Conventional wisdom that junk food is solely responsible obesity epidemic challenged.

Fast-food and soft drinks account for “a minority” of calories we consume but we focus on those items while ignoring foods such as potatoes, chicken and meat which account for most of our calorie intake, Prof [broken link removed], head of UCD’s centre for food and health, said yesterday.
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He said this “tsunami of lard” tended to come in waves throughout centuries and by blaming one thing we were ignoring the complexity of the problem. Hippocrates [who was born in 460 BC] wrote in his essay on the Scythians that the girls were “amazingly flabby and podgy” while obesity was common in ancient Rome.

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Chapter summaries​

Chapter 1: With regard to food
Chapter 2: Sugar and spice and all things nasty
Chapter 3: Modified foods: genetic or atomic?
Chapter 4: The metrics of food and health
Chapter 5: Personalized nutrition – fitting into your genes
Chapter 6: Plastic babies – the phenonomen of epigenetics and nutrition
Chapter 7: Your insides out: food - the gut and health
Chapter 8: A tsunami of lard: the global epidemic of obesity
Obesity is seen as a simple problem: people get overweight because they eat more calories than they expand [sic]. That’s a bit like saying “cancer is simply a cell gone wrong”.

This chapter begins by briefly explaining the biology of the diabetes associated with obesity and then moves to the biology of the control of food intake. It makes the point that rodent studies of the regulation of food intake are of interest but we have a large part of our brain, the neo-cortex, responsible for higher human functions, which overrides simple biology signals such as hunger. We refuse to eat cat food when hungry whereas a rat will readily do so.

We then move to genetics and specifically to twin studies and show how powerful the heritability element of obesity is.

A strong case is made in this chapter that much of the research in this area focusing on foods responsible for obesity (fast food, soft drinks, processed foods) is going nowhere largely because of the reasons outlined in chapter 4 on our poor ability to accurately quantify food intakes.

The case for a greater focus on linking genetics to food related behaviour is made. Dieting is dealt with as is physical activity and the stigmatization of the obese.

Finally this chapter looks at little known data on the rise in obesity pointing out that obesity has been rising in the US in waves dating back to the early 20th century.

The conventional wisdom that it is simply junk food is challenged and data on inter-generational augmentation of obesity through epigenetics, discussed in chapter 6 is discussed.
Chapter 9: Greying matters – food and the elderly
Chapter 10: Food and Health – The science, policy and politics
Chapter 11: The hazards of food
Chapter 12: How the other half dies
Chapter 13: Mankind and Mother Earth
Chapter 14: Reflections and projections

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