Sugar Rush

Karen Throsby has been researching issues of gender, technology, bodies and health for over 20 years, including work on reproductive technologies, weight loss surgery and endurance sport. She is the author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Identity and Embodiment (2016) and When IVF Fails: Feminist, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (2004). She is currently Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.

'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'While sensitive to the personal impact of emotionally charged health messages, Throsby challenges the presumed innocence of celebrities whose anti-sugar campaigns, sparked by uninterrogated fears animated by slapdash thinking and social privilege, enact and endorse inequitable harm. This call for accountability is even more pertinent to dietetics, where anti-fatness, nutritionism and ableism remain prevailing ill-winds.'Lucy Aphramor, The Sociological Review'Throsby avoids giving easy answers in her discussion of sugar; in fact, her book is essentially a plea that we should see issues of food and health as complicated. In this she is undoubtedly correct, but we could perhaps take it as another illustration of the failures of capitalism, that something that should be simple becomes so complex.'Elaine Graham-Leigh, Counterfire

• Introduction1 What’s wrong with sugar?2 Hanging together3 Hidden4 Giving up sugar5 Entertaining sugar6 Taxing sugar7 Sweetening austerity8 The (in)visible inequalities of sugarConclusionIndex