Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

(Paperback)

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Food provides the raw material required for life. Yet most of us don't have a clue about how our bodies use it. How do we get energy from our food while at the same time extracting the physical materials we need to make and maintain our bodies How does the food we eat affect the way our bodies function What's distinct about the way we metabolise highly-processed food

Food and nutrition are overrun by myth and pseudoscience. The reality is that millions of years of evolution have structured human physiology so that it is macronutrient agnostic. Protein, carbohydrate: the body has evolved so that it extracts the same amount of energy from each, and retains the same amount of fat. There are countless theories about the efficacy and health benefits of certain macronutrients - proteins versus carbs versus fat... but biology simply doesn't work that way.

The problem is that while diet gurus are busy prescribing what to eat, they haven't bothered to explain why we eat in the first place. Why We Eat is a definitive look at the science of food and metabolism. It will explain why we're hungry at particular moments in our days and our lives, why diets almost never work, why exercise doesn't benefit you in the ways you probably think it does, and how ultra-processed food fools and alters our metabolisms.

Author Bio

Vox's lead health reporter, Julia Belluz, focuses on translating medical research and scientists' big ideas into clear and precise language in her award- winning, widely syndicated journalism. She has worked on formats and platforms as varied as Netflix, podcasts, SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and has been published widely in the Economist, ProPublica, Los Angeles Times, Slate, British Medical Journal, Globe and Mail, and the National Post. In 2013 14, Belluz was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Kevin Hall is widely recognized as a world- leading scientist in the field of nutrition, metabolism, and obesity research. He is tenured Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Hall has twice received the Director's Award from both the NIH and the NIDDK and has also received the E.V. McCullum Award from the American Society for Nutrition, the Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from The Obesity Society, and the Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology from the American Society of Physiology. Hall has published more than 100 scientific articles and book chapters and his research has been prominently covered in The New York Times, Time, The Economist, Wired, NPR, CNN, Vox, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.