4th Estate

In Fat Chance, Robert Lustig documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of metabolic syndrome – whose symptoms include obesity, diabetes and heart disease – over the last 30 years. He exposes for the first time how changes in the food industry and in our wider environment have affected our collective metabolisms and our waistlines, and he shows how industry and political forces, motivated by greed, don’t want things to change. In the late 1970s, when the US government mandated the removal of fat from food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, and suggests societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.