The informational chapters with the basics on Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are highly worth it to get a good base. I've made a bunch of the recipes this The informational chapters with the basics on Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are highly worth it to get a good base. I've made a bunch of the recipes this year too - have really enjoyed this cookbook....more
The best book about how to eat healthy and the reasoning behind it that I've yet read. Well backed with science and uses studies to make all his pointThe best book about how to eat healthy and the reasoning behind it that I've yet read. Well backed with science and uses studies to make all his points. Highly recommended for everyone (the title is misleading, its not just for obese people).
The main theory of the book is that the root cause of obesity and weight gain is a complex hormonal imbalance, that stems from high blood insulin levels. High insulin levels are responsible for obesity, and to a smaller degree, so can high cortisol levels (being overly stressed can lead to weight gain). High insulin levels are a direct result of poor diet, and are 95% of the cause of obesity. Exercise is 5% of it (I would have said it was 70/30, so this was interesting). The foods that contribute to weight gain are largely a result of too much sugar and too much refined carbohydrates. Obesity can also be "genetic" and passed to kids in the sense that if a mother has high insulin levels it will be passed to the child.
A fascinating part of the book was that while many of us would intuitively say sugar and processed carbs are the culprit, the prevailing wisdom by all official sources is different - eg look at what the NHS website says: "Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little.". This theory of calories in minus calories out, has prevailed for 50+ years, and the book makes a good case for it being wrong. The kind of calories make all the difference. To prove this, the book goes into all the data it could find about weight loss studies done, and found that generally, diets don't work. Shocker, I know, because again intuitively we all know that - its easy to go on a diet and lose weight, but then it always comes back. Why is this?
Basically, our bodies are like thermostats in our houses - they are set to a certain weight, and our bodies do their darnedest to keep our weight there. To change our weight, we have to change our "body set weight" first. To do that, we have to lower our insulin levels, by eating less things that make them spike.
This book was recommended to me by my doctor, as I did some bloodwork which said I high slightly high cholesterol and should lose 10 pounds. He recommended I start doing 8/16 fasting, and when I asked for reading material to learn about it, he recommended this book. I can report after 2 months, it really works. I don't miss breakfast - I just have coffee on many mornings, and am fine - and lost the 10 pounds! The reason fasting works is well described in the book, and its a huge new tool in my arsenal. Basically, our bodies need time to process insulin in our bodies, and if we don't get it, it leads to continuous elevated insulin levels, which leads to weight gain. So by not eating for 12 hours a day (overnight), or 16 hours (overnight plus skip breakfast), you can lower your insulin levels. This is a neat trick as now I know if I have a huge dinner, its not necessary to have breakfast. It's also helpful as snacking, in particular late night snacking, is one of the worst things for you. In fact:
Fasting may sound like a terrible hungry hangover, but it's actually very natural and a part of our human history. It's also a very effective weight loss tool:
The reason that most of us don't know how to eat well? Because nobody really knows the truth, because the food industry has spent money to conceal it, being subsidized by the government all along. The book Salt Sugar Fat goes into more depth on this topic, but with such big dollars at stake you couldn't exactly declare that everything that Nestle or Proctor & Gamble makes is bad for you (it is). Their first scapegoat was fats, and thus was born several decades of focus on "low fat foods" - however, there are no studies that actually find a correlation between low fat diets and lower cholesterol and thus reduced heart disease. It just didn't exist - the whole "low fat" diet thing failed. Now there is another scapegoat:
Soda and all sugary drinks deserve a large portion of the blame. The data of the rise of soda and obesity are strongly correlated, and happened over the same years. If you are still drinking soda or any drink other than water or sparkling water, stop!
But then a good thing happened, and in the 21st century in the US we started to recognize the evils of soda and drink less. Profits for Coca Cola fell. So then:
So far I've only talked about avoid sugar and processed carbohydrates generally - but the book does a great job of better explaining why processed carbohydrates are so bad. Basically, the processing removes all the "good stuff" they come with that offset the effects of the carbs.
I decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And nI decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And not only did it succeed in that goal, but I think it put a permanent, deep scare in me about sugar. The book basically argues that sugar is the root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even a lot of cancer.
