Book
Fung J. The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss. Vancouver: Greystone Books; 2016. Foreword by Timothy Noakes. 328 pp. ISBN: 978-1-77164-125-8.
Why we cite it
Popular science book presenting the hormonal theory of obesity — arguing that insulin, not calories, is the primary driver of weight gain and that insulin resistance is why diets fail long-term. Fung frames weight loss as a two-step problem: (1) what you eat affects insulin in the short term, but (2) insulin resistance keeps the body set weight high regardless of diet. His central claim for the project is that fasting addresses the second step that diets miss — by routinely lowering insulin, fasting breaks the resistance cycle and allows the body set weight to decrease. Chapters 19-20 provide the practical framework used in the project’s treatment of fed/fasted states and meal timing.
This is the carbohydrate-insulin model, and it is contested — a fact this record did not carry until 2026-09-02 (card 6NM98H). The model’s own leading proponents concede the point: `cif02` (Ludwig & Ebbeling 2018) writes ”Admittedly, the evidence for these effects in humans remains inconclusive” (`oa-fulltext.txt`, held). `cif01` is a trade book arguing a position, not a source that settles one, and it reaches 47 live companion pages and 13 knowledge files (both counted 2026-09-10). Until that day this sentence also called that ”the widest reach of any record in this library”; it is not. Counted the same way the same day, `cib03` is anchored on 144 pages, `chb01` on 86 and `cpi01` on 61. The knowledge layer already handles this better than this record did: `kif02` marks a Fung claim as ”an argument in a trade book, not a measured finding” (quotation corrected 2026-09-10 from ”…not a measured fact”, which is not `kif02`’s wording), `kfs01` says the five-stage schema is ”one author’s presentation of mainstream physiology, not a measurement” and checks his 75% brain-ketone figure against `cfs02` (Owen 1967) at 60-70%, and `kif03`, which once flagged a 12% figure as one ”this library cannot source to a paper”, has since traced it to `caf01` and records that the book bent it twice (corrected 2026-09-10 from the present tense: `kif03` dropped that wording on 2026-09-06, commit 732ecfb1, after the figure was identified on 2026-09-05). Anyone reading downward from here should inherit that care rather than reinvent it.
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