Fat Chance
"Robert Lustig's 90-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", has been viewed more than two million times. Now, in this much anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove "a calorie is NOT a calorie", and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide"
Stats for nerds
6recommend
8mentions
7people
2015–2024years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You're welcome. I must add that I am not a doctor so take the above with the appropriate level of skepticism on your behalf. I am only summarising what I have learned from books and have omitted A LOT of detail.
Recommended further reading
- Pure, White and Deadly (John Yudkin)
- Fat Chance (Robert Lustig)
- Outlive (Peter Attia) contains an excellent and concise synopsis of the mechanisms behind metabolic disease
- Sugar is poison.
Check out the latest talk from Dr Robert Lustig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n28W4AmvMDE&pp=ygUGbHVzdGln
Its a 3.5h video, but roughly sugar is as toxic as alcohol and the food industry is adding it to most products. In short if it has a label (like most processed foods with many ingredients) you should avoid, switch to the ones that don't have (like an apple).
This book is also great "The hacking of the American mind"
`While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover.
Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape.
With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.`
- I believe that the authority in sugar is DR. Robert Lustig. He has a great book called Fat Chance, there he explains in details how sugar is a toxin and correlates with a plethora of diseases. Great read from a true hero that saved many obese kids during his practice.
- This is so true. I think it was Dr. Robert Lustig that said something like "it has never been proven that exercise alone can make you loose weight".
You allways need to combine better diet with exercise. Think about how much you would have to do to burn off 1000 calories through exercise vs reduce your food consumption with the same ammount.
I find that light exercise is really good for my brain.
For some realted information regarding diet and exercise you should look up some of the presentations done by Dr. Robert Lustig. "Fat Chance: Fructose 2.0" is a good one for example.
- There's a lot of discussion on here about stupid consumers vs evil corporations, etc. As is often the case, the blame lies with just about everyone involved to some extent. The US government choose to promote a low fat diet with it's original nutrition guidelines in the 70s [4] which led the public to demand the food companies to produce low fat everything in the 80s and into the 90s. It's now emerged that there was little evidence to support the health benefits of a low fat diet.
When you remove fat from food it becomes unpalatable unless.... you add sugar. Thus the increase in added sugar in just about everything which has helped to contribute to the rise of obesity and metabolic syndrome and all the diseases that come with it from diabetes to fatty livers, heart disease, etc.
So who's to "blame"?
The government in some ways, even though they seemingly meant well when recommending low fat diets (they're just now beginning to recommend reduced sugar and ease up on fat warnings).
Food companies in some ways who seem to have known about sugar's addictive properties and engineered their food to keep you coming back for more rather than keeping you healthy [3].
Consumers in some ways for not reading labels, exercising more, reducing portions, etc. But who could blame you when the government and the food companies were trying to convince you that what you were eating was good for you? (unless you had time to dive into the research yourself but let's face it, that's not an option for 99% of people)
One of the best explanations I've read of not just why sugar (fructose to be specific) is bad for you (in the quantities Americans but also most of the world eats it at) is the book "Fat Chance" by Robert Lustig [1]. You can also get a glimpse into his arguments via his youtube lectures [2].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Chance-Beating-Against-Processed/d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[3] http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-in...
- I would suggest reading "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease" by Robert Lustig.
He goes into the science behind sugary diets and why they are truly so addicting.
I'm talking about, more addicting than cocaine.
Related
The hacking of the American mind
9 recommend · 13
The obesity code
45 recommend · 74
Metabolical
6 recommend · 13
Why we get fat
45 recommend · 79
The big fat surprise
19 recommend · 45
The logic of chance
2 recommend · 7
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails
recommend · 11
