Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"It’s not so much that fat fills us up as that carbohydrates prevent satiety, and so we remain hungry."

"The most dramatic of these animal obesity models is known as hypothalamic obesity, and it served as the experimental obesity of choice for researchers from the 1930s onward. It also became another example of the propensity to attribute the cause of obesity to overeating even when the evidence argued otherwise. The interpretation of these experiments became one of a half-dozen critical turning points in obesity research, a point at which the individuals involved in this research chose to accept an interpretation of the evidence that fit their preconceptions rather than the evidence itself and, by so doing, further biased the perception of everything that came afterward."

"Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet—unrestricted in calories—than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet."

"Once the “truth” has been declared, even if it’s based on incomplete evidence, the overwhelming tendency is to interpret all future observations in support of that preconception."

"Rats can be easily addicted to sugar, according to Hoebel, and will demonstrate the physical symptoms of opiate withdrawal when forced to abstain."

"This notion that fattening is the cause and overeating the effect, and not vice versa, also explains why a century of researchers have made so little progress."

"Whatever the accepted wisdom, making obesity a behavioral issue is endlessly problematic."

"One of my head pizzaiolos, Laura Meyer, has lived and studied in Italy and speaks fluently. So when the world championships in , Italy, rolled around, she was excited to give it a shot. We flew over together and planned her entry in the pizza in teglia ("," or what we would call ) division. I advised her not to go too off the wall—Italians don't love that, especially from Americans—but to add a little twist that would be just creative enough. Laura settled on a classic pizza alla diavola, which is made with whole milk , , and slices of the spicy oblong known as soppressata picante. Her clever addition was a scattering of on top of the finished pizza. Tasting the mildness of the Italian mozzarella, she decided to blend in a bit of ' for extra flavor. And because we were in Parma, she finished her creation with shavings of , and some for good measure. ... In addition to a title she will hold all her life, she won a , a of , and a five-kilo block of Parmesan cheese, which she hand-carried all the way back home. ..."

"Sadly for all of us, our culture does little to encourage boys to become great men. Television depicts men as stupid, or as sex addicts, and almost always intellectually and emotionally shallow. Men don't seem to care about these depictions, merely laughing them off. But I care about them, because our sons need good role models and given the amount of time boys spend with electronic media they need good role models on television. And of course, there is a bigger cultural fallout from the depreciation of masculinity and fatherhood, which is lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and the reality that many boys grow up in fatherless homes.This is a national tragedy, because boys need healthy encouragement from their fathers more than they need it from anyone else. In a boy's eyes, his father's words are sacred. They hold enormous power. His words can crush a boy or piece him back together after a fall. If a father is not there at all, there is a huge void in a boy's life — and as the depressing statistics remind us, boys who grow up without fathers are at a dramatically greater risk of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and ending up in prison.Encouragement from a father changes a boy's life. His words can ignite furious passion in a boy that will help him achieve any goal he sets out to accomplish. To a son, a dad's words are the final truth. If they are positive, a boy feels that he cannot be beaten; if they are negative, however, a son feels that he could never win. If you are a son reading this, you know exactly what I mean."

"Every boy needs schooling in virtues in order to become a great man. And any parent can school him because at the heart of virtue is masculine intuition. Parents don't have to construct the virtues and then pour then into the heart of their son. The virtues are there, but in small fragments that must be cleaned, shaped, and polished.The great burden for parents is finding time. Haste is the enemy of virtue, because it gives us no time to discuss, think, wonder, or pray; it forces us to push our boys to perform when we should be working with them. Give time back to your son. Give him time to dream. Encourage him to question and to think. Boys must have time to think upon virtues before they embrace them. Otherwise, virtues become nothing more than a disposable outer layer of clothing. A man can put them on or off, depending on his mood. But real virtues are not so disposable — they become part of the boy."

"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations."

"By a peculiar logical inversion the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, its imitators, accomplices, and victims, have come to believe in a Negro problem....While there is actually no Negro problem, there is definitely a Caucasian problem.Continual reference to a Negro problem assumes that some profound difficulty has been or is being created for the human race by the so-called Negroes. This is typical ruling class arrogance, and...has no basis in fact It has been centuries since any Negro nation has menaced the rest of humanity. The last of the Moors withdrew from Europe in 1492.The so-called Negroes...have passed few if any Jim Crow laws...set up few white ghettoes, earned on no discriminatory practices against whites, and have not devoted centuries of propaganda to prove the superiority of blacks over whites....While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal. Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace, and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, exploited, persecuted, and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of white racial superiority.The term Negro itself is as fictitious as the theory of white racial superiority on which Anglo-Saxon civilization is based, but it is nevertheless one of the most effective smear devices developed since the Crusades...Of course "white" and "Caucasian” are equally barren of scientific meaning....There are actually no white people except albinos who are a very pale pink in color..."

