Fat Chance Quotes

“The obesity pandemic is due to our altered biochemistry, which is a result of our altered environment.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Exercise is the single best thing you can do for yourself. It’s way more important than dieting, and easier to do. Exercise works at so many levels—except one: your weight.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.” —Frank Zappa”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“The Japanese have a saying, “Eat until you are 80 percent full.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“The real problem is not in losing the weight but in keeping it off for any meaningful length of time. Numerous sources show that almost every lifestyle intervention works for the first three to six months. But then the weight comes rolling back.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Sugar is now the most ubiquitous foodstuff worldwide, and has been added to virtually every processed food, limiting consumer choice and the ability to avoid it. Approximately 80 percent of the 600,000 consumer packaged foods in the United States have added caloric sweeteners.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Unfortunately, food now matters even more than it should. Food is beyond a necessity; it’s also a commodity, and it has been reformulated to be an addictive substance. This has many effects on our world: economically, politically, socially, and medically. There”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“In other words, the FDA is concerned only with acute toxins in food (those chemicals that kill you immediately), not chronic toxins, which kill you slowly by promoting chronic disease.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“The American food industry produces 3,900 calories per person per day, with about 29 percent wastage, but we should rationally eat 1,800–2,000. Who eats the difference? We do! Throughout evolution, humans could eat only a fixed amount, but today that amount is limitless.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“As you will see, all successful diets share three precepts: low sugar, high fiber (which means high micronutrients), and fat and carbohydrate consumed together in the presence of an offsetting amount of fiber. Anything after that is window dressing.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“The question is, why is the USDA in charge of the country’s nutrition anyway? In 2003 the Chicago Tribune reported the comments of Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.)15: “The primary mission of the USDA is, after all, to promote the sale of agricultural products…So putting the USDA in charge of dietary advice is in some respects like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” So who should be in charge of our nutrition? How about anyone without a vested interest in pushing the poison?”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Food processing is the Mr. Hyde of this obesity pandemic. And the way to reverse it is to do the opposite.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Michael Pollan, in his New York Times article “Unhappy Meals,” exhorts us to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That’s seven words; I’ll reduce it to three: eat real food. The “not too much” will take care of itself. And the “mostly plants” isn’t a worry if you eat the plants as they came out of the ground, or the animals who ate the food that came out of the ground—because they ate plants.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“No, my friends, this won’t be solved from the top-down. This will have to be a bottom-up movement. You can’t expect government to do the right thing. You have to coerce it into doing the right thing. When there are more votes at stake than dollars, that’s when legislators will come around. But that’s not a reason to be daunted. In a democracy, the public has power.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina states that of the six hundred thousand food items for sale in the United States, 80 percent are laced with added sugar. Ninety percent of the food produced in the United States is sold to you by a total of ten conglomerates—Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dole, General Mills, Hormel, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Fat cells want to be downsized about as much as General Motors or AIG.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“There is no fat accumulation without insulin. Insulin shunts sugar to fat. It makes your fat cells grow. The more insulin, the more fat, period.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Ethanol (Grain Alcohol) Ethanol is a naturally occurring by-product of carbohydrate metabolism, called fermentation. Upon ingestion of 120 calories of ethanol (e.g., a 1.5-ounce shot of 80-proof hard spirits), 10 percent (12 calories) is metabolized within the stomach and intestine (called the first-pass effect) and 10 percent is metabolized by the brain and other organs. The metabolism in the brain is what leads to the alcohol’s intoxicating effects. Approximately 96 calories reach the liver—four times more than with glucose. And that’s important, as the detrimental effects are dose-dependent.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“There is not one study that demonstrates that exercise alone causes significant weight loss, and a meta-analysis (designed to assess significance over many studies at once) proved it; moderate exercise resulted in a weight loss of 2.2 pounds and vigorous exercise in a loss of 3.5 pounds.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: The bitter truth about sugar

“Bottom line, although lots of effort and money have been thrown at various methods of obesity prevention at the individual education level, the results are downright disappointing.18 When it comes right down to it, you can’t change behavior with information alone, especially when you’re talking about addictive substances. Necessary, but not sufficient. Because the biochemical drive will eventually overcome any cognitive attempt to control it. Nope, it’s going to be all about changing the environment, and that means changing availability.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“None of the suggestions in this chapter is remotely actionable today, because government has been co-opted in what is known as “elite capture.” By this we mean that the government bends the regulatory systems in the food industry’s favor, to maintain a decidedly lopsided power structure. Either the legislative branch won’t act because the food industry is paying it off, the executive branch won’t act because it’s afraid of the political repercussions, or the populace won’t act because as far as they are concerned, “a calorie is still a calorie” and they still believe in personal responsibility—and they’re addicted anyway.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“Real food, containing endogenous micronutrients, prevents metabolic syndrome. Processed food causes metabolic syndrome.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: The bitter truth about sugar

“Do we need to eat what our ancestors did or eschew all carbs? I would propose that all we need to do is eat “safe carbs.” That means low sugar to prevent insulin resistance, and high fiber to reduce flux to the liver and prevent insulin hypersecretion. And while we’re at it, eat “safe fat,” that is, real fat rather than synthetic fat (such as trans fats, which can’t be metabolized).”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

“In short—insulin makes you gain weight, while cortisol tells you where to put it.”
― Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease