Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, if skewed, research
Review: Most of us know empirically that our fellow Americans have been ballooning at an alarming rate for the past 10-15 years, and the health statistics bear us out. Fat Land is an interesting look into how this epidemic started.Critser performs some interesting research, discovering that (as above) Palm Oil and High Fructose Corn Syrup - calorie-intense food additives -- made their way into our diets in the 1970s. He also pinpoints what he believes is the origin of our ever-increasing portion sizes, laying blame at the feet of McDonalds. Unfortunately this good research is seriously called into question, when Critser reviews the Zone diet. Critser would have us believe that the Zone diet claims that one does not have to exercise at all to lose weight. This is untrue. Chapter 6 of Dr. Sears Zone book ("Exercise in the Zone") is dedicated to the notion that to lose weight, it is MANDATORY to exercise - a minimum of 6 HOURS per week. This glaring error in an easily verifiable fact makes one pause to wonder where else Critser has erred, or perhaps changed the facts to fit his opinions (political and otherwise). While it is indisputable that the use of Palm Oils and High Fructose Corn Syrups certainly has risen in our culture, Critser insists that this was a scheme hatched from the bowels of the Nixon Administration. If one wanted to match this conspiracy theory from another viewpoint, it could just as easily be "proven" that the cause of American obesity was instead the fault of "the Malaysians" (who earned the lions share of the Palm Oil profits), and "the Japanese" (who invented and sent into mass production High Fructose Corn Syrup). Yet Critser has neat theories to prove that - as always - it was the pernicious, greedy Republican party and a traditionally perverse American culture that is to blame. To his credit, Critsen does point out that America has become too forgiving of obesity. He points out that France (among other cultures) tends to insist its children eat well - which obviously sets up good eating habits, and likely set in motion that nation's relative small obesity problem. We in America would do well to mimic this, as one's "self esteem" may need an occasional puncturing in order to return to reality. All in all, Fat Land is an interesting look into the history of the recent obesity epidemic, but the apparent research errors and political skew make cautious and careful filtering a must. (For the record I am not Republican nor do I use Dr. Sears' Zone diet or work for that company)
Rating: 
Summary: Not surprising but required reading
Review: Critser describes an American world gone mad. We eat without regard to the consequences. We have lost any control over our diets and our dinner tables. Our obesity, fatness, and over indulgence speaks volumes about our inability to restrain ourselves. The saddest part is the lack of understanding of the trajectory of poor health that this binging puts the US population on. Kudos to Critser for telling it like it is and for holding up the ugly mirror. But will we listen.........
Rating: 
Summary: Less Filling
Review: A worthwhile topic, disappointingly rendered, especially if you've read "Fast Food Nation". Critser goes into useful levels of detail on tantalizingly few topics. Too many of his other points are supported only anecdotally, or worse, because-he-said-so. He does make at least a few points excellently: the blistering critique of our feel-good fat-positive self-esteem etiquette nonsense, that prevents us from warning our friends and ourselves when we are literally gorging ourselves to death, was right on the mark and needed saying. I attended a women's college during a high-level eating disorder scare, and found it surprising and eye-opening to learn that the rates of anorexia and bulimia are far lower than our self-help culture has suggested. Certainly it is useful for everyone to place anorexia and bulimia in proper perspective alongside the skyrocketing rates of obesity, and ask ourselves what we've gained for conceding one in the name of fighting the others. (He does not detail, but in later years it has also become part of the thinking on eating disorders that they are primarily mental illnesses related to control and trauma, not food. We should stop treating them as being about food, and start treating obesity, which is about food!) And, the chapter on the "branding" of food and drink in our schools should be a wake-up call for parents and school boards nationwide. Unfortunately, too many other topics represent missed opportunities or simply misfires. Sure, his high fructose corn syrup theory is supported by some initial dietary research, but so were all the other fad diets he himself decries. The opening chapter on America's food subsidies and ag policies is frustratingly thin and primarily devoted to an amusing character study of Mr. Butz instead of a weighty analysis of which foods we make available to ourselves and at what prices. It's been said that subsidies of specific unhealthy food types contribute to the disproportionate rates of obesity among the poor (because the cheapest foods are the worst for you, while lean meats and fresh produce are unaffordable for many working Americans), but you won't find that discussion here. There's no mention at all of the shift in the nature of employment for Americans... thanks to labor-saving and even safety devices, even minimum-wage work is increasingly sedentary (standing in one place all day as a cashier or Wal-Mart greeter is not physical activity), and at home, the villainous TV and video games get all the blame, with no discussion of everyday labor-saving devices and their effect on American sloth. I don't recall much information about Americans' rejection of public transit and our propensity to fight one another tooth and nail for a parking space five feet closer to the mall doors. If we fail to recognize that modernity has changed the nature of our physical lives across the board, all of Critser's exhortations about PE will surely fail. He hints at it, but never really nails it... for most Americans, exercise has become artificial rather than an integral part of everyday life. And PE, no matter how skillfully taught, is artificial, in a structured form unavailable to adults. The affluent can afford to purchase their exercise in comparably tidy packages (clubs, leagues, etc.), but where does that leave the rest of us when we grow up? And so, saddest of all, Critser's one and only proffered "solution" is: more PE in (public) schools. What a political football that is! Should our desperately cash-strapped schools (stripped of their fast food and soda sponsorship contracts, no less) pull money and time out of already underfunded and inadequate academic programs? Should we spend yet more of our resources teaching our kids how to have a sanctioned lifestyle instead of teaching them how to read and do math? Especially low-income kids, who need a real education more than anyone! Do our schools have to be everything to every child simply because they're the one and only opportunity in an American's entire lifetime where we have a captive audience? Can we serve Americans better all the way through adulthood if we teach literacy, history, statistics and general critical thinking instead of dodgeball? "Fat Land" is a tasty appetizer. I hope the main course on this subject is yet to come.
