Thinking on obesity is overly simplistic – Education News | Primary, Secondary & Third Level | The Irish Time – Thu, Dec 19, 2013.

The simple thermodynamic conclusion that weight gain, leading to obesity, results from consistently ingesting more food calories than are burned off in various activities, hides the complex roots of the epidemic.

Prof Mike Gibney, director of the Institute of Food and Health, UCD, explains these roots in his book Something to Chew On: Challenging Controversies in Food and Health (UCD Press, 2012). Gibney argues persuasively that the two main popular explanations of the current epidemic of obesity, namely that the epidemic is caused by socio-economic and food-chain factors, are simplistic…