Reviews for Gerontological Nursing and Healthy Aging

The average rating for Gerontological Nursing and Healthy Aging based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-22 00:00:00 Jeffrey Scott McDonald's. NutriSystem. Burger King. Weight Watchers. KFC. Jenny Craig. Pizza Hut. Dexatrim. Watch TV for any length of time and you'll glimpse, in swiftly alternating commercials, twin American obsessions: eating and dieting. But as Barry Popkin points out, Americans aren't alone in their struggles with food and fitness. The problem is a global one. The title of Popkin's book is spun off of Thomas L. Friedman's bestselling treatise on globalization, The World Is Flat. That bit of wordplay is almost the only note of what might be called humor in Popkin's earnest and somewhat textbookish survey of what he sees as a worldwide nutritional crisis. Popkin is authoritative: He's a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, and he's spent 30 years surveying the changes in the way the world eats. "A half century ago," he tells us, "there were less than one hundred million obese individuals and seven billion malnourished people. There are now 1.6 billion overweight and obese people living in the world, many living with the chronic diseases that contribute to the bulk of deaths in the world, while there are about eight hundred million undernourished people." Popkin surveys the myriad causes of this trend toward obesity: agricultural, commercial, governmental, societal, cultural and technological. As he notes, we have evolved in this direction: "We - the human species, that is - have a strong desire to discover technologies that allow us to reduce our effort and thus our energy expenditure in all spheres of life. ... In a very broad sense, you might say that evolutionary pressures have driven us to eat rich food and be lazy. And we are approaching the point where we barely have to move to flourish as a society." (You may be reminded of the movie Wall-E, in which bloated and inert humans float above the ravaged Earth in a spaceship.) Survival of the fattest, then. Except that, Popkin asserts, "In terms of human evolution, we weren't built to drink Pepsi, sweetened tea and lattes, and pina coladas." And so a host of diseases - diabetes, heart problems, bone and muscle disorders, even some cancers - prey upon the obese. "The mystery is not how to stop development and modernization, but how to adjust our way of living, eating, and drinking so that we can gain from these changes - not be destroyed by them." The laissez-faire attitude - let them eat cake if they want to - can only lead, Popkin believes, to disaster in the form of higher medical costs and even environmental damage from the reduction in agricultural diversity. But expecting business and agriculture to reverse course is folly. As he notes, even the fashion industry, despite its preoccupation with waif-thin models, yielded to the fattening trend "in 1983 when it dropped the idea of standardization for sizing after it found that women returned to buy clothes more often if they were sized smaller, even though they were cut larger. Since then, smaller sizes have gotten bigger." The solutions Popkin proposes will get howls of protest from free-market conservatives, but he makes a strong case for regulations and for cutting subsidies to crops that have contributed to the imbalance in our diet. Government subsidies in the United States have resulted in "much cheaper beef, poultry, corn, soybeans, and sugar. But .... this has occurred at the expense of healthy plant foods - particularly fruits and vegetables, whose relative cost is great compared with fats, sugars, and meats in today's marketplaces." He also proposes to tax us thinner: "In the seat-belt use and antismoking campaigns, regulations and taxation were critical." In Popkin's scheme of things, farmers, fast-food joints, soft-drink makers, purveyor of sugary treats and, yes, consumers would pay a lot more for living off the fat of the land. It has to be said that there are no eye-openers in Popkin's book. Much of what he tells us has been reported on widely. And there are more lively and readable books that make the same points, such as Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. But Popkin's sober and unadorned prose, and his long experience studying the world's diet, gives a sense of urgency to his book.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-16 00:00:00 Dean W. Ballew Yes, yes. I know the world is fat. At least, my world is, not so sure about the rest of it. So it would have been nice to have more hard facts, research, charts and graphs rather than anecdotal evidence from the authors' life about the fattening of people he knew. Also, the book would have benefited by having solutions to the fat problem. Barry Popkin spent way too much time counting calories rather than getting to the root of our fatness; lack of proper nutrition, such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables and a sedentary life style. He spent what felt like a majority of time in the book discussing ways to make the big corporations (eg McDonalds and Coke) lower calories in their products rather than education for children about healthy eating.