Food or Fiction? The Truth About the Ultraprocessed Foods Making America Sick

The former FDA Commissioner and New York Times bestselling author explains why Americans suffer in unprecedented numbers from obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other debilitating illnesses, and offers concrete solutions for reducing cardiovascular problems, keeping weight off, and curtailing chronic disease. Features a new preface for the paperback edition.

Unprecedented numbers of us live with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other debilitating illnesses. The root cause is a once-revolutionary idea that seemed to offer so much promise but instead has become the cause of a global health crisis: processed foods. Over the past seventy-five years, a number of factors aligned to create a reality in which processed carbohydrates—in the form of appealing, ever-present food items from pizza to burritos to bagels—became our main food source. In Food or Fiction, bestselling author and former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler, MD, explains how the quest to feed a nation resulted in a population that is increasingly suffering from obesity and chronic disease, and offers an urgently needed course correction.

While changes to farming, production, and distribution revolutionized our lifestyles, it also impacted our health as our bodies quietly contended with the metabolic chaos caused by consuming rapidly absorbable starch. Slowly but surely, these effects accumulated and became disastrous, leading to the health crisis we face today. In Food or Fiction, Dr. Kessler explains how eating refined grains such as wheat, corn, and rice leads to a cascade of hormonal and metabolic issues that make it very easy to gain weight and nearly impossible to lose it. Worse still, he argues, is that this excess weight is making us sick, laying the groundwork for a host of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cognitive decline, and a number of cancers. We can no longer afford to dismiss the consequences of eating food that is designed to be rapidly absorbed as sugar in our bodies. Food or Fiction reveals in illuminating detail how we got to this critical turning point—and outlines a plan that allows us finally to regain control of our health.