The World is Fat
The Fads, Trends, Policies and Products that are Fattening
the Human Race

In his new book ‘The World is Fat’ Barry Popkin, global economist and nutritionist, explains how food ads, technology and government and NOT biology are making the world fat!

Barry Popkin, director of the University of North Carolina Interdisciplinary Obesity Center and a professor of global nutrition, has studied economics and nutrition for three decades. His research has spanned six continents, where he spearheaded wide-ranging, long-term studies of the effects of lifestyle change on body composition. In The World is Fat, Popkin compares our lifestyles today with those half a century ago using stories of four families from his research as well as his own family life from the 1950s.

Why?
Because 50 years ago, there were 100 million overweight people in the world and 7 billion people who suffered from malnutrition. Today, over 1.6 billion people are overweight and 600-700 million suffer from malnutrition.

His argument?
The explosion of obesity across the world cannot simply be blamed on too many cheeseburgers. And it cannot be solved by 1.6 billion treadmills.

In The World is Fat, Barry Popkin, one of the world’s leading experts on the obesity crisis, argues that the fattening of the human race is not simply about gluttony, but it is instead the result of an unprecedented collision of technology, globalization, government policies, and food industry practices with human biology,

Since WWII, Popkin shows, four trends have significantly changed the way we eat:

• snacking

• weekend eating

• super-sizing

• eating away from home

Who is to blame?
Not just the consumer.
For example: Arguably one of the most direct causes of our collective weight gain is the clash between our drinking habits and our biology. We can drink hundreds of calories and not feel any less hungry. Food and beverage companies aggressively market an ever-increasing range of high calorie sodas, sweetened teas, lattes, and energy drinks and we drink them with abandon – the top 40 percent of caloric beverage drinkers consume over 760 calories a day from beverages.

Throw in large declines in physical activity, the replacing of key elements of traditional cuisines – such as noodles in China and the tortilla in Mexico – with processed versions, a powerful food industry that uncompromisingly fights change, and obesity has become a full-blown global public health crisis in a few short decades.

What’s the point?
Ultimately, The World is Fat shows that widespread obesity is less an effect of poor individual choices than the consequence of a high-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our lives.

Dr. Barry M. Popkin was interviewed on Champagne Sundays online radio show on January 11, 2009. To listen to the entire, unedited show, please click here. To listen to Dr. Popkin's interview, please double click on the Play Button below.

About the Author – Dr. Barry M. Popkin, the Carla Steel Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition, has a Ph.D. in economics and is Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill where he directs the UNC-CH’s Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity. Dr. Popkin studies dietary behavior with a focus on eating patterns, trends, and sociodemographic determinants; the nutrition transition and the rapid changes in obesity; dynamic changes in diet, physical activity and inactivity; body composition changes (and the factors responsible for these changes); consequences of the these changes; and program and policy options for managing change. He is also active in a number of other NIH-funded studies of countries around the world including detailed longitudinal studies that he directs in China and Russia and related work in Brazil and several other countries. His research has spanned six continents over the past thirty years, and his work has been featured in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Scientific America.