- What in American society has changed so dramatically
that nearly 60 percent of us are now overweight, plunging the nation into
what the surgeon general calls an "epidemic of obesity"? Greg
Critser engages every aspect of American life - class, politics, culture,
and economics - to show how we have made ourselves the second fattest people
on the planet (after South Sea Islanders).
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- Fat Land highlights the groundbreaking research that
implicates cheap fats and sugars as the alarming new metabolic factor making
our calories stick and shows how and why children are too often the chief
metabolic victims of such foods. No one else writing on fat America takes
as hard a line as Critser on the institutionalized lies we've been telling
ourselves about how much we can eat and how little we can exercise. His
expose of the Los Angeles schools' opening of the nutritional floodgates
in the lunchroom and his examination of the political and cultural forces
that have set the bar on American fitness low and then lower, are both
discerning reporting and impassioned wake-up calls.
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- Disarmingly funny, Fat Land leaves no diet book - including
Dr. Atkins's - unturned. Fashions, both leisure and street, and American-style
religion are subject to Critser's gimlet eye as well. Memorably, Fat Land
takes on baby-boomer parenting shibboleths - that young children won't
eat past the point of being full and that the dinner table isn't the place
to talk about food rules - and gives advice many families will use to lose.
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- Critser's brilliantly drawn futuristic portrait of a
Fat America just around the corner and his all too contemporary foray into
the diabetes ward of a major children's hospital make Fat Land a chilling
but brilliantly rendered portrait of the cost in human lives - many of
them very young lives - of America's obesity epidemic.
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