Dr. Robert H. Lustig’s career was spent in pediatric medicine, working largely on the growing issue of childhood obesity and diabetes. In Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine, he discusses the role that processed foods have in impacting our society’s health...and not for the better.
Most of us often think of fat in food and fast food as bad things. Lustig argues that while, yes, those things are bad that it is really sugar and the lack of what he terms “Real Food” as the culprit of our medical issues. Real Food is unprocessed whole grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and meat that is raised and farmed in a non-industrial manner. While processed foods offer convenience and relatively lower upfront costs, Lustig advocates that the long-term health impacts from lower nutritional content and higher preservative and nitrate content will cause longer-term health issues.
Lustig asserts that the medical community is also complicit in contributing to America’s poor diet as medical school offers very little class time on nutrition and that Big Pharma and Big Food underwrite much of the research and education that don’t educate people on nutrition and instead focus people’s attention on calorie count. Lustig argues that not all calories are created equal nor are the impacts from those calories going to be the same.
Lustig wraps up Metabolical by offering policy ideas, similar to the ones used to counter tobacco and alcohol such as taxing sugary items and putting restrictions on advertising. Knowing the obstacles that some of the sugar taxes have had on a local level, a national or state level of taxation may face some tough opposition.
Metabolical to be very much one man’s indictment of Big Food and Big Pharma, at times as bombastic as much as it is educational (and Lustig educates the reader a lot in this book). The adage “you are what you eat” keeps coming to mind; Metabolical may very well have you rethinking how and what you eat by the time you are done reading it.
MY RATING - 4
