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Overview

This book is about human nutrition. It provides a comprehensive overview of the topic, as well as information on several different studies and their results. The reader will learn about the health benefits and repercussions of basic foods such as meat, milk, fish, vegetables and fruits.

Obesity is a complex problem. It can be caused by many factors, including genetics, environment and lifestyle choices. We know that obesity is the result of taking in more calories than you burn. Scientists don’t entirely understand why we get fat and how to prevent it without counting calories or changing our diet and exercise habits.

They believe that the reason so many people are overweight is because they eat too much unhealthy food and don’t exercise enough. Based on this theory, one might conclude that fat people are lazy and gluttonous. They’re like balloons—when you put energy into them (by eating), they get bigger, and when you take it out (by exercising), they shrink back to normal size.

However, it’s not that simple. The human body is complex and doesn’t always use calories the way we think it does. That’s why some people consume more food than they need to survive.

Additionally, people can be overweight even when they live in poverty. For example, indigenous peoples of America were forced to subsist on small amounts of food and their children showed signs of deficiency, yet the mothers were often obese.

Are we stuck in a dogma that sounds convincing but doesn’t actually hold water? At any rate, the prevailing models haven’t been able to stop the obesity epidemic or explain why some people are fat and others aren’t.

Given the contradictions in established views, anybody who has seriously struggled with their weight should question those ideas. People who consume more calories than they burn will get fat: a common misconception.

Big Idea #1: The common belief is that fat makes us overweight. However, this logic doesn’t hold up in the long term because it’s not a sustainable approach to weight loss.

We know enough about obesity to be able to stop its spread, but health experts decided not to do anything. In the 1950s, it was clear that being overweight was caused by a hormonal imbalance. However, this idea gradually disappeared and was replaced by the notion that people were overweight because they ate too much. What caused this change?

The change in paradigm was largely due to the rise in heart disease cases. Heart disease dominated public health interest and economic and political issues. It could be explained by people eating fatty foods, which made them fat and sick. Doctors warned about the consequences of a diet with too much fat. This influenced medical students, who believed it for decades afterward.

Because the current medical opinion is based on a flawed model, it’s not necessarily careless. It just means that doctors and nutrition experts are caught in a paradigm that makes it difficult to question or reject as false. It’s hard to uproot firm beliefs, so science spread the doctrine that if you want to lose weight, you should eat less fat. But people didn’t lose weight; they got fatter instead. Heart disease cases have risen over time too.

Obesity is usually blamed on a person’s eating habits. However, that logic is flawed because fat doesn’t make you fat.

Big Idea #2: Exercising more and eating less will not necessarily help us to lose weight.

When we eat unhealthy foods and don’t exercise, we get fat. But what makes us lazy? We become lazy because of a hormone imbalance that makes us lethargic.