Description
Product Description
Nature puts a “survival switch” in our bodies to protect us from starvation. Stuck in the “on” position, it’s the hidden source of weight gain, heart disease, and many other common health struggles. But you can turn it off.

Dr. Richard Johnson has been on the cutting edge of research into the cause of obesity for more than a decade. His team’s discovery of the fructose-powered survival switch—a metabolic pathway that animals in nature turn on and off as needed, but that our modern diet has permanently fixed in the “on” position, where it becomes a fat switch—revolutionized the way we think about why we gain weight.

In Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, he details the mounting evidence on how this switch is responsible both for excess fat storage and for many of the major diseases endemic to the Western world, including heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Dr. Johnson also reveals the surprising link between the survival switch and health conditions such as gout, kidney disease, liver disease, stroke—and even behavioral issues like addiction and ADHD. And, most important, he shares a science-based plan to help readers fight back against nature.

Guided by ongoing clinical research—plus fascinating observations from the animal kingdom, evolution, and history—Dr. Johnson takes you along on an eye-opening investigation into:

• What you can do to turn off your survival switch
• What we have in common with hibernating bears, sperm whales, and the world’s fattest bird
• Why it’s fructose (not glucose) that drives insulin resistance and metabolic disease
• The foods we eat that trigger the body to make its own fructose
• The surprising role salt and dehydration play in fat accumulation

Dr. Johnson not only provides new recommendations for how we can prevent or treat obesity, but also how we can use this information to reduce our risk of developing disease. Nature wants us to be fat, and when we understand why, we gain the tools we need to lose weight and optimize our health.
Review
“A fascinating look at the science of obesity, with many practical tips. Dr. Johnson points out that ‘It is not our culture that is making us fat. It is our biology’ and proceeds to explain that biology from an evolutionary viewpoint. An important book."
—Jason Fung, MD, author of The Obesity Code

“This fascinating and provocative book makes the case that fructose has a unique role to play in the development of diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases . . . Dr. Johnson takes us on an entertaining, wide-ranging journey, through animal and human studies as well as stories from the history of humankind, to provide some rigorous answers.”
—Nina Teicholz, science journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Big Fat Surprise

“Dr. Johnson explains how a simple mutation turned a simple sugar, fructose, ostensibly an energy source, into a metabolic poison that foments the chronic diseases that plague America and, indeed, the rest of the world.”
—Robert Lustig, MD, MSL, neuroendocrinologist at University of California, San Francisco, and author of Metabolical