Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss–and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is much less angry and lyrical than Paul Campos’ The Obesity Myth, but it is just as powerful, partly because it takes the reader by surprise. Even the title, “Rethinking Thin,” seems designed to lull the complacent who are going to be confronted with the need to rethink fat. And, it saves its best ammo for the end. Not only is weight loss rarely possible in the way it is advertised, not only are the causes unknown, but the best evidence is that heftier people are healthier than the skinny. The mortality rates are U shaped with overweight in the middle of the valley and the thin and extreme obese at the higher ends (where a rise indicates greater mortality).
This book is never boring, but if you at all know that you like human interest stories, you can be confident that you will find Kolata’s writing fascinating. Also, this is the first book I’ve found that gives some historical/cultural information about when and how views of fat changed in American life. It is all fascinating.
I didn’t give this book five stars because I wasn’t happy with some aspects of Kolata’s happy ending. I think the people who learned to exercise more, eat more healthy, snack less between meals, and accept the results without trying to become skinny, were inspiring. But in that mix Kolata included people obsessed with calorie counts who instinctively interpreted food as caloric numbers. I don’t think that is mentally healthy. (I’d only take off a fraction of a star if that were possible.)
Kolata’s book is short, engaging, and disruptive to the superstitious world in which she lives we live [not sure why I wrote “she lives” originally]. One of her stories involved a statistician in the 1800s who discovered that bleeding did not help the diseases it was supposed to help. He immediately reported that this proved people weren’t being bled soon enough or as much as they needed to be. That is the world we live in today regarding health and fat. All the best evidence is that we are actually hurting ourselves but the thin-regime will never give up the political and economic power they have.
Take it away from them.