Being Obese Is Not Our Fault: Robert Lustig Uncovers ALL the Causes of Extra Weight

I’m reading Dr. Robert Lustig’s 2012 book Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. I already knew sugar was toxic to the body, but here’s what this book taught me.

What We Individually Do

1. Yes, our bodies run on glucose (sugar) and can’t survive without it. But our bodies create glucose from protein and fat molecules. We don’t need to consume much of it at all in the form of sweets and carbs.
2. When we do consume sugar (including starchy carbs and alcohol), there’s a whole chain of reactions that happen and they include causing a lot of insulin to be released by the pancreas into the bloodstream. I knew the function of insulin was to turn sugar into fat, but I didn’t know too much insulin can block the brain from getting signals from leptin and this is a problem because leptin is the hormone that tells the brain that our stomach is full and it’s time to stop eating.
3. Insulin resistance and leptin resistance are huge contributors to obesity.
4. In the U.S., Blacks and Latinos are the biggest sugar consumers (I’m guessing that’s one of the effects of racism) and have the highest waist circumference, which is a marker for insulin resistance. Apparently we also have the…