In every case, he wrote, the foods they craved were breads and starches and desserts. As a consequence, Brillat-Savarin considered it indisputable that grains and starches were the principal cause of obesity*2—along with a genetic or biological predisposition to fatten easily, which not everybody has—and that sugar exacerbated the fattening process. He lived in a time, though, when sugar was still a luxury for the wealthy, and sugary beverages were exceedingly hard to come by, at least compared to their ubiquity a century later. So he focused his advice on starches and flour, assuming that
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