Marginal Revolution: Fat Politics is “excellent”

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution praises Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics in a post today and gives us a peek into his eating patterns.

First, I have recently switched from Raisin Bran to Spelts cereal in the morning. Second, I prefer mineral water to Coke, but Szechuan restaurants do not serve the former. I am waiting for Markets in Everything, and in the meantime I am not willing to give up Dan Dan Noodles or eat them with plain ice water or tea. Third, in the last year I have started snacking on high-quality dark chocolate. I have yet to decide whether I wish to fight this new source of additional calories…

LINK to post at Marginal Revolution.

UPDATE: LINK to review in the LATimes, where you will find this amazing quote:

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 60% of Americans are overweight and one in four is obese. But that’s only because body mass index (BMI), the U.S. government’s official measuring stick, considers weight solely as a function of height, ignoring tremendous natural variation in body type, percentage of body fat and overall fitness. As a result, Oliver contends, the incidence of obesity and its associated health risks have been grossly exaggerated by government researchers, pharmaceutical companies and the weight-loss industry to make money and fuel prejudice. “By worrying about our weight, we are focusing on the wrong target,” Oliver writes. “[W]e are not getting diabetes, cancer, and heart disease because of how much we weigh; we are getting these problems partly because of how and what we eat” – and too little exercise.

Although Oliver agrees with “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser that we eat too much unhealthy food, he chastises Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Supersize Me” and many weight-loss experts for equating weight gain with poor health, fueling prejudice in otherwise intelligent people. “Not only do they assume that fatness is inherently bad, they also presuppose that fat people (that is, minorities and the poor) are too ignorant to know that they should be thin.”