What is interesting is while all of us know that sugar is not good for us, the only thing that people officially blame on overconsumption of it is tooth decay. Obesity is highly correlated with diabetes, heart disease, and a number of other bad things. If you Google for the cause of obesity, you see statements like “Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little. If you consume high amounts of energy, particularly fat and sugars, but don't burn off the energy through exercise and physical activity, much of the surplus energy will be stored by the body as fat.” This book makes the argument that a calorie is not a calorie, that sugar is actually toxic, but unlike other toxins it takes decades of overconsumption to show up - which has made it hard to prove.
The statistics are fascinating. Fifty years ago, one in eight American adults was obese; today the number is greater than one in three. Diabetes has gone from 1 in 2,000-3,000 to 1 in 7-8, which is an astounding increase. The book listed numerous examples of native populations that suffered from a similar diabetes epidemic after adopting the “western diets and lifestyle”. What is it about western lifestyle that has done this? The culprit is almost certainly something in the diet, and linked to processed foods - and after reading this book, it seems very logical that sugar is either the root or one of the main root causes.
“By the late 1970s, though, sugar had mostly vanished from the discussion. Dietary fat had been implicated as a cause of heart disease. Nutritionists and public-health authorities responded by rejecting the idea that sugar could be responsible for the diseases that associated with heart disease, which included both obesity and diabetes.”
The book gives a fascinating history of how nutritionists and the government have viewed sugar as largely harmless. This included an impressive amount of lobbying from the sugar industry to vindicate themselves. Mind-blowingly, the sugar industry back in the 50’s actually advertised sugar as a great, healthy way to get calories. Sugar has never, and largely is still not thought of as a root cause of obesity - the narrative is still more about fats and “lifestyle” (i.e. lack of exercise).
“To the sugar industry, it has been the gift that keeps on giving, the ultimate defense against all arguments and evidence that sugar is uniquely toxic. This is the idea that we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete. By this thinking, researchers and public-health authorities think of obesity as a disorder of “energy balance,” a concept that has become so ingrained in conventional thinking, so widespread, that arguments to the contrary have typically been treated as quackery, if not a willful disavowal of the laws of physics.”
“Fat” is often the culprit named for people getting fat (even the word is the same!), and thus was born a processed food industry that touts “low-fat” items (which are then rich in sugar+salt to offset the bad taste). But looking at populations that eat high fat content but low sugar, shows lower rates of obesity and heart disease. For instance, the French.
“When researchers realized that the French had relatively low rates of heart disease despite a diet that was rich in saturated fats, they wrote it off as an inexplicable “paradox,” and ignored the fact that the French traditionally consumed far less sugar than did populations— the Americans and British, most notably— in which coronary disease seemed to be a scourge. At the end of the eighteenth century, French per capita sugar consumption was less than a fifth of what it was in England. At the end of the nineteenth century, even after the beet-sugar revolution, France was still lagging far behind both the British and the Americans— thirty-three pounds for the French compared with eighty-eight for the English and sixty-six for Americans.”
Interestingly, when we say “sugar” we can actually be referring to a number of things: fructose, glucose, or sucrose. Glucose is used to refer to blood sugar levels in blood, and also comes from eating carb rich foods like bread or potatoes. Sucrose is table sugar, which actually made of part fructose. Fructose is the scary one because “it is very different from other sugars because it has a different metabolic pathway and is not the preferred energy source for muscles or the brain.”. Fructose is found in fruit but as such low levels that it isn’t harmful, plus its offset by rich fibers. But high fructose corn syrup? Avoid at all costs.
The logic is basically: IF excess sugar (fructose notably) leads to insulin resistance, THEN we can say with confidence that it is likely a root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer, as it’s been proven to be correlated with all those things. High fat diets - particularly the wrong sorts of fats - are also involved if eaten in excess. The logic seems solid - and yet even searching “what causes obesity” you don’t see sugar named as a key cause. I’d be very curious to learn from nutritionists what the think of this logic.
“Is it that we’re all simply eating too much and exercising too little, which is the one simple answer that the nutritional establishment will embrace in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? Another simple answer, and a more likely one, is sugar.”...more
A fascinating in-depth and well researched look at the processed food industry. I recommend this for anyone who buys food at a grocery or convenience A fascinating in-depth and well researched look at the processed food industry. I recommend this for anyone who buys food at a grocery or convenience store (aka everyone). I read this book hoping to learn more about processed foods and how to avoid them, and I definitely got what I was looking for. Before reading this I was trying to avoid processed foods, and this book has helped increase that resolve, as well as educated me more on how to do it. It is absolutely amazing and frightening how many processed foods - some of which I remember fondly like Capri Sun - have enough salt/sugar/fat to easily account for a quarter or half of your daily recommended limit. This makes it super easy to go way over, and the result is unhealthy, fat Americans.
