The World is Fat The Fads Trends Policies and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race
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The World is Fat The Fads Trends Policies and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race
Fast Food Nation meets The World Is Flat in this eye-opening look at the obesity epidemic.
Today, the planet’s 1.3 billion overweight people by far outnumber the 700 million who are undernourished. This figure would have seemed ludicrous just fifty years ago, when hunger was the world’s most pressing nutritional problem.
In The World Is Fat, Barry Popkin argues that the fattening of the human race is not simply about that next cheeseburger; rather, it is a result of an unprecedented collision of human biology with trends in technology, globalization, government policy, and the food industry that are changing how we eat and how we live.
Popkin, whose expertise in both nutrition and economics makes him uniquely qualified to write this book, compares our lifestyles today with those of half a century ago through the stories of five families living in the United States, Mexico, and India. He shows how increasing access to media and exposure to advertising, a powerful food industry, the rise of Wal-Mart like shopping centers, and a dramatic decline in physical activity are clashing with millions of years of human evolution, creating a world of overweight people with debilitating health problems such as diabetes. Ultimately, Popkin contends that widespread obesity is less a result of poor individual dietary choices than about a hi-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our everyday lives.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars A well written essay on the obesity epidemic
The name Barry Popkin carries some real clout in the nutrition/obesity research world, so I was excited to read his opinions and thoughts, and I cruised through this book in one night. The author starts out with the story of his life growing up in the 50’s and the lives of a few other families in India and China, and he returns to them throughout the book. Although I don’t feel that the individual stories make a convincing argument for why the world is fat, they do make the book immensely enjoyable and extremely easy to relate to.
What does make a convincing argument is the well-researched data that peppers this book, pointing the finger firmly at a one-two-three punch of the sudden drop in activity in our lives, the over-abundance of nutritionally void foods and the governmental/corporate intervention into our eating habits. While not a new theory, it is a new take that is a pleasure to read.
Where this book falls short is that the author doesn’t really take the story to a conclusion. He touches on why we are fat but never really reaches an answer, touches on what obesity does to us but never really drives the point home, and touches on what we can do about it without ever really laying down any firm resolution. I would have liked to see less conjecture about liquid calories and more facts about the changes in our world. I found myself leaving the book with more questions than I started with.
The book clocks in at a light 170 pages of meat in a large font, and as such, it makes a great introduction, but not a great answer, to a very serious question.
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