Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Greg Critser

Houghton Mifflin, $24, pp 232

ISBN 0 618 16472 3

To order, see http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/

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James O Hill, a physiologist at the University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center, once said that becoming obese was “a normal response to the American environment.” Greg Critser, a reduced fatso himself, sets out to explore this claim. Using many of the findings about obesity in America that have appeared in the media in the last few years, he begins by asking, “What has changed in the environment to allow the inclination toward overweight and obesity to express itself?”

Critser faults Earl Butz, US secretary of agriculture under President Richard Nixon, who in the …