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The Hungry Gene: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry Paperback – September 15, 2003

by Ellen Ruppel Shell (Author)

19 customer reviews

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In a rare blend of erudition and entertainment, acclaimed science journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell reveals the secret history and subtle politics behind the explosion of obesity. Shell traces the epidemic's inception in the Ice Age, its rise during the Industrial Revolution, and its growth through the early days of medicine and into modernity. She takes readers to the front lines of the struggle to come to grips with this baffling plague — from a children's food marketing convention, to the cutthroat race to find the obese gene, to a far-flung tropical island, where a horrifying outbreak of obesity has helped unravel the disorder's genetic and evolutionary roots. Offering an unflinching insider's look into the radical and controversial surgical and pharmacological approaches used to combat what drug makers have dubbed the trillion-dollar disease, Shell takes aim at the collusion of industry and government that lies behind the crises and shows conclusively that obesity is not a matter of gluttony or weak will, but of an increasingly greedy culture preying on vulnerable human biology. Gripping and provocative, The Hungry Gene is the unsettling saga of how the world got fat — and what we can do about it.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is remarkable that a book as excellent as The Hungry Gene can be contained in such a siender volume. ... [Shell] examines the history of obesity and suggests what can be done to control it. ... As Shell points out, the obesity pandemic didn't begin the day McDonald's started selling fries."

About the Author

Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and writes for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and other publications. She is associate professor and codirector of the Program in Science Journalism at Boston University.

Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Grove Press; First Trade Paper edition (September 15, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802140335
ISBN-13: 978-0802140333
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 19 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,083,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1416 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Genetics
- #2578 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Anatomy
- #6291 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Nutrition

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An important book with a few problems...

January 29, 2003

Verified Purchase

In the spirit of revealing any biases I might have about the material discussed in this book, I must state that I'm both fat and a fat-acceptance activist. I'm giving this book four stars--albeit grudgingly, because despite my disgust with some of the author's assumptions and language use, the scholarship is generally solid and the facts she puts forth are very important in understanding the epidemiology of the current "obesity epidemic".
One of the problems I have with "The Hungry Gene" is the author's use of degrading language in her descriptions of fat people. When the author discusses the experience of watching a fat woman undergoing weight-loss surgery , she uses sentences like "The flesh ripples thickly, like a crème brûlée", and characterizes the smell of the incision made by a cauterizing scalpel as being "like hamburgers spitting on a grill". Honest, perhaps, but not "compassionate"--a term used by a previous reviewer of this book.
A much bigger problem with this book, however, is the conclusions the author reaches after consideration of all she's learned from her research. Throughout the book, the author discusses the causes of the obesity epidemic: genetic tendencies, fetal environment, too little exercise, too much processed convenience food. The research is excellent in depth and breadth, if at times recounted in rather, ah, bombastic language. Certainly all these causes are at the root of the many ailments associated with obesity--but the problem is not obesity *itself*. Correlation is not the same as causation. Numerous studies have demonstrated that it's not fat itself that's bad for health, but rather those things that *cause* obesity that account for health problems (Check out Glenn Gaesser's "Big Fat Lies", for example, for more confirmation of this statement). Obesity can be a symptom of poor lifestyle choices, yes. But obesity *itself* isn't what we should be fighting a war against, as the author concludes. Instead, we should be doing everything in our power to fight the causes of obesity, and the author does a good job of discussion solutions to these causes. Choosing fat itself as our target, on the other hand, actually ends up making us fatter than ever, a fact which the author actually discusses in the book. The conclusion that fat itself is the enemy, however, really undermines the book's primary message.
So, with a couple caveats, I do recommend this book for anyone interested in why people get fat, and what can be done to counteract the health problems associated with obesity. It's a highly entertaining read, and a very important one in this day of ubiquitous McDonalds and 4-hour TV-watching marathons.

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

June 30, 2016

Verified Purchase

Lot of info

One person found this helpful

December 3, 2015

Verified Purchase

Good insight into both physiological and societal influences on obesety.

One person found this helpful

A customer

January 6, 2003

Verified Purchase

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.

6 people found this helpful7 people found this helpful

James R. Mccall

A Healthful Appetizer

February 26, 2003

This book takes as its starting point the perception that people are getting too fat in general, and that a significant percentage of adults and even children are actually obese, and that THAT percentage is growing alarmingly. But our author, a journalist and academic, does not spend much ink talking about the gradations of the weight problem, the culture, the unintended consequences of our getting bigger, and so on, but jumps right into the research on obesity. Everyone admits there is a problem. Can science solve it?
Maybe. But first science has to decide what the problem is. Of course, research is not done in a vacuum: the holy grail of obesity investigations is a gene that controls appetite or one that controls fat storage, whose protein can be interdicted or encouraged without complicated side-effects. As Shell makes clear, great fortunes await the researcher and his or her institution for such a magic-bullet solution to the overweight problem. Some of the workers portrayed here care deeply about the monetary rewards their research might yield. Others have rather deliberately chosen to go at the questions differently, for rewards of different sorts.
About half of this book is given over to a blow-by-blow of various salients into Fat Science, as it were. There are the usual portraits of crusty or visionary or harried or just plain human scientists as they talk about their work, and their hopes for it. The writing here is pleasant but not dazzling, and sometimes the science is presented without sufficient prelude. But along the way we do learn something about the physiology of fatness, and also about those relatively small number of people for whom obesity is truly a disease. For must of us, overweight is no more a disease than taxes, but about as avoidable.
But the real subject of this book does not really kick in until almost two-thirds of the way through it. The real subject is how our eating habits and hopes are simultaneously fed and increased by the food and drug industries. Each, in its own way, caters to our dreams and our weaknesses. And, as Shell points out, nobody is really telling us to stop eating too much and taking too many diet pills of uncertain effect.
I think our author is trying to lay the blame for our excesses at the feet of profit-making corporations, with their power to influence government, and their massive, seductive advertising. To a certain extent the science at the beginning of the book paves the way for the social statistics at the end, yet the two sit rather uncomfortably together. And there is little discussion of the reasons we overeat. They must be more complicated than just corporate conspiracy: modern life has disrupted so many traditional social patterns. At bottom, though, this is a book about our health, and for anyone interested in THAT, a pleasant, if unsettling, read, and a good source.

5 people found this helpful6 people found this helpful

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