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    Cover of The Miracle Pill

    The Miracle Pill

    Peter Walker · 2021

    Biology & Medicine
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    1recommend
    3mentions
    2people
    2021–2025years
    67% recommend33% neutral

    Mentions per year

    20212022202320242025

    What Hacker News says

    1. Earw0rmMay 2023
      Good book on the topic: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Miracle-Pill-Ha-Peter-Walker/dp/147...
      thread
    2. Earw0rmOct 2021
      Yes and no.. on a strict thermodynamics basis, it's not. If you're say 30lbs overweight (i.e. some, but not much), straight up burning that is going to require considerable patience and discipline to not destroy your body in the process. Each lb of fat is - very roughly - equivalent to running a marathon.

      However, being physically active makes you more aware and mindful of the input side of the equation; building muscle mass, cardiovascular fitness and endurance in turn improves your metabolic ability to burn calories. So it's absolutely part of the picture. "The Miracle Pill" by Peter Walker is an excellent introduction to the topic.

      thread
    3. _feusJun 2025
      Those are ad riddled sources by three obviously biased authors who each wrote books on the topic and stand to profit from a buy in, though.

      Carlton Reid - "Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring", a book "whose very title is fightin' words" is basically a Mein Kampf of cycling. He also writes for DailyMail, which is famous for hit piece journalism and lack of credability.

      Angie Schmitt - Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, from which one reviewer quotes "The bigger challenge, Schmitt argues, is addressing the systemic racism built into cities". It is obvious to anyone who reads into this sentence that this is a woke bias.

      Peter Walker - The Miracle Pill pushes the active lifestyle narrative, of which cycling is one.

      While I think your argument only adds to the fact that cyclists are delusional, I have to agree that it is not a "cyclist" itself that is the problem, but halfwits both in cars and on bikes, with cyclists having a higher proportion of those.

      thread

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