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Book Review: The Hungry Brain | Slate Star Codex

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The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is no Gladwell-style dilettante. He’s a neuroscientist studying nutrition, with a side job as a nutrition consultant, who spends his spare time blogging about nutrition, tweeting about nutrition, and speaking at nutrition-related conferences. He is very serious about what he does and his book is exactly as good as I would have hoped. Not only does it provide the best introduction to nutrition I’ve ever seen, but it incidentally explains other neuroscience topics better than the books directly about them do. I first learned about Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “scientific consensus” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the consensus doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The consensus doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people

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