Food Fight – The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Dr. Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen
The number one rule to remember when reading studies, works of non-fiction, even the news, is that everyone approaches a piece with a bias. When it comes to nutrition studies, the bias often reflects who is paying for the study; in the news, whether the network or paper has a right or left-wing slant. In non-fiction, it comes down to why you’re writing the book and the point you want to get across.
Thus, no matter how much I want to like a book, and to take it seriously, I have to account for the fact that Food Fight was written in part by the Director of the Yale Centre for Eating and Weight Disorders.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – certainly Dr. Kelly Brownell is going to know more about the surging obesity epidemic than the average person. But his bias against the evils of obesity shows up early on, and I can’t help but begin to be skeptical.