Lee Klein 's Reviews > Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

Yeah I know New Directions didn't put this one out, it's not the fancy German dead white male lit I tend to like, but it does an admirable job of weaving more than a century of medical literature -- some of it German -- into a convincing argument that's at times stunning (I said "wow" aloud once or twice) and even heart-breaking on a grand scale -- for example, all those low-fat foods you see in the supermarket have extra carbs to replace reduced fats, so people buy low-fat stuff thinking it has less fat so it won't make them as fat as the full-fat stuff (makes perfect sense!), but according to the thesis of this book, the opposite is true: carbs make you fat, not the fat you consume. You'd think that shoving lard down your gullet wouldn't be better for you (your weight and your heart and triglyceride levels and blood pressure) than an equivalent amount of bread, even whole grain stuff, but it's counterintuitively true -- this book includes a few really interesting, counterintuitive, scientificially proven again and again assertions (eg, we don't get fat because our metabolism slows; our metabolism slows because we're getting fat). All of this is heartbreaking when talking about how the obesity epidemic snowballs as overweight/obese mothers prenatally increase their unborn children's insulin resistance, which leads to fatter children who more easily become obese when eating typical western carb/glucose diet, who then grow up to have metabolically worse off children, on and on (human bodies are literally snowballing thanks to carb-freaked metabolisms). The structure read sort of like a wonky thriller: initial hook followed by lots of history up front followed by pop science reviews of 100+ years of studies followed by easily vanquished anti-low carb arguments (ie, the impact of potentially higher LDL "bad" cholesterol levels) followed by a representative high-protein/high-fat/low-carb diet, which apparently is nothing new -- it's been popular pretty much forever, especially among native Americans and eskimos, as well as among 19th century physicians up till the 1960s -- only recently have we associated this sort of traditional human diet with some dude named Atkins. Sucks to have grown up during the food pyramid era, with its fattening base of grain. Recommended to me by my mama whose own mother was done in by carbs/sugars and a genetic predisposition for insulin resistance she passed down to her daughter and now to me. Easy to eat this way now that it's summer but the test will come when it's time for stouts and pizza in the fall and winter. Oh if only porters were brewed from porterhouse steak instead of grains . . . and if meat didnt come from cute cuddly animals or require massive suboptimum land used to fatten these animals with grain, land covered in ever-increasing tonnage of environmentally awful excrement et cetera etc