Fat : Fighting the Obesity Epidemic [Hardcover]

Robert Pool (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195118537 | ISBN-13: 978-0195118537 | Publication Date: February 15, 2001 | Edition: 1

When the leptin gene was discovered in 1994, news articles predicted that there might soon be an easy, pharmaceutical solution to the growing public health crisis of obesity. Yet this scientific breakthrough merely proved once again how difficult the fight against fat really is. Despite the many appetite-suppressants, diet pills, and weight-loss programs available today, approximately 30 percent of Americans are obese. And that number is expanding rapidly.
Fat is the engaging story of the scientific quest to understand and control body weight. Covering the entire twentieth century, Robert Pool chronicles the evolving blame-game for fat--from being a result of undisciplined behavior to subconscious conflicts, physiological disease, and environmental excess. Readers in today's weight-conscious society will be surprised to learn that being overweight was actually encouraged by doctors and popular health magazines up until the 1930s, when the health risks associated with being overweight were publicly recognized. Thus began decades of research and experiments that subsequently explained appetite, metabolism, and the development of fat cells. Pool effectively reanimates the colorful characters, curious experiments, brilliant insights and wrong turns that led to contemporary scientific understanding of America's epidemic. While he acknowledges the advances in the pharmacological fight against flab, he underscores that the real problem of obesity is not losing the weight but keeping it off. Drugs offer a quick fix, but they aren't the ultimate answer. American society must remedy the unhealthy daily environments of its cities and towns, and those who have struggled with their weight and have experienced the "yo-yo" cycle of dieting must understand the underlying science of body weight that makes their struggle more than a question of willpower.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic, by science writer Robert Pool, is the story of obesity research: the quest to find out why people get fat, why certain people are more likely to gain weight than others, why it's so difficult to lose weight, how the body's weight-regulating system works, how genes and environment interact to produce obesity, and why dieters regain their weight more than 90 percent of the time.

Pool presents story after story about the obesity scientists and their research, along with the evolution of social attitudes about corpulence. Some of the anecdotes are entertaining, such as the description of a 1911 experiment where a researcher inflated a condom in his belly, attached to a tube that went through his esophagus and out his mouth, to measure stomach contractions during hunger. Others may make you shudder, such as the story of 515-pound J.W., who lost weight in a hospital on a 600- to 800-calorie liquid diet 25 times, always rebounding afterwards to his previous weight.

Pool favors the leptin gene as a major clue to the mystery of obesity and treats it with more scientific detail than any other topic. Leptin, Pool explains, "regulates appetite and metabolism to keep the body at a stable, preferred weight." The brains of people with a mutation that results in deficient leptin production perceive their bodies as perpetually starving--even though they may be 50 or 100 pounds overweight.

Fat isn't a quick read and it won't tell you how to lose weight. It will appeal primarily to sociologists and those interested in the science of obesity. If that's you, you'll find this book to be a treasure trove of information. --Joan Price

From Publishers Weekly

In a well-paced narrative, science writer Pool (Beyond Engineering; Eve's Rib) traces the history of obesity in Western society and the ups and downs of medical science's ability to determine what causes some people to gain a considerable amount of weight and why it is so difficult to lose--and keep off--those extra pounds. For the longest time, both doctors and ordinary people have believed that losing and maintaining a lower weight were matters of personal responsibility--a very American perspective, the author avers. Certainly, if people change their eating habits and lifestyle, and are motivated, they can lose weight, but this formula of mind over matter is not universally successful. Moreover, despite recent breakthroughs in medical research, more and more Americans continue to become obese. The solution, argues the author, is that American doctors and nonprofessionals must change their beliefs about obesity: we must regard it not as an individual problem to be solved through willpower, but as a disease and, more specifically, a social disease "caused by a sick environment"--the fast-food and snacking environment--"to which some of us are more susceptible than others." Our bodies, which have changed little since our hunter-gatherer days, have not adapted well to our advanced, convenient, more sedentary Western lifestyle. Pool's aim here is to alert people to what he calls a rising epidemic. His arguments are cogent and convincing, but the reader may be disappointed to learn that Pool doesn't offer any suggestions to how we may be able to promote such widespread change. (Jan.)Forecast: A recent series of articles on obesity in the New York Times indicates the hunger (so to speak) that exists for information on weight loss; still, this book is mostly for the minority of readers who are looking not just for advice on how to lose weight but for a broader reflection on the problem.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (February 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195118537
• ISBN-13: 978-0195118537
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,562,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scientific Summary of Much of What We Know About Obesity, February 24, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fat : Fighting the Obesity Epidemic (Hardcover)

This book is not a diet book, nor a guide to losing weight. It is a serious popular summary of the scientific studies into how people become overweight. On the other hand, if you are overweight and want to be lighter or want to learn more about the causes of obesity, this book is very well done and will help you overcome important misconceptions.

