If losing weight was easy there would be no overweight people. These two authors explore the reasons for this. There are multiple brain areas and intertwining hormones involved in appetite and weight. We have less control over what we eat than we would like to believe—our bodies have secret override codes that can frustrate the most devoted dieter. Combined with our food environment (what foods are easily available, their cost, their palatability, etc.), our personal tastes, and our social cues, what we eat becomes very complicated very quickly.
”With something as fundamentally important to life as eating, biology wasn't messing around.”
I was surprised at how little the microbiome was discussed. Instead, the authors wrote about the companies offering personal nutrition guidance, sometimes using glucose monitors as a guide. The evidence for this is anemic at best, but it is a measure of people's worries about their health that many are willing to spend significant amounts of money for this advice. I tend to believe that if a particular program, supplement, or food provided a true dietary advantage, it would be featured in news headlines and on the cover of Time magazine. I occasionally get suckered into buying a bottle of vitamins—just recently it was Vitamin B complex. I'll finish them, mostly because I paid for them, but I know I'm better off eating foods with B vitamins in them.
Many of the issues discussed are what I think of as first world problems. Hunger is still a reality in many parts of the world (and among the poor in our own societies). The future of food production will have to deal with more equitable distribution of food. We are also going to have to face climate change and depleting water supplies.
In the end, Michael Pollan gave some of the best advice: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
