Professor and SUGAR RUSH author Karen Throsby joins us to discuss why sugar became demonized despite a lot of actual uncertainty in the science, how anti-sugar sentiment is bound up with anti-fat bias, the different rhetoric around sugar that’s dominant in diet culture vs wellness culture, what the research really says about the supposed addictiveness of sugar, and lots more.

Karen Throsby is Professor of Gender Studies and the Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She 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 (Manchester University Press, 2016), When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and most recently, Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness (Manchester University Press, 2023).

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