By Harriet Brown
Over the previous twenty-five years, our quest for thinness has morphed right into a relentless obsession with weight and physique snapshot. In our tradition, "fat" has develop into a four-letter be aware. Or, as Lance Armstrong acknowledged to the spouse of a former teammate, "I referred to as you loopy. I referred to as you a complain. yet I by no means known as you fat." How did we get to this position the place the worst insult you could hurl at somebody is "fat"? the place girls and women (and more and more males and boys) will vitamin, purge, overeat, undereat, and berate themselves and others, all within the identify of being thin?
As a technological know-how journalist, Harriet Brown has explored this collective longing and fixation from an aim viewpoint; as a mom, spouse, and lady with "weight issues," she has struggled to appreciate it on a private point. Now, in Body of Truth, Brown systematically unpacks what's been provided as "truth" approximately weight and health.
Starting with the 4 greatest lies, Brown exhibits how study has been manipulated; how the scientific career is complicit in holding us at the hours of darkness; how colossal pharma and massive, empty can provide equivalent giant, gigantic money; how a lot of what we all know (or imagine we all know) approximately overall healthiness and weight is incorrect. and the way all of these have an effect on we all each day, no matter if we all know it or not.
The quest for future health and wellbeing hasn't ever been extra pressing, but such a lot folks proceed to shop for into fad diets and not possible physique beliefs, ignorant of the wear and tear we're doing to ourselves. via interviews, study, and her personal event, Brown not just provides us the true tale on weight, healthiness, and wonder, but additionally deals concrete feedback for a way every one people can kind throughout the lies and misconceptions and make peace with and for ourselves.
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Extra info for Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—And What We Can Do about It
Sample text
Cautions about this latent menace have been publicized, with ( 2 4) convincing scenarios—forexample, by Taylor and Willrich. In May 1977 the alarm bells rang with two new realities. S. Government Accounting Office reported for the second time to the Congress that several thousand pounds of weapons-grade uranium had been mislaid over the years in commercial nuclear plants, enough to make dozens of nuclear bombs. While there was no claim that it had been stolen, the apparently careless accounting procedures made it impossible to say with complete certainty what had happened to the missing material.
More and more technical, economic, legal, institutional, political and social processes have been successively adopted and mixed. With divergent social preferences now finding political expression, these interactions have swiftly increased in number, variety and novelty, with associated synergistic interdependence on the one hand and conflict on the other. Political boundaries no longer constrict social traffic. In economic terms, banking, currency and trade freely cross national frontiers; oil produced in one country is shipped to fifty; aircraft manufactured in one state are assembled with components from twenty.
Utilization of high 36 Margins for Survival altitude aerial photography to detect and permit intervention in the 1962 Russian missile build-up in Cuba is a second striking example of both a close shave and the critical role of military intelligence as ( 2 9) anticipatory protective reaction. War planning goes on continuously. Developing tactics and strategies in advance of conflict, and rehearsals through war games, are both deterrents and techniques to reduce losses. During peace time, armed services have the time, resources and inclination to engage in such exercises at very low additional cost.