May 20 2011
Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It
McDonald’s stockholders yesterday rejected a proposal to issue a report on the role it plays in childhood obesity, which includes the pervasive advertizing of its unhealthy fast food to kids. At the fast food giant’s annual meeting, McDonald’s Chief Executive Jim Skinner said to an enthusiastic room full of stock holders, “This is about choice and we believe in the democratic process… This is about the personal and individual right to choose.” Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. in recent years, with obesity rates sharply increasing for children as young as six months old. With higher obesity rates more prevalent among poorer Americans, obesity, and all the public health consequences of it, becomes an issue of social and economic justice. Now, a new book by science journalist Gary Taubes synthesizes ten years of research into the reasons behind obesity. The book is simply called Why We Get Fat. In it, Taubes makes a damning case about how the science linking dietary fat to heart disease and obesity was seriously misreported, leading to government agencies prescribing a low-fat, and in-effect, high-carbohydrate diet, that is precisely the recipe for obesity and its related diseases. Thirty years of increasing obesity rates, coinciding with pushing such a diet, is a testament to a public health policy gone horribly wrong. Taubes asserts that it is the tendency among health professionals and health reporters to link obesity to individual failings that has perverted the interpretation of the existing science. “We don’t get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we’re getting fat,” says Taubes.
GUEST: Gary Taubes, award winning science journalist, contributing correspondent for Science Magazine, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.
Read Gary Taubes’ article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print.
Special thanks to UCTV for making Dr. Lustig’s lecture available to KPFK. UCTV is available on cable in Los Angeles. It can also be found online at www.uctv.tv.
Thank you Gifts:
Why We Get Fat and What We Can Do About It, book by Gary Taubes – $125
Sugar: The Bitter Truth – DVD by Robert Lustig – $75
Call 818-985-5735 or visit www.kpfk.org to make a pledge.
3 Responses to “Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It”
Hello there! This article couldn’t be written much better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous roommate! He always kept talking about this. I am going to send this post to him. Pretty sure he will have a great read. Thanks for sharing!
Interesting blog post. A few things i would like to make contributions
about is that laptop memory ought to be purchased if the computer cannot cope with what you do by
using it. One can mount two good old ram boards containing 1GB each, as
an example, but not one of 1GB and one having 2GB.
One should look for the car maker’s documentation for one’s
PC to make sure what type of memory space
is required.
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems
as though you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know
what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just
posting videos to your weblog when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?