Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness

(Hardback)

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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.
Alan Warde, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester

Author Bio

Karen Throsby has been researching issues of gender, technology 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 and When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality. She is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.