The diet industry feeds on the hopes and the fears of those who need-or think that they need-to lose weight. Since the publication of the first known diet book in 1864, a host of sanctimonious preachers and self-proclaimed experts-often overweight themselves-have stoked fears of obesity effectively for both profit and political power, none more so than former surgeon general C. Everett Koop. In Public Health Profiteering, James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo offer a scathing and irreverent assessment of Koop's public and private career showing how a brilliant pediatric surgeon has evolved into a self-seeking and hypocritical public scold.During his term as Surgeon General under the Bush administration, Koop, enamored of the military trappings of title and uniform, saw himself as leading an army of public health administrators against an enemy. As often as not, the enemy took on the disquieting countenance of the American people. In Koop's view they were stupid, improvident, feckless, unable to make the simplest decisions about their lives. As Bennett and DiLorenzo show, he used his position as a bully pulpit for intemperate attacks on the tobacco and alcohol industries and to irresponsibly exaggerate the dangers of obesity. While taking a prohibitionist line, Koop himself smoked a pipe, drank martinis, and weighed in at a hefty 210 pounds. Although Koop claimed that he would never cash in on his office, his subsequent career tells a far different story. He has lobbied, hawked, and endorsed products for a host of firms: Wyeth Ayerst (makers of the dubious diet drug Fen-Phen), Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Intel, Neurocrine, Kelloggs, BioPure, and many others.Lively in style and carefully researched, Public Health Profiteering will be of interest to health policy specialists, political scientists, economists, and media analysts.James T. Bennett is professor of economics at George Mason University. He is founder and editor of the Journal of Labor Research and has authored many books and articles, including Health Research Charities: Image and Reality and Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, co-authored with Thomas DiLorenzo.Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at the Sellinger School of Business and Management at Loyola College in Baltimore. He has co-authored many books and is widely published in academic journals as well as the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

What is it in human nature that leads us to label some as insiders and stigmatize others as outsiders?Sociologist Gerhard Falk examines the social psychology that motivates this process of exclusion, focusing on the outcasts in contemporary American society and comparing current experience with examples from the past. Referring to the work of Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman, Falk reviews the whole range of stigmatized people from the mentally ill to ordinary people with unpopular occupations, like undertakers and trash collectors. Amid the wide diversity of stigmatized persons, he finds two basic types of outsiders: the "existential" and the "achieved." The first group comprises those who are stigmatized because of their very existence, regardless of their specific actions: the mentally handicapped, for example. The second group describes those whose actions or life conditions have resulted in stigma: from high achievers (often subject to resentment) to criminals. Falk also looks at the ways in which writers past and present have dramatized stigmatized characters in literature.This fascinating overview of a long-standing and widespread social problem will be of interest to all those concerned about creating a more fair-minded society.

A lively and important argument from an award-winning journalist proving that the key to reversing North America’s health crisis lies in the overlooked link between nutrition and flavor. In The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker shows us how our approach to the nation’s number one public health crisis has gotten it wrong. The epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are not tied to the overabundance of fat or carbs or any other specific nutrient. Instead, we have been led astray by the growing divide between flavor—the tastes we crave—and the underlying nutrition. Since the late 1940s, we have been slowly leeching flavor out of the food we grow. Those perfectly round, red tomatoes that grace our supermarket aisles today are mostly water, and the big breasted chickens on our dinner plates grow three times faster than they used to, leaving them dry and tasteless. Simultaneously, we have taken great leaps forward in technology, allowing us to produce in the lab the very flavors that are being lost on the farm. Thanks to this largely invisible epidemic, seemingly healthy food is becoming more like junk food: highly craveable but nutritionally empty. We have unknowingly interfered with an ancient chemical language—flavor—that evolved to guide our nutrition, not destroy it. With in-depth historical and scientific research, The Dorito Effect casts the food crisis in a fascinating new light, weaving an enthralling tale of how we got to this point and where we are headed. We’ve been telling ourselves that our addiction to flavor is the problem, but it is actually the solution. We are on the cusp of a new revolution in agriculture that will allow us to eat healthier and live longer by enjoying flavor the way nature intended.

Big Fat Food Fraud gives the public an unprecedented and eye-opening inside look at the corrupt practices of the food and weight-loss industries, which have combined to raid Americans' wallets and to decimate their health. Equal parts The Wolf of Wall Street and Fast Food Nation, Big Fat Food Fraud takes the reader on Philips's colourful, personal journey through the dark underbelly of America's food industry.

Abstract: This hearing discusses the dangers of unsupervised dieting, unsafe over-the-counter diet products, and recent enforcement efforts by the FDA against companies perpetrating diet frauds. Witnesses describe the unhealthy effects of these diets and suggest ways of confronting the operators of these companies. Several cases of anorexia nervosa and bulemia are described.