Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

As you can see from the title,
Fat Chance
is about Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.

This book gets 5 stars from me, not because it I loved reading it so much, some of it was a bit of a chore. But it’s one of those books you wish everyone would read, or that it was on the school curriculum, as the knowledge within is so important and so beneficial to everyone’s health. (And if everyone read it, it might stop other people feeding your children sugar every chance they get).

I don’t hold much truck with news headlines that say this food or that food, is bad for you, or good for you one month, and vice versa the next month. I prefer to get my facts from books based on hard science, and years of research. And that’s what Fat Chance is.

In no particular order, here are just some of facts that I have learned or had confirmed by this book:

– Sugar is a poison. It’s not the type of poison that will kill you straight away. It’s worse than that. It will slowly eat away at your health, greatly increase your chance of cardiovascular disease, and ultimately decrease your life span.

– Fruit is good for you. But only as nature intended. Peel an orange, eat it, great. But even juicing it changes everything by eliminating the fibre. Then you’re just drinking sugar water, no better than a can of coke or sugared drink! Even smoothies shred the fibre too much.

– (Natural) Juice has 5.8 teaspoons of sugar per cup. Soda has 5.4

– “Real food doesn’t have or need a Nutrition Facts label. The more labels you read, the more garbage you’re buying”

– Stepping on a scale measures 4 types of weight: 1. bone, 2.Muscle 3.Subcutaneous fat (big ass, fat thighs etc) and 4.Visceral fat. Subcutaneous fat isn’t bad for your health, but Visceral fat is, this is fat around your belly and inside your organs. That’s the fat you need to lose. (If your focus is on health rather then vanity)

– Obese people should not be judged. Thinking of them as lazy over eaters is a grossly incorrect generalization. There is a vast range of health issues that makes it impossible for some people to lose weight without medical intervention specific to their body. And a vast range of societal and environmental problems that might have put them there in the first place.

– The single best thing you can do to keep healthy, is a regular routine of cardiovascular workouts. Running, cycling, swimming etc. (Note: for health & well being, not looking good).

– The only guarantee you can have that you are eating unsugared / unprocessed foods, is when you are eating food that didn’t come with a label. Real food: meat, fruit, veg.

– A calorie is NOT a calorie. This is a highly propogated myth. Some calories are not burned off as easily as others. The type of caloric intake varies greatly.

– “All successful diets share three precepts: low sugar, high fiber, and fat and carbohydrate together in the presence of an offsetting amount of fibre. Anything after that is window dressing”

– “First step in eliminating your sugar consumption is to start eliminating all sugared beverages. We were designed to eat our calories not drink them”

– Make dessert a once-weekly treat at the weekends. For you and your kids.

I’ve had a lifetime of over indulging in sugar and sugared foods. And I’ve also mostly had a sedentary life with little sports activity. And have always been *lucky* to have a metabolism that resulted in me never really getting fat. But I’m starting to almost consider that not so lucky, because I’m pretty sure that abuse has manifested itself in many other ways. Constant stomach aches and digestive problems, major fatigue issues etc, I’ve a long list of symptoms I won’ bore you with. Maybe if I had got fat, I would have cut down on sugar intake a lot sooner, and I might be healthier now.

Having said that, I’ve vastly cut out sugar recently and started exercising, and I’m definitely noticing the health benefits. And this book really drove all that home. If I could go back in time and warn my younger self about one drug to watch out for it wouldn’t be tobacco, alcohol, class A drugs or recreational drugs. It’d be sugar. It’s the one addictive, and slowly damaging drug that no one seriously talks to you about. Hopefully that will start to change.

The author’s hour and a half long presentation, which has had almost 4 million views on youtube in the header

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