There is more that we do not know about obesity than we do know. Despite this, obesity is a rapidly increasing problem in the United States. From 1991 to 1998, the U.S. population that is obese (more than 30 percent overweight) grew from 12 percent to 18 percent. Studies suggest that this trend, as alarming as it is, hides the severity of the problem, because many people understate their weight in surveys.

Weight is affected by environment, genes, and behavior. Little is known about how the three interact with each other. The author argues that the current growth in obesity mainly relates to an environment that is getting less and less healthy rather than some sudden negative change in genetic make-up or intentional behavior. He also does not suggest any specific solutions.

Many people do not understand that the process of losing weight often causes the body to burn fewer calories. So you have to feel like you are literally starving to death to lose weight past a certain point. That point is your "set point" and we each have a different one. For many overweight people, that set point is well above the weight that the physicians encourage. So many overweight people aren't "indulging" themselves more than thinner people, they just have a different body chemistry. So remove those value judgments when you see overweight people. Give them a hug instead.

The other flaw in thinking about weight is that that being overweight is the cause of many diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Recent research suggests that the connections are not always linear. Being overweight is sometimes a symptom of some other problem, rather than the cause of the disease.

The main weakness of this book is that it does not include the work described in Sugarbusters! and Live Right for Your Type that suggest a role for the mix of foods you eat as affecting your weight level. Mix of foods is referenced, but mostly in the context of behavioral treatments for overweight that emphasize creating aversions for certain foods.

Hearing about how scientists have worked on this problem makes me feel pretty discouraged. My suggestion is that only obese scientists work on overcoming obesity. At least they will have a bodily experience as a reference point. In picture after picture in this book, the pioneers of obesity research are displayed as extremely trim individuals.

After you read this book, I suggest you think about the problems of discrimination that obese people face. How can those barriers be lowered? How can the emotional pain of being obese be reduced? I suspect that the harm in these two areas is even greater than the health harm associated with obesity. That's the real epidemic!

Live comfortably with your body!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good summary of research on obesity, November 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fat : Fighting the Obesity Epidemic (Hardcover)

Robert Pool's Fat: Fighting the Obsesity Epidemic is a very accessible review of research on obesity. He covers the history of obesity research and explains how various research studies have influenced attitudes towards obesity and how to treat it. Contrary to what another review states, this book is not based on the premise that leptin is the cause of obesity. This was merely an illustration of current research that Pool uses to open the book.

Fat is not a guide to weight loss for individuals. The research is very discouraging for anyone currently obese -- most studies show that weight can be lost, but no one knows how to help people keep it off. However, Pool discusses some of the research that investigates why people cannot keep off weight they lose, including studies demonstrating that those who lose wait not only have slightly slower metabolisms, but they also burn fewer calories through fidgeting, etc.

Pool also discusses obesity from a public health perspective. Given that losing weight and keeping it off is so difficult once one becomes obese, he argues that some effort should be paid to keeping the population from becoming obese in the first place. In this discussion, he looks at studies examining when and how various populations became obese. Such studies -- like that of the obesity difference between Pima groups in the US and Mexico -- provide clues for how the current environment could be modified to prevent some obesity.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong research, weak conclusion, April 26, 2001

By 

B. Roberts (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fat : Fighting the Obesity Epidemic (Hardcover)

The bottom line of Mr. Pool's book is that humanity is growing fat thanks to a plague of plenty. Fatty food is readily available and labor-saving devices are everywhere. Those who have the capacity to become fat are much more likely to do so today than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. His suggested solution incorporates findings of the National Weight Control Registry. The "successful losers" of the Registry -- those who have averaged a 67 pound loss sustained for at least five years -- have shielded themselves from society's fat-promoting environment by creating, in Pool's words, "mini-environments" free of easy calories and endless invitations to consume. He asks us to consider whether the changes embodied by mini-environments could be woven into the general social fabric, thus enabling those who might otherwise grow heavy to benefit from the discoveries of the successful losers.

Seems reasonable enough.

Reasonable, that is, until you visit a medical library and read what these successful losers are actually doing. They are consuming an average of 850 to 1990 calories daily and burning off, through exercise, an average of 400 to 500 of those calories, seven days a week. Which means these folks are living on anywhere from 450 to 1500 calories a day and burning off the balance with exercise that is the equivalent of a daily 4 mile walk. Given the intensity of this regimen, it's not too surprising that the total enrollment of the Registry is only a few thousand; a few thousand out of a population of hundreds of millions. Whatever else the successful losers are, they are rare.

Though Pool admits that the "eat less, exercise more" programs have not worked, the National Weight Control Registry findings seem to boil down to "eat way less, exercise way more." It is difficult to imagine how society could be transformed to help the potentially overweight to eat way less and exercise way more without hopelessly inconveniencing and/or starving those for whom weight will never be a problem. This difficulty provides the foundation for Pool's call to action. Are we up to the challenge of reshaping our environments to fit us or will we continue to allow the environments we have created to deform us? While this is an admittedly tough call, I think it's a safe bet that we'll continue to allow the environments we've created to deform us.