One of the more powerful things of this book was that Moss went deep into the food industry to really understand the dynamics at play. He didn't just demonize them for making the US one of the fattest countries in the world. He interviewed dozens of insiders - current and retired, to get their perspectives.
And the bottom line is scary. The food industry has zero incentive to produce healthier food. Because the high calorie food that they make that is stuffed with salt, sugar, and fat sells really well. It's tasty and convenient and cheap, and people buy whats tasty, and have no time or money to make or buy healthier options. And when the industry has tried to reduce the salt, sugar or fat, every time they find that it doesn't sell as well. Sure they have made some incremental improvements here and there, but by and large, the grocery store is a scary place if you don't want to vastly exceed your daily caloric intake.
It seems clear to me that things will never get better without government intervention - something that Moss also concludes in the book. Trying to understand a food label is impossible for most people, as (1) you have to know by heart the daily recommended values for calories, salt, sugar, and fat, and (2) you have to do math to figure out how many servings you are eating. Doing both of these just won't happen for 99% of the population, and thus we are where we are. We cannot rely on the food industry to make healthier products - we have make them do so by choosing with our wallets.
In my opinion, the FDA or someone in the government needs to get a good designer to fix food labels and get them to a state where any American can easily look at them and go "oh my gosh this [can of pasta sauce] will account for [a quarter] of my daily recommended [caloric/protein/fat/sugar] intake if I eat it". Maybe some startup can combine a phone camera and some image recognition to do this. The right organization to drive this is the FDA, but they are not acting.
So why doesn't the government act to prevent the obesity epidemic (and yes, that word is appropriate)? Moss spends a bit of time in the book examining this question, interviewing people at the FDA and the Dept of Agriculture. His conclusion is that they aren't incentivized or enabled to act. The food industry is well capitalized and has - for some inescapable reason to me - been able to fight every report of how bad their products are. Regulation is a tricky subject in America, but it seems that even the role of getting information to Americans about how to protect their health is completely broken.
One of the more interesting things I learned from the book is how sophisticated the food industry is in marketing their products. Their segmentation is impressive, and they find the right products, messages and mediums for each segment. They have learned to be on top of trends and perform slight of hand tricks with ease. For instance Americans initially loved their breakfasted cereals when marketed using the word "sugar". When people finally caught on that many of these were 50-70% sugar (!!!) the industry changed their marketing to promote other aspects, and removed the word sugar. Sugar Frosted Flakes became Frosted Flakes. Same thing for "low salt" or "low fat" or "includes some vitamin or nutrient" trends.
This is good to know if you are in the grocery store, as they still use these tricks. If a product is "low sugar", it's probably high in fat and/or salt, and same for "low fat" or "low salt". Or they will pick a nutrient or vitamin and promote that to hide the high amounts of salt, sugar & fat - for instance Tang was marketed as having lots of Vitamin-C (but was and is really bad for you).
One of the biggest trends that led to processed food in the past 40 years is summed up by the word "convenience". That's been a big part of the food industries marketing tactics, and it's worked. Life has become increasingly busy and complex, and we don't have time to go to work *and* shop for and cook a healthy meal. An aspect of this that I hadn't thought about is the rise of dual-working families - we have gone from 50% of women in the workforce in 1970 to 80% today. Families simply don't have time when both parents work to spend hours cooking when they get home. Thus, "convenience", or foods that are easy to buy and make, have risen drastically in that timeframe.
Emotionally, I could see how this marketing worked on me as a kid. Hearing about products that I used to eat and remembered fondly was kind of sad. Capri Sun, lunchables, hot pockets are just a few such examples mentioned in the book, none of which is particularly good for you.
The most damning evidence Moss finds is that none of the executives or insiders he talked to eat their own dogfood. In fact, they all have diets that explicitly prohibit it. I think that's very telling.
Overall, I think book will open your eyes to the "battlefield" for space and attention that goes on in the grocery store, and to pay more attention to the labels. That's a big educational process, but one which everyone needs to learn how to do. We need to force the food industry to stop producing foods that are unhealthy by stopping buying them....more
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