"The reason for this book is straightforward: despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount."

"Obesity levels in the United States remained relatively constant from the early 1960s through 1980, between 12 and 14 percent of the population; over the next twenty-five years, coincident with the official recommendations to eat less fat and so more carbohydrates, it surged to over 30 percent."

"From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day…. The facts did not support these claims, but the myths served a purpose, and so they remained unquestioned."

"Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively."

"Conflict of interest is an accusation invariably wielded to discredit those viewpoints with which one disagrees."

"By the 1920s, insulin was discovered and found to be essential for the utilization of carbohydrates for energy. Without insulin, diabetic patients could still mitigate the symptoms of the disease by restricting the starches and sugar in their diet. And yet diabetologists would come to reject categorically the notion that sugar and refined carbohydrates could somehow be responsible for the disease—another example of powerful authority figures winning out over science."

"That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles of themselves."

"We may forget that the science is not adequately described, or ambiguous, even if the public-health policy seems to be set in stone."

"All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon."

"When I interviewed Grundy in May 2004, he acknowledged that metabolic syndrome was the cause of most heart disease in America, and that this syndrome is probably caused by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. Yet in his three reports—representing the official NIH, AHA, and ADA positions—all remained firmly wedded to the fat-cholesterol dogma."

"A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions."

"This is considered the fundamental principle underlying modern genetic research: once evolution comes upon a genetic mechanism that works, it reuses it again and again. Those genes that regulate the development and the existence of any single living organism will likely be used in some similar fashion in all of them. “When reduced to essentials,” as the cancer researcher J. Michael Bishop suggested in his 1989 Nobel prize lecture, “the fruit fly and Homo sapiens are not very different.”"

"The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations."

"“It appears that efforts to promote the use of low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful,” Weinsier noted, but the reduction in fat intake did “not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population.”"

"That the toxic-environment hypothesis is deeply immersed in moral and class judgments is evident by the observation that few or none of the condemnations of fast-food restaurants included a coffee chain such as Starbucks, despite the copious extra calories it peddles."

"Neither eating less nor exercising more will lead to long-term weight loss, as the body naturally compensates."

"Evolution should be our best guide for what constitutes a healthy diet."

"This is how functioning science works. Outstanding questions are identified or hypotheses proposed; experimental tests are then established either to answer the questions or to refute the hypotheses, regardless of how obviously true they might appear to be. If assertions are made without the empirical evidence to defend them, they are vigorously rebuked…. Each new claim to knowledge, therefore, has to be picked apart and appraised…. This institutionalized vigilance, “this unending exchange of critical judgment,” is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades."

"One of the most reproducible findings in obesity research, as I’ve said, is that fat people, on average, eat no more than lean people."

"“Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power,” as Susan Sontag observed in her 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor, “are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” This is certainly the case with obesity."

"Children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing."

"What may be the single most incomprehensible aspect of the last half century of obesity research is the failure of those involved to grasp the fact that both hunger and sedentary behavior can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to grow fat, just as a lack of hunger and the impulse to engage in physical activity can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to burn calories rather than store them."

"We should not be surprised that dieting is difficult, as Keith Frayn of Oxford University says in his 1996 textbook, Metabolic Regulation. “It is a fight against mechanisms which have evolved over many millions of years precisely to minimize its effects.”"

"It’s effectively impossible to restrict calories significantly without also reducing the carbohydrates."

"It’s hard to avoid the observation that at least some individuals lose weight on carbohydrate-restricted diets while eating considerably more calories then would normally be consumed in a semi-starvation diet.… Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with calories."

"“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”"

"Practical considerations of what is to loosely defined as the “public health” have consistently been allowed to take precedence over the dispassionate, critical evaluation of evidence and the rigorous and meticulous experimentation that are required to establish reliable knowledge. The urge to simplify a complex scientific situation so that physicians can apply it and their patients and the public embrace it has taken precedence over the scientific obligation of presenting the evidence with relentless honesty. The result is an enormous enterprise dedicated in theory to determining the relationship between diet, obesity, and disease, while dedicated in practice to convincing everyone involved, and the lay public, most of all, that the answers are already known and always have been—an enterprise, in other words, that purports to be a science and yet functions like a religion."

