A book title I can believe in

“The World is Fat: the fads, trends, policies, and products that are fattening the human race”

I like the play on Friedman. I think I like anything that makes fun of Friedman actually.

Barry Popkin is the author.

He is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition at University of North Carolina. That’s a long and pretty crazy title. “Professor of Global Nutrition”. I dig.

I picked up his book at NPR. From the back of the book:

Popkin argues that widespread obesity is less an effect of poor individual dietary choices than the consequences of a high-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our everyday lives.

In a cultural matrix where Kellogg spent 32.8 million dollars in one year marketing Cheez-its, you gotta wonder.

WTF:

32.8 million is more than the budget of a lot of Hollywood films:

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls – 30 mil
Million Dollar Baby – 30 mil
Dodgeball – 30 mil
Mumford – 28.7 mil
Zoolander – 28 mil

…just to name a few.

Think of the amazing movie Kellogg could have produced!?

And Cheez-Its are nasty.

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Anyways, I’m gonna read Popkin’s book and post about it so stay tuned.

(BTW, “Hot, Fat, and Crowded” would be an awesome book title too.)

Outsourcing Digestion?

Robert Krulwich (of NPR/Radio Lab) has an interesting story up about the two sets of bacteria that we have inside of us – one passed down from parents, the other a byproduct of our environment:

In studies on mice, their bacteria seems to affect weight gain…

Biologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis became quite well known a few years ago for a group of very skinny mice in his lab. The mice were skinny because they had no bacteria in their intestines. Gordon had kept them completely bacteria-free. If a bacteria-free mouse eats, food passes right through the intestine, significantly undigested.

So without bacteria, the mouse can eat and eat and eat and never gain weight. But when Gordon exposed the mice to “this big, bad, dirty world,” as Gibson calls it, the mice suddenly turned their food into more calories and gained weight. So bacteria matter. Apparently, they can digest food far more efficiently.

So controlling these bacteria may allow doctors to prevent disease (it seems to be working in mice):

University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky, with collaborators from Yale University, recently reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of type 1 diabetes in lab mice. “By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent type 1 diabetes,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The bottom line: We now have two sets of genes to think about — the ones we got from our parents and the ones of organisms living inside us. Our parents’ genes we can’t change, but the other set? Now that is one of the newest and most exciting fields in cell biology.

I could see this becoming a whole new angle on weight loss…”what kind of bacteria do you have?”

(hat tip Catherine)