The Hungry Gene The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin
Americans spend $33 billion annually on diet and exercise programs, yet we are fatter than ever — and it’s killing us. According to a recent Surgeon General’s report, more than 60 percent of Americans are overweight, including a growing number of children, all of whom face such increased, potentially life-threatening health risks as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. The Hungry Gene takes an unflinching look at the spreading obesity pandemic, guiding readers through the ongoing quest to unravel the genetic and behavioral basis of one of the most vexing scientific mysteries of our time. Acclaimed science journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell goes to the front lines of the struggle against fat — from the quiet facility in Maine where the first superobese mice were bred more than thirty years ago, to Rockefeller University in New York where scientists worked around the clock to isolate the gene that causes obesity. Along the way Shell looks at how medicine is dealing with the fat crisis with radical and controversial surgical techniques, what the incidence of mordant obesity among native islanders in Micronesia tells us about its evolutionary roots, and how drug companies are racing to create a pill to cure this “Trillion Dollar Disease.” She also takes aim at the increasingly obesity-enabling culture that lies behind the crisis — from the expanding suburban sprawl that has fostered America’s car-centered sedentary lifestyle to the fast-food marketers who prey on the jammed schedules of today’s two-income families. Weaving science, history, and personal stories, the narrative builds to a powerful conclusion that reveals how we can beat the obesity pandemic before it beats us. Gripping and provocative, The Hungry Gene is the unsettling saga of how the world got fat — and what we can do about it. “An indefatigable reporter with a novelist’s sense of character and drama …” — John Horgan, author of The End of Science
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars No Hysterics, Please, We’re All Bozos on This Bus
The author somehow manages to remain calm while revealing how certain sorry segments of the science community distort the facts for money. However she becomes completely hysterical over fast food. Since when did McDonalds claim to be an impartial caretaker of anybody’s health?
Up until the end this book is an interesting series of revelations.
3 Stars Not bad, but I’m still a little hungry…
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.
3 Stars Obesity Marketeers
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.
5 Stars Enlightening and Comprehensive
If you enjoyed Jungle or Fast Food Nation, and/or are a nutrition/health enthusiast, this book is a must-read. It is fascinating, well-paced, reasonably comprehensive and enlightening about the history of obesity research and the current state. It balances scientific biographic accounts with social events/scenarios. Should help people show more sympathy towards larger people!
3 Stars Phat start…thin finish
Keeping the food theme alive, I’ll start by way of analogy…
Have you ever dined at a fine restaurant, had a well planned, beautifully executed and thought provoking meal, only to have the entire experience scuttled by a ho-hum dessert and a burnt cup of coffee? Such was my encounter with The Hungry Gene.
Author Ellen Shell, a consistent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, is among the top science writers in the United States today and she adroitly demonstrates her literary and research skills in every piece she creates. This book is no exception as she sets the stage with great finesse and takes us through a brief monograph of the philosophy and treatment of obesity from ancient history to the mid twentieth century. She then moves to the early theories of genetics and obesity and on to the core of her book, the absolutely riveting story (full of juicy back-stabbing details and deal making) of Dr. Jeffrey Friedman and his research team’s obsessive search for the magic genetic bullet to cure obesity, and the resulting avarice of the pharmaceutical industry in trying to procure and apply the research.
Shell then elaborates on the genetic ties to obesity through a chapter dedicated to the Kosrae people (an indigenous Micronesian population brought to obesity by the Westernization of their foodways) and a chapter concerning pediatric and adolescent obesity illustrated through the study of children conceived and born during the Nazi siege of Holland of 1944-45 and additional prenatal research performed by Dr. David Barker, a Southampton, UK based epidemiologist. These studies are sited in support of the strong correlation between a pregnant mother’s food intake and a child’s pre-disposition towards obesity.
It’s at this point the waiter pulls up the rather Spartan dessert cart featuring a tired looking cheesecake, a lonely slice of apple pie and coffee made fresh…this morning. Because in what reads like stream of consciousness, Shell tries to use childhood obesity as a bridge to the final chapters which are essentially a political harangue of the food industry and food marketing. Her points for the most part are well taken and quite valid, but they seem out of context for the case she was building previously on scientific and empirical evidence. Also there are several authors who frankly wear the mantle of angry reformer better than she: Greg Critser’s, “Fat Land”, Marion Nestle’s, “Food Politics” and Eric Shlosser’s, “Fast Food Nation” are infinitely better articulated and have more compelling arguments condemning the big business of food. There’s a telling line in Shell’s Acknowledgements section: “Current Atlantic Monthly editor Mike Kelly not only ran excerpts of this book in the magazine, but suggested that I direct at least some attention to what he called the ‘marketing of obesity’ - a brilliant stroke”. That’s exactly what the conclusion of this book feels like - a well intentioned afterthought encouraged by an editor.
For me, perhaps the greatest irony to be savored from the swelling (excuse the back to back puns) number of publications concerning the weight problem and obesity pandemic, is that even after all the scientific, psychological, and sociological pundits have weighed in, we’re still faced with the same admonishments our mothers gave us starting as far back as the Eisenhower administration, namely turn off the television, go play outside, no candy before dinner, don’t eat so fast, and finish your veggies.
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