Rating: 
Summary: Eyes Opened, Mouth Shut
Review: Reading this book is like being woken up from a deep sleep with a bucket of ice water dumped on your crotch.
You will open your eyes and see how the system is designed to keep people fat (and ultimately unhappy) while the real fat cats reap in the dough.
This book has encouraged me to start on a fitness program like no other.
The truth is out there and in this book.
Rating:
Summary: We've all got to change
Review: Reading this book really opened my eyes. I've been trying my whole life to exercise and eat right, but I never had the right motivation. This book is well researched, interesting, and for some, scary. It should be required reading. I began eating better and exercising after I read this book, hopefully I will be able to "keep it up" long after it's collecting dust on the bookshelf. People who want to criticize this book need to get up and go outside and go jogging. There is an epidemic in America, and it is primarily the poor who suffer.
Rating:
Summary: Fat Land is a must read for all Americans
Review: This book has been an amazing walk through fact after fact about why Americans have become so fat, so quickly. Cheap sugars, lack of exercise, concerns re: dangerous neighborhoods are all discussed. Its a quick read that has kept me telling some of this trivia to whomever will listen.
Rating:
Summary: The Fattest People On The Planet - How It Happened!
Review: This is a very good book about the problem of obesity in America. It is not a diet book. However, it can help a person with the motivation needed to succeed with a reduced calorie lifestyle. It is a simple book. Yet, it is well written and well focused on the causes of and the solutions to obesity.
The metabolic cause of obesity is very simple in most cases. There are too many calories and not enough calorie-burning activities. First, the book explains where the calories are coming from. Next, the book explains who got the calories into our bellies along with our help. Then there is a discussion of the reasons why the calories build up on our bodies.
The last half of the book discusses the devestating affects that too many calories and obesity can do to a person. It also discusses what can be done to help improve the situation. For some readers the book may actually scare them into losing weight.
Rating: 
Summary: [modified 25 Jan 03]
Review: [text 925 words]
With the talent for writing that gets him published in USA Today, Harper's Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, Critser has produced an easy-to-read, well-edited, and highly entertaining expose of American fattening. A number of unsurprising trends are highlighted and their origins uncovered, such as increasing portion sizes at fast food chains and in soft drinks; the pollution of school cafeterias by big junk food corporations; and the use of high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten and thicken almost everything. TV and other food ads aimed at children come in for their fair share of blame as well.One of Critser's more glaring blunders, even if by omission, shared by The American Diabetes Association, which is cited, is that simple sugars do all the damage leading to type 2 diabetes and obesity. The notion of glycemic index (GI), now >80 years old, never entered Critser's mind. The GI is measured in humans by checking blood glucose levels after eating. The GI of a food shows the % glucose levels rise compared with the same weight of glucose (GI = 100). One of the things that creates high (bad) insulin levels is high blood glucose levels. Since all the common complex carbohydrates (starches) in foods are polymers of glucose, and some of them are metabolized very rapidly into glucose, and we eat more of them by weight, the contribution of wheat, corn, potato and other forms of high-GI starches to poor health is greater than that of many of the the simple sugars. The so-called low-carb diets must be low GI diets to be effective, and they really are for weight loss, and the prevention of type 2 diabetes (Bernstein 1997, Ottoboni 2002). This relates to the next blunder claiming that the Atkins, Sears, Eades diets do damage because of Critser's false representation that unlimited calories are recommended or allowed. This was accompanied by the blunder that all carbohydrates were eliminated, including the ones with very low GI from fruits and vegetables. As it happens, clinical trials have shown that low GI diets are the only ones most people can maintain. The usual sensible recommendation is for 40% calories from low-GI carbohydrates, 30% from fats, and 30% from proteins (Eades 2000, McGee 2001, Ottoboni 2002). On the same plane in blunderland, Critser actually succumbed to the biggest misinformation in the history of medicine: that eating saturated fat and cholesterol causes obesity or clogged arteries or heart disease (p15,140). This nonsense originated with a campaign by the American Heart Association (AHA) begun in 1961, and its anti-cholesterol, pro-polyunsaturated fat campaign, which peaked in the 1980s. Nothing in the Framingham, MRFIT, or any other honest study actually supports this anti-fat stand, despite the politically correct summaries of many of the studies. (Moore 1989, Smith 1991, Fehily 1993, Fraser 1997, Tunstall-Pedoe 1997, Eades 2000, Enig 2000, Kauffman 2000, Kauffman 2001, McCully 2000, McGee 2001, Ottoboni 2002, Ravnskov 2000). The occasional success of people on the Pritikin and Ornish diets may be due to lower total calories or avoidance of bad fat. Also, many other lifestyle changes were made in addition to diet. Fat makes the stomach empty more slowly, thus keeping the blood glucose concentrations lower (Enig 2000). Speaking of bad fat, Critser's dump on palm oil (p13-19) is totally unfounded based on actual cohort studies (Wood 1993, Enig 2000). To "compound the felony" Critser failed to warn about the really bad fats, namely the omega-6 fatty acids among the polyunsaturated fats such as soybean, corn, safflower and sunflower oil (Wood 1993, Enig 2000, Vos 2003), nor was there much on eating the good omega-3 fats (Vos 2003). Not a word about avoiding trans fats, as though this were still in doubt (Willett 1993, Oomen 2001). Even the AHA began to warn about trans fats in 2002. Among the saturated fats, the medium-chain ones are lower in calories (8 kcal/g) than the unsaturated ones (9 kcal/g), and the 18-carbon stearic acid in cocoa butter and tallow are so indigestible that these fats provide only 5.5 and 7.5 kcal/g (Finley 1994). "When new immigrants were asked whether rest was more important or better for health than exercise, a large portion 'always says yes'. The attitude was doubly corrosive..." (p70-71). Critser seems not to be able to imagine that most new immigrants do hard manual labor in their employment, and they are correct to choose rest. Critser's unquenchable recommendations for exercise have some merit (Bernstein 1997), but the only prospective, randomized study of exercise after heart attack found no effect of exercise on all-cause death and a slight benefit of exercise on cardio-vascular mortality for the first few years, disappearing at 5 years (Dorn 1999). While Critser was correct to pick on Reuben Andres, MD, for certain reasons, Critser fell for the nonsense that being leaner is better and leads to longer life. Granted there was confounding, but one of the best studies found that in both men and women the relation between weight or body mass index (BMI) and heart deaths or all-cause deaths was U-shaped, not inverse; that is, those of middle weight and middle BMI lasted the longest (Tunstall-Pedoe 1997). And so it was also with energy intake (Fehily 1993, Tunstall-Pedoe 1997). Smoking was indeed very bad for lifespan. If the reforms Critser recommends were implemented, based on only the problems he described, my guess is that about 1/3 of the obesity problem in the US would disappear, thus a rating of 2 stars. For complete references cited e-mail me.
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