Name: Fat Land
Rating: 3.333333333333333 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780618380602

Greg Critser

Takes a close-up look at the social, political, cultural, economic, and nutritional factors that have made Americans the victims of an epidemic of obesity.

How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Fat Land

Sarah Escorsa

A very interesting read, if a bit scary in terms of what the future may hold for American children (and possibly European ones sooner or later!). The book was very well researched but it was a bit too much (especially the medical part: diabetes, insulin etc...) and I found myself skimming through the last chapters of the book. Still, this was a very insightful read!

Big portions and big profits: how America became the land of the fat - and we're going the same way . . . The USA is now the most overweight country on the planet (apart from a few South Seas Islanders), with Britain catching up fast and rates of obesity continuing to explode. Fat Land reveals why it happened, how cheap imports of fat and sugar made junk food and fizzy drinks out staple diet; how ruthless marketing by big business ensures portion sizes (and waistlines) keep on growing; and how every aspect of American life - from TV dinners to advertising in schools, from 'baggy fit' clothes to wonder diets that don't work - is contributing to the supersizing of the world.

Bad Girl Bex

I wish we could give books a score out of ten, rather than out of five, on here. This book is a decent 7/10. I couldn't give it a 3/5 as that's too low, so I gave it a 4/5, despite it not being as good as other books I have awarded the same score to. The 'out-of-five' scale annoys me with its vagueness.

But anyway. This was a very interesting book. I missed it when it was initially released - despite it seeming to have been received well and given much hype - so it does feel a tad out of date, but the statistics are still valid and the history is merely less recent, so aside from the occasional reference to a 'today' of about a decade ago, it remains a solid and pertinent text.

It's probably a little overly simplistic for my taste; obviously the author has tried to make the information more accessible to a wider audience, but as with many books in the PopSci realm, this book left me wanting more detail. There were links to many of the studies referenced, in the appendix, but it would have been more convenient to have included more information in the text itself.

I think most people would find this book simple, accessible and interesting. It basically describes the 'perfect storm' that has caused an explosion in the rate and severity of obesity in America, in the last 30 years. It isn't that one single contributing factor is to blame: the problem in itself is a societal syndrome of sorts, with multiple causes, bringing about multiple outcomes; which in turn have resulted in a so-called 'obesity epidemic'. Fascinating in parts and terrifying in others, this is a quick read at under 200 pages of actual text. Second-hand copies can be picked up for 0.01p on amazon uk (exc. p&p) so it's worth picking up if you've ever wondered why people in the west seem to be getting more corpulent than ever before.

Fat Land How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

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