What do you think?
Rate this book
The Evolution of Obesity
In this sweeping exploration of the relatively recent obesity epidemic, Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin probe evolutionary biology, history, physiology, and medical science to uncover the causes of our growing girth. The unexpected answer? Our own evolutionary success.
For most of the past few million years, our evolutionary ancestors' survival depended on being able to consume as much as possible when food was available and to store the excess energy for periods when it was scarce. In the developed world today, high-calorie foods are readily obtainable, yet the propensity to store fat is part of our species' heritage, leaving an increasing number of the world's people vulnerable to obesity. In an environment of abundant food, we are anatomically, physiologically, metabolically, and behaviorally programmed in a way that makes it difficult for us to avoid gaining weight.
Power and Schulkin’s engagingly argued book draws on popular examples and sound science to explain our expanding waistlines and to discuss the consequences of being overweight for different demographic groups. They review the various studies of human and animal fat use and storage, including those that examine fat deposition and metabolism in men and women; chronicle cultural differences in food procurement, preparation, and consumption; and consider the influence of sedentary occupations and lifestyles.
A compelling and comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of the obesity epidemic, The Evolution of Obesity offers fascinating insights into the question, Why are we getting fatter?
For most of the past few million years, our evolutionary ancestors' survival depended on being able to consume as much as possible when food was available and to store the excess energy for periods when it was scarce. In the developed world today, high-calorie foods are readily obtainable, yet the propensity to store fat is part of our species' heritage, leaving an increasing number of the world's people vulnerable to obesity. In an environment of abundant food, we are anatomically, physiologically, metabolically, and behaviorally programmed in a way that makes it difficult for us to avoid gaining weight.
Power and Schulkin’s engagingly argued book draws on popular examples and sound science to explain our expanding waistlines and to discuss the consequences of being overweight for different demographic groups. They review the various studies of human and animal fat use and storage, including those that examine fat deposition and metabolism in men and women; chronicle cultural differences in food procurement, preparation, and consumption; and consider the influence of sedentary occupations and lifestyles.
A compelling and comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of the obesity epidemic, The Evolution of Obesity offers fascinating insights into the question, Why are we getting fatter?
- GenresNonfictionScienceHistory
408 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
9 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 12, 2013
An excellent antidote for way too damn many stupid and useless rah-rah diet books. (And the rest of that industry.)
The subject is what it says on the tin; the deep evolution, not the treatment or social aspects, of obesity. In a desperate scramble to try to bring the reader up to speed on the huge sweep of modern biology that goes into their analysis, the authors sometimes wobble a bit over how much they have to explain to the lay reader and how far back they need to start. They (though not necessarily the lay reader) seem a bit more comfortable when they come down to grips with molecule-by-molecule discussions of the complexities of human genetics and metabolism. These made my eyes glaze over as some of the more abstruse articles in my Scientific American sometimes do, but happily I wasn't having to memorize it for a test. For anyone who can actually swim in that alphabet soup, I suspect the rating might bump up up a star.
It was still worthwhile running it all past my brain, I think. An enormous amount of work has been done in just the past decade spinning out from the new ability to sequence genomes, and if anything, the floods of fresh data are speeding up, so stay tuned.
The bottom lines, or some of them: the human organism is very, very complex, and the interlinked nature of so many of our internal workings make it very unlikely that any easy pharmacological "silver bullet" will ever be found for weight control, not least because so many molecular factors are also tied into reproduction and human brain development. Evolution has done a lot more to make us resistant to losing weight, on the lower edge of health, than to making us resistant to gaining weight, on the upper edge of health, simply because historically and prehistorically scarcity was always far more common and dangerous than glut. Adipose tissue is not a passive storage medium, but an active endocrine gland; just as doubling or tripling the size of one's parathyroid gland would throw off other systems, so does over-increasing the size of one's adipose "gland". Yes, there is an obesity "epidemic" in Western society and increasingly in other developing areas, due to the mismatch between our evolved characteristics and the unique new high-abundance/low-activity environment in which many of us find ourselves. The natural variation of the human species assures that the individual responses to same will also be widely variable; some people are just un/lucky.
Exercise is good for you. Statistically. Bleh. (Let me tell you, exercise doesn't do a damn thing for a perforated appendix.) That aside, the Johns Hopkins University Press origin and the quarter of the book devoted to references and citations, as well as the generally measured tone, rather incline me to trust the authors.
I read this off my new Kindle Paperwhite. I find it easier on the hands but not quite as easy on the eyes as paper, but my local library didn't have this one, so at least I have rewarded the authors with an e-book sale, and certainly do not regret having done so.
If you made it through high school biology and chemistry, you can probably plow through this with profit. Recommended.