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.
Rating: 
Summary: No way...
Review: I've never read this book, but I've read what it's about. I myself am plus sized and found out that being overweight is not, as people believe, unhealthy. If you excersize you are healthy, no matter what your weight. I found this out when me and my cousin were running one day. My cousin who is 5'6" tall and 80lbs was not only running SLOWER than me, but she was also panting MORE than I was when we stopped running. That just told me that the media doesn't care about our health, they care about what we look like.
This is so because I am a healthy fat girl and proud of it, my cousin is an unhealthy skinny girl. I hate books like this. Who cares if americans are fat? Fat doesn't mean your unhealthy and automatically lazy. It just means that we like to eat more than a skinny person does. So friggen what?
Rating:
Summary: Duh!
Review: I thought I went over this in my previous review, but when I say I'm stuffed, I'm stuffed! Back off with your leftovers, man!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Read
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I have recently started to make an effort to become a fit person. This book went beyond the obvious to point out why america is so overweight. The book looks at the psyche, legislation, and even religion as to why americans feel it is ok to be so large.
I enjoyed Fat Land from beginning to end. It is a book jammed with outstanding journalism, wise and humorous asides, and compassion for those who suffer from obesity, one of the nation's top health problems.
Overall, it's a great feel-good type of book. Just like my new beverage of choice called s o y f e e. It's made from soybeans that you brew just like coffee. Caffeine-free, you'll find it at www. S oycoffee.com.
A great read about the topic of the day...
Rating:
Summary: Condescending view--it's just not that easy!
Review: Losing weight is NOT as simple as Mr. Critser seems to believe, and his obvious disdain for the obese only takes away from his basic premise. Although he goes to great lengths to show scientific studies and historic references, the underlying attitude of "obesity is the same as laziness and the culture is just promoting it" is apparent in the language. Trust me, making someone feel bad about their weight is the worst way to make them get thin--or at least stay thin. How about, instead of trying to shame people back into thinness (an impossible task, as it turns out), we try to shame McDonald's and Krispy Kreme into being more concerned for their consumers' welfare? A better book on the subject would be Robert Pool's Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic. It contains many more conversations with doctors and scientists as well as people who have gained or lost a large amount of weight, putting a much better spotlight on science versus personal disgust.
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: Why It's Normal to Be Fat
Review: Critser is no victim-based advocate calling for lawsuits against fast-food corporations in this incisive, analytical manifesto, which successfully penetrates the underlying causes of America's obesity epidemic. He explains that the obesity rate, which was always stable at around 25%, shot up to 60-65% in the 1980s and he provides a coherent narrative, packed with well-documented statistics, to show the major forces of that obesity spike. He shows that Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture for Nixon, was a key player in making the environment conducive to our being fat. In the 1970's, under Butz's charge, farmers grew more corn to make a cheaper form of sugar, High Frutose Corn Syrup, which metabolizes in far more dangerous ways than regular sucrose. Secondly, he made a deal with Malaysia, allowing them to export palm oil, also called "hog's lard," to America. Palm oil turns out to be a form of trans fat which, with a shelf life of infinity, clogs our arteries. The other enviromental condition that led us down a path of obesity was the Super-Size-Me Philosophy spawned in the fast-food industry. Shrewd business men who wanted greater profits preyed on our psychology and created a new way to make us fat:
1. Disguise our piggishness by making huge bags of fries rather than shaming us into buying two bags.
2. Combine low-profit (hamburgers) with high-profit (soda and fries) foods to create a "value meal."
3. Emphasize price and value over taste and presentation, which they found to their giddiness, made us eat MORE.
4. Banish the shame of gluttony. Create a culture where it's cool to overeat in the same way that it's cool to drive a big SUV and be a huge, conspicuous consumer.
What makes Critser's analysis so refreshing is that even though he points at the environmental hurdles we must face if want to be fit and trim, he always encourages us to educate ourselves and to take responsibility for what we put into our mouths. Reading his book is the first step in that education.
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