Carbs & Cals

As a nation, we love eating carbs, and they are right at the heart of our diet. The problem is that with 63 per cent of UK adults now considered overweight or obese, many experts think that we are eating far too many wrong sorts of carbohydrate. Xand van Tulleken is a medical doctor and self-professed lover of carbs, to the point where he used to weigh 19 stone. He is keen to discover whether they really are a killer as claimed by many, responsible for record levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

We've tried to hide it, shoving carbs aside for cauliflower rice and courgetti, but we're not fooling anyone. Carbs are what we want – what we really, really want. We love them because they make every meal better. And anyway, global medical guidelines now say carbohydrates should make up 50% of our daily food intake, and that skipping them could lead to long-term health issues. What have we been thinking?

The American body is in trouble. Unprecedented numbers of us suffer from 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 became our main food source. In Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs, bestselling author and former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler explains how the quest to feed a nation resulted in a population that is increasingly suffering from obesity and chronic disease and offers a solution for changing course.