Ta, L.
The subject is what it says on the tin; the deep evolution, not the treatment or social aspects, of obesity. In a desperate scramble to try to bring the reader up to speed on the huge sweep of modern biology that goes into their analysis, the authors sometimes wobble a bit over how much they have to explain to the lay reader and how far back they need to start. They (though not necessarily the lay reader) seem a bit more comfortable when they come down to grips with molecule-by-molecule discussions of the complexities of human genetics and metabolism. These made my eyes glaze over as some of the more abstruse articles in my Scientific American sometimes do, but happily I wasn't having to memorize it for a test. For anyone who can actually swim in that alphabet soup, I suspect the rating might bump up up a star.
It was still worthwhile running it all past my brain, I think. An enormous amount of work has been done in just the past decade spinning out from the new ability to sequence genomes, and if anything, the floods of fresh data are speeding up, so stay tuned.
The bottom lines, or some of them: the human organism is very, very complex, and the interlinked nature of so many of our internal workings make it very unlikely that any easy pharmacological "silver bullet" will ever be found for weight control, not least because so many molecular factors are also tied into reproduction and human brain development. Evolution has done a lot more to make us resistant to losing weight, on the lower edge of health, than to making us resistant to gaining weight, on the upper edge of health, simply because historically and prehistorically scarcity was always far more common and dangerous than glut. Adipose tissue is not a passive storage medium, but an active endocrine gland; just as doubling or tripling the size of one's parathyroid gland would throw off other systems, so does over-increasing the size of one's adipose "gland". Yes, there is an obesity "epidemic" in Western society and increasingly in other developing areas, due to the mismatch between our evolved characteristics and the unique new high-abundance/low-activity environment in which many of us find ourselves. The natural variation of the human species assures that the individual responses to same will also be widely variable; some people are just un/lucky.
Exercise is good for you. Statistically. Bleh. (Let me tell you, exercise doesn't do a damn thing for a perforated appendix.) That aside, the Johns Hopkins University Press origin and the quarter of the book devoted to references and citations, as well as the generally measured tone, rather incline me to trust the authors.
I read this off my new Kindle Paperwhite. I find it easier on the hands but not quite as easy on the eyes as paper, but my local library didn't have this one, so at least I have rewarded the authors with an e-book sale, and certainly do not regret having done so.
If you made it through high school biology and chemistry, you can probably plow through this with profit. Recommended.
Ta, L.
May 21, 2011
This is a solid book that explores the biology that feeds and frames human obesity. It is also an incisive study of evolution and the cultures of feeding and movement. The only issue - with regard to argument - that raised questions for me when reading this book is that the cultural history of obesity was absent and there appeared an inevitability to obesity. Understanding the ideologies and contexts of obesity would have added greater definitional subtlety.
March 1, 2019
Such an exhausting book to read. It needed strong editing and should have been written in concert with journalists.
It uses a lot of motherhood statements, many of which were painfully twee. It was written as if for one’s favourite professor and contained long conceptual sentences that didn’t mean much because they were trying to cover every contingency in nature and biology. It didn’t succinctly make their case with illustrative examples, instead there were long winding sentences and disjointed points.
The content was quite good but hard to understand why they were going on and on about certain things and the role that these concepts had towards producing the obesity epidemic was highly obscure - came off as a textbook.
Painful reading, I am sorry
It uses a lot of motherhood statements, many of which were painfully twee. It was written as if for one’s favourite professor and contained long conceptual sentences that didn’t mean much because they were trying to cover every contingency in nature and biology. It didn’t succinctly make their case with illustrative examples, instead there were long winding sentences and disjointed points.
The content was quite good but hard to understand why they were going on and on about certain things and the role that these concepts had towards producing the obesity epidemic was highly obscure - came off as a textbook.
Painful reading, I am sorry
July 17, 2015
This book explores where our vulnerability to obesity comes from, explained from the standpoint of biology and evolution. The authors' thesis is that a "significant contributor to modern human obesity is the mismatch between our current environment and our evolved adaptive responses." We haven't changed our genes in such a short time, so what is it about our biology that allows our modern environment to trigger such a rampant increase in obesity? There is much discussion at the molecular level, and as such, the reading may be dry for those without a bioscience background. But if you'd like a more in-depth discussion of the many biological factors at play in adiposity, along with why our species adapted to this disposition, it's a fascinating read.
January 8, 2013
I loved this book! I really like the evolutionary biology perspective on this issue and how the authors cited so many studies. It's like reading a book of review articles (kind of), which is appealing to me.
May 13, 2015
This book is clever and informative without pressing an agenda. Written well and an acceptable reference for university, which is pretty crucial!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews