Reddit reviews The Hungry Gene: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry

Ellen - I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about what inspired you to write this book? I really enjoyed The Hungry Gene, but that's such a wild swing between topics!

I started taking notes when I was reading it, then decided it wasn't really worth the effort. Have a look at this comment thread for one discrepancy that we discussed here recently.

Let me give you an example of why I don't like his book or his methods; this happened to me several times while reading his book. Here is the claim that Fung makes in his book. There is also a version of this on his website. It is in part 2, chapter 5 of The Obesity Code:

>For this experiment, [Sims] recruited convicts at the Vermont State Prison. Attendants were present at every meal to verify that the calories—4000 per day—were eaten. Physical activity was strictly controlled. A funny thing happened. The prisoners’ weight initially rose, but then stabilized. Though at first they’d been happy to increase their caloric intake,[3] as their weight started to increase, they found it more and more difficult to overeat, and some dropped out of the study. But some prisoners were persuaded to eat upwards of 10,000 calories per day! Over the next four to six months, the remaining prisoners did eventually gain 20 percent to 25 percent of their original body weight—actually much less than caloric theory predicted. Weight gain varied greatly person to person. Something was contributing to the vast differences in weight gained, but it was not caloric intake or exercise. The key was metabolism. Total energy expenditure in the subjects increased by 50 percent. Starting from an average of 1800 calories per day, total energy expenditure increased to 2700 calories per day. Their bodies tried to burn off the excess calories in order to return to their original weight. Total energy expenditure, comprising mostly basal metabolic rate, is not constant, but varies considerably in response to caloric intake. After the experiment ended, body weight quickly and effortlessly returned to normal. Most of the participants did not retain any of the weight they gained. Overeating did not, in fact, lead to lasting weight gain. In the same way, undereating does not lead to lasting weight loss.

Pretty specific, right? Lots of numbers in there. I saw that and I wanted to see this study, because I read a ton of studies and this is big. See that [3] up there? That's Fung's citation. I chased it down, and it's a book from 2002, not a primary source. Kind of odd, since he's talking about specific numbers from a specific research paper, but I chased that down, too. Here is the entire paragraph on that research from that book:

>Sims was fortunate to have nearby a ready source of experimental subjects: the inmates at Vermont State Prison, sufficient numbers of whom were willing to gorge themselves for science. At first the prisoners proved enthusiastic trenchermen, as much as doubling their usual daily intake of food. But as they fattened, they became increasingly reluctant to overeat. Most found it extremely difficult to gain weight, and eventually some started to drop out of the study. Only twenty made it through the requisite two hundred days, achieving an average weight gain of twenty to twenty-five pounds. Relieved of the high-calorie, low-exercise regimen, all but two of the inmates quickly dropped the newly acquired ballast. The pair of inmates who found it most difficult to lose weight were those who had experienced the least difficulty gaining weight in the first place. It was later discovered that both of these men had a family history of obesity.

Weird, still no numbers, but these are both pop science kind of books, so they don't need to get into the weeds. The author provides a reference for this chapter, though, and it's actually a primary source! So, I chased that down. This is a paper entitled Adaptation to Obesity and Starvation, and indeed it's by Sims! But wait, this is a review paper, not a paper about prisoners in Vermont; did they reference the original study in here somewhere? Let's read through...72 references, whew!

Fortunately, there are only two references to work by Sims, and one is proceedings of a meeting (non peer-reviewed literature), so that leaves us with one reference. Finally! I can get to looking at the nitty-gritty of this study. Unfortunately, it's not available anywhere, legal, illegal, or gray area. The best I could come up with on the Vermont prison studies are this paper, which is about the number of adipose cells, and this paper, which is about adrenocortical function. It seems that the results of this study were published in a series of papers, based on the titles and numbering. Maybe Fung went to his local university library and was able to pull this off a dusty shelf somewhere, but there is no link to a primary source on PubMed or Google Scholar, so I highly doubt it exists in electronic form.

As a last resort, I went back to the other reference in the first Sims paper I found, notes from the proceedings of the 1968 meeting of endocrinology in France. Here, they finally start discussing some details about their prison study, and even provide some numbers. Damn, the figures are in units of kcal/sq m of surface area. I've never seen that used before, maybe that's an outdated means of determining calorie intake. Off to Google! I didn't have a piece of string handy, so I used the chart to try and estimate the calories given to subjects in the study. There's no easy way to do this, but it's somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times the number given, as the chart is basically a conversion from BMI. I'm pretty big and mine is 2.1; lets go with 1.5 since these guys were normal weight to start. I did find the 1800 and 2700 numbers in this paper, but they are again in kcal/sq m of body surface area, so they are wrong anyway.

By this point, I barely care anymore. This is one reference and Fung could have easily linked to a primary source if one existed. There are many like this in the book and it makes me question how much he really put into this. In the end, I Googled the paper and authors and looked down the first page.. Found it! Looks like Fung just cribbed the idea from Taubes, who wrote about it in his book. I found this in another case as well, where there was an odd reference and where I couldn't find the paper initially; I ended up finding it on a keto forum in an almost identical argument to Fung's, and the poster said that this would be good evidence for Fung's theory. Looks like he took it and put it in his book.