*84 That the toxic-environment hypothesis is deeply immersed in moral and class judgments is evidenced by the observation that few or none of the condemnations of fast-food restaurants include a coffee chain such as Starbucks, despite the copious excess calories it peddles. A “grande” (sixteen ounces) Tazo ® Chai Crème Frappuccino, ® for instance, with whipped cream has roughly 510 calories, equivalent to a quarter-pounder with cheese at McDonald’s. The same judgments are made when discussing physical activity: If we sit around all day watching television, we’re condemned as couch potatoes, and our obesity is only a matter of time. If we sit around studying or reading books, this same accusation is rarely voiced.
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*85 These observations do not contradict Magnus-Levy’s. Magnus-Levy compared lean and obese subjects. These latter observations compare those who gain weight to those who don’t; this difference, as we’ll see, is critical.
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*86Obesity and Leanness was the first serious book on obesity published after 1900, when von Noorden published Die Fettsucht. In the years since, there have been only half a dozen similar attempts (out of the innumerable professional texts and proceedings now available) to present a comprehensive and balanced analysis of the evidence, and only three come close to Obesity and Leanness in critical analysis—the chapters on obesity and undernutrition in the 1933 English translation of Eric Grafe’s Metabolic Diseases and Their Treatment, Hilde Bruch’s Importance of Overweight, and, a distant fourth, John Garrow’s Energy Balance and Obesity in Man.
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*87 A hormone also secreted by the pancreas that tends to counteract the effects of insulin.
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*88 This phenomenon led to the notion of low-protein diets for weight loss. Regrettably, the ability to burn off excess calories when consuming a protein-deficient diet appears to be specific to young animals, and maybe even young pigs. When researchers tried to replicate this result in other animals—rats, sheep, cattle, or even older pigs—they noted that the animals eating the lower-protein diet got considerably fatter. They had more fat and less muscle, even if they weighed the same as the control animals.
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*89 Although, as we discussed in Chapter 16, the total energy expenditure of obese individuals is likely to be greater, because they have, simply put, more pounds to expend energy and generate heat.
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*90“The mean diet for Japanese people,” Nishizawa et al. reported, citing a 1972 survey by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, “consists of 359 g of carbohydrate, 50.1 g of fat, 82.9 g of protein and a total of 2,279 calories.”
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*91“Obesity itself,” as the National Academy of Sciences noted in 1989, “has not been found to be associated with dietary fat in either inter-or intra-population studies.”
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