The World Is Fat

"For more than three decades Barry Popkin has been spearheading research on how lifestyle changes affect the body composition of people around the world, His long-term studies have followed the spread of obesity across six continents, In The World Is Fat, he compares how we live today with how we lived half a century ago, through the stories of tour families, as well as his own family life from the 1950s." Ultimately, Popkin argues, widespread obesity and the chronic diseases that contribute to the bulk of deaths in the world are less a result of poor individual dietary choices than a consequence of a high-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our everyday lives.