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Sugar Rush

Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness

Karen Throsby author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Manchester University Press

Published:20th Jun '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Sugar Rush cover

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived ‘war on obesity’ levelled at ‘unhealthy’ foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play?

Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonization of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities.

Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.

'Are we asking the wrong questions about sugar? This smart and excellent book argues that we are.’
Jayne Raisborough, author of Fat Bodies, Health and the Media

ISBN: 9781526151551

Dimensions: 216mm x 138mm x 17mm

Weight: 390g

304 pages