Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness
(Paperback)
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Publishing Details
Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness
By (Author) Karen Throsby
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
1st July 2023
United Kingdom
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Sociology
641.336
Physical Properties
Paperback
304
Width 138mm, Height 216mm, Spine 17mm
390g
Description
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived war on obesity levelled at unhealthy foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play
Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the problem of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonisation of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities.
Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.
Reviews
Challenging and in the best traditions of critical social science, Karen Throsby unsettles popular misconstructions of the evils of sugar by situating recent controversies in their broader socio-cultural context.
Dr. Alan Warde, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester
Author Bio
Karen Throsby has been researching issues of gender, technology, bodies and health for over 20 years, including work on reproductive technologies, weight loss surgery and endurance sport. She is the author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Identity and Embodiment (2016) and When IVF Fails: Feminist, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (2004). She is currently Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.