"This era began with a handful of naïve assumptions…The forty years of research that followed would overturn them all—but it would have effectively no influence on the mainstream thinking about human obesity."

"What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you."

"No amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us."

"Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking."

"At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as "radical, upscale feminism") was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as "products of conception," "termination of pregnancy," "privacy," and "choice" ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's "privacy" or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die."

"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."

"The upholders of conventional wisdom have been equally, if not more, disconcerted by Hellenosemitica, a major work by Gordon’s colleague Michael Astour, which first appeared in 1967. Hellenosemitica, a series of studies of striking parallels between West Semitic and Greek mythology, showed connections of structure and nomenclature that were far too close to be explained away as similar manifestations of the human psyche. Apart from the challenge posed by this basic theme, Astour made three other fundamental attacks. First, the fact of his writing the book at all upset the academic status quo. While it was permissible for a Classicist, coming from the dominant discipline, to discuss the Middle East in its relation to Greece and Rome, the converse did not hold true. A Semitist was felt to have no right to write about Greece. Secondly, Astour questioned the absolute primacy of archaeology over all other sources of evidence about prehistory—myth, legend, language and names—thus threatening the ‘scientific’ status of ancient history. Thirdly, he sketched out a sociology of knowledge for Classics, indicating links between developments in scholarship and those in society. He even implied a connection between anti-Semitism and hostility to the Phoenicians and cast doubt on the notion of steady accumulative progress of learning. But the worst threat came from his basic message that the legends of Danaos and Kadmos contained a factual kernel. So many heresies could not go unpunished. Astour was so battered by his critics that he has stopped work on the field he had so brilliantly opened up. Nevertheless his work, like that of Gordon, has had profound effects..."

"Why was Astour’s work considered so much more offensive? First, it offended at a formal level, because it challenged the academic hierarchy; this was a reflection of the relative power of the two disciplines. Although Classicists had previously discussed Eastern parallels to Hellenic mythology, it was entirely different and unacceptable for Orientalists to pronounce on Greece. There were also fundamental objections to the content of Astour’s work. Scholars like Fontenrose and Walcot had made broad sweeps of world mythology – including India, Iran and so on – and they gave preference, if possible, to the less offensive sources. By contrast, Astour’s derivation of Greek names from Semitic not only poached on the sacred ground of language, but also made the connections between West Semites and Greeks disturbingly close and specific. Furthermore, two of the myth cycles he treated – those of Kadmos and Danaos – were concerned with Near Eastern colonization in Greece, and he made a plausible case for their having a historical kernel of truth. The fourth section of Hellenosemitica was even more provocative in that it went into the sociology of knowledge, and its sketch of the history and ideology of Classics and Classical archaeology has been the basis of all later writings on this subject, this volume included. In doing this Astour injected relativism into subjects that had previously been impervious to the forces of probabilism and uncertainty that have transformed other disciplines since the 1890s."

"The library is in a noble hall, and looks splendidly with its vista of alcoves. The most remarkable sight, however, was Mr. Hildreth, writing his history of the United States; he sits at a table, at the entrance of one of the alcoves, with his books and papers before him; as quiet and absorbed as he could be in the loneliest study; now consulting an authority, now penning a sentence or a paragraph, without seeming conscious of anything but his subject. It is very curious, thus to have a glimpse of a book in process of creation under one's eye. I know not how many hours he sits there; but while I saw him, he was a pattern of diligence and unwandering thought; he had taken himself out of this age, and put himself, I suppose, into that which he was writing about."

"Unfortunately, there have been, and are, in the world, very few governments in which the right of passive or unarmed resistance is acknowledged. By most governments, such resistance is considered and treated as no better than open rebellion, which thus becomes the sole resource of oppressed subjects."

"Our decision rules determine which way we tilt, but we should not comfort ourselves with the fantasy that both unwanted outcomes can be avoided—in the face of genuine uncertainty, that’s just not possible. If you want to acquit all the innocent, you will also acquit some of the guilty. If you want to convict all the guilty, you will convict some who are innocent. You can’t have it both ways."