Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine

Pediatric endocrinologist Lustig (Fat Chance) serves up an eye-opening survey to explain why processed food is killing people. Forty years of medical practice convinced Lustig that the problem was not what’s in food, but what’s been done to food: processed foods (largely thanks to added sugars), he writes, are “a toxic and addictive consumable poison” that have increased rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, depression, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. A return to “real food,” he writes, can improve lives, ease health-care costs, and save the planet. Lustig decries modern medicine’s method of treating symptoms instead of addressing diet and, on the personal level, proposes a solution for healthy eating that involves protecting the liver and tending to the gut. Lustig crisply condemns Big Pharma and the food industry, and is indisputably thorough on the science, drilling down to the eight cellular pathologies behind metabolic syndrome. Lustig’s case that readers treat sugar like an addictive substance is strong, and candid asides on such topics as how to interpret one’s lab test results keep things moving along. This indictment of the food industry lands as a must-read guide to a healthier world. Agent: Janis A. Donnaud, Janis A. Donnaud & Assoc. (May)