think everything you thought you knew about a subject. She covers it all, from obese Paleolithic figurines to contemporary maps of the human genome. "The Hungry Gene" is one of the best books yet written about our national obsession.

I read this in one day. Just fascinating. Similar to (and as good as) Fast Food Nation. This book will be hanging around the Non-fiction Bestseller Lists for months so you may as well read it now and be ahead of the curve.