Secrets of weight loss revealed! A little is easy, a lot is hard, and results may vary.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: "Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - and the Myths and Realities of Dieting", "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" - Book review

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting, by Gina Kolata, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 257 pages, $24

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink, New York: Bantam Books, 276 pages, $25

GINA KOLATA says losing weight is nearly impossible. Brian Wansink says it's easy. But they don't really contradict each other, because they're talking about different kinds of weight loss.

Although their new books offer very different messages for dieters, Kolata and Wansink share a suspicion of collectivist responses to the "obesity epidemic." Both writers are intensely interested in the question of why people weigh as much as they do, but they do not leap from research findings to policy prescriptions aimed at making us thinner by restricting our choices. At a time when almost every discussion of weight in America seems to end with a list of things the government should do about it, their restraint is commendable.

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In Rethinking Thin, Kolata, a veteran New York Times science reporter, focuses on a group of obese people enrolled in a University of Pennsylvania diet study. They exhibit the usual pattern of initial success followed by setbacks, typically ending up about as fat as they were to begin with. She uses these case studies to illustrate her general point that "very few people lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off" because genetic factors play a large role in determining how much a given person will weigh as an adult.

By contrast, in Mindless Eating, Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University who has studied consumers' food-related decisions for decades, focuses on the sort of gradual, modest weight loss that Kolata concedes is achievable. Declaring that "the best diet is the one you don't know you're on,' he urges small changes in everyday behavior that over the course of a year can result in a weight loss of 10 to 25 pounds. His book will not be much help to people like the research subjects Kolata interviews, who generally want to lose fro to 100 pounds.

Kolata's message, as it pertains to the very fat, is mostly discouraging, while Wansink's, which is addressed mainly to the somewhat overweight, is relentlessly upbeat. But both distinguish themselves from the "obesity epidemic" doomsayers by casting a skeptical eye on efforts to make Americans thinner through social engineering. They show that it's possible to discuss the issue of weight without laying out a Plan of Action that treats us all as an undifferentiated blob of blubber.

Kolata, whose reporting on subjects