Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It.

Abstract

is that the increasingprevalence ofobesity follows inexorably from the pairing ofhuman biology with the created by present­day eating and exercise patterns. Much ofthe book is devoted todescribing this environment and the force-likenedto that ofatsunami-withwhich it shapes public health.In Part 1(Chapters I to 3), the authors make the casethat changing the toxic environment is the most effectiveapproach for halting the spread ofthe global obesity epidemic.They argue that our hunter-gatherpast has given us a metabolismtuned to storing calories in times ofplenty while modernagriculture provides many with perpetual caloric plenty. In theirview, changing the food environment will be both easier andmore successful than changing human biology.Part 2 (Chapters 4 to 9) presents and discusses details ofthe American food and exercise environment. Chapter topicsinclude barriers to exercise (4), the influence ofmarketingdirected to children (5), junk food in schools (6 and 7),expanding p011ion sizes (8), and economic incentives for overconsumption (9). Evidence from many countries, especiallyCanada and the UK, is compared and contrasted with USexamples.