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Title: The Fat of the Land: The Obesity Epidemic and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves by Michael Fumento, JoAnn E. Manson ISBN: 0-670-87059-5 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Medical Research, Excellent; Social Commentary, Mixed
Comment: This is not a self-help book. You won't get your hand held ortold to accept yourself. You'll get a kick in the butt and told to dosomething. I don't agree with everything in this book, but Fumento is an extremely good writer, and presents plenty of facts to support most of his strong opinions. Michael Fumento does an excellent job on these accounts:
1 - Showing how the food industry perverted the low-fat recommendation into a fat-free and sugar-laden feeding frenzy. Anything in excess will make you fat.
2 - Showing that the "95% of dieter's regain their weight" is an exaggeration, doesn't clearly define "dieter," and encourages people to give up on controlling their weight.
3 - Showing how the diet industry takes advantage of people's wishes to lose weight without effort.
4 - Bringing us back to the basics: to lose weight you must eat well, and exercise; excess body fat is detrimental to your health; you CAN do something about it.
Here's where he doesn't do so well:
1 - Fumento makes the claim that most fat acceptance activists are extremely obese, like the folks in NAAFA who are 300-600 pounds. This isn't true in my experience. Many therapists who treat eating disorders believe in the tenants of FA. He labels books that discuss the dangers of dieting unnecessary, or show that large people can be fit as fat acceptance and equates fat acceptance with obesity promotion. This is rather hypocritical, since he resists the idea that promoting weight loss encourages anorexia, but he apparently believes this works the other way around. He does believe that pressure to stay thin discourages obesity, however. He believes white women have a lower rate of obesity than black women do because there is more social pressure to be thin in white culture. If this is so, then it is worth noting that white women make up the majority of anorexics, and black women have almost no presence in this disease.
2 - I'm not sure Fumento has a grip on what normal sized women look like. He accuses the movie Circle of Friends in which the hero falls in love with the "chubby girl," and Plus Size models of being "Aiders and Abettors" to obesity. The average Plus Size model is 5 foot 5 and 155 pounds. By the 1959 weight charts that he sites and the Body Mass Index, this is normal. He says that Fraser, the author of Losing It, "comes off as a fat person justifying her condition" (by Fumento's own cited definitions, she is not obese). Even with this jab, much of his own book covers the same material as Fraser, in fact he footnotes her book in one of his arguments against Susan Powter.
3 - Fumento is out of touch with how severe the social effects of "fat discrimination" are. His repulsion of Fat Activists show that the arrived a bit late on the scene. He strongly believes that self-esteem comes not from acceptance, but from accomplishment. I would agree, and point out that the self-esteem that fat acceptance offers comes not from denial, but the permission to experience self-esteem from one's accomplishments in spite of one's appearance.
Fat Acceptance is a philosophy that I am glad I discovered, because at the time I felt that until I was "thin", I did not deserve to feel proud of any of my accomplishments - or even try to accomplish anything that wasn't appearance related. I accepted that I would never become "thin enough" unless I resorted to an eating disorder. However, after reading this book, I have come to the conclusion accepting that I will never be model-thin was healthy, gaining 50 pounds was not.
Rating: 5
Summary: Don't take it so personally
Comment: Some of the negative reviews here seems to be taking Fumento's book awfully personally. If this is the case, don't worry, it's not your fault- by all means continue to gorge yourself to an early death, because after all, it's society's fault, isn't it?
One reader, among many mischaracterizations, said that, according to Fumento, "Yo yo dieting is good." Fumento did not say anything of the sort. By my reading, the book offers solid advice on how to lose weight and keep it off, backed up by solid scientific research. Indeed, compared to most of the lose-weight books and magazine articles available, this book is an oasis of rationality.
A reader also called the book "exploitive", which begs the question, "Exploitive of what or whom, and towards what end?" One supposes he means exploiting overweight people, but it's a mystery what the purpose would be. After all, a book such as this, that tells the hard truth, is not likely to sell very well. In the book, Fumento himself flippantly lays out the instructions for writing a best-selling diet book, which is along the lines of: be fat, lose weight, come up with a gimmick as to why your weight-loss method is different from all the others, tell people what they want to hear: that they can eat whatever they want and don't have to exercise, and can still lose weight with little or no effort.
The people who write such books and articles as these (Susan Powter, etc) are truly exploiting overweight Americans for personal gain, and I share Fumento's contempt for these "profiteers".
Fumento is a science-oriented person, and as such does not use anecdotal evidence very often. This review doesn't have those boundaries, however, so here it is: I have travelled extensively abroad, and when I return home, I never fail to be shocked by how _big_ Americans are. I suppose the critical reviewer could pull out a study showing that Americans somehow have genetics which are entirely different from everyone else, and so you see, it's _really_ not our fault. Seeing that all Americans are originally from those other countries, the genetics/slow metabolism theory just doesn't make any sense.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not worth it!
Comment: The things I liked about this book:
1. It has a breezy, refreshing tone that keeps the book from getting bogged down in the science.
2. Fumento presents a lot of useful information in a straightforward way: eat more fiber, eat more vegetables, get some exercise. Simple concepts, but they can get lost with the latest fad diets.
3. He encourages personal accountability about a weight problem, not trying to blame other people.
The things I did NOT like about the book:
1. Fumento often adopts a condescending attitude toward the obese. In particular, he derides NAAFA and its president, Sally Smith.
2. He ridicules several books about the diet industry as having been written by fat people trying to justify their condition, then reaches the same conclusions their books do. In particular, Laura Fraser's book, Losing It, is mocked, then cited as a source a few chapters later!
3. The thing that bothered me the most about this book was its ending. Throughout most of the book, Fumento advocates taking charge of your own health, and using exercise and a healthy diet for weight control. However, in the last chapter, he discusses the benefits of phen/fen and ephedrine, even saying that he urged his friend to give ephedrine a try. Perhaps at the time the book was published, those drugs had not been proven as dangerous as they have now. However, pushing weight control drugs after spending hundreds of pages telling people that they can't blame anybody but themselves for their obesity is inconsistent. He writes that people can't blame genetics for obesity because obesity has skyrocketed in the US over the last 100 years, and genes can't change that fast. Well, if obesity wasn't such a problem back then, and all we're doing differently is eating more and exercising less, then why advocate using drugs to control your weight?
In conclusion, I would say that this book contains a lot of useful information, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to live with the condescending attitude and sort through some bad information.
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Title: Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser ISBN: 0618164723 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Hungry Gene: The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin by Ellen Ruppel Shell ISBN: 0871138565 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Food Fight : The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It by Kelly D. Brownell, Katherine Battle Horgen ISBN: 0071402500 Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books Pub. Date: 07 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Fat : Fighting the Obesity Epidemic by Robert Pool ISBN: 0195118537 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Food Politics : How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health by Marion Nestle ISBN: 0520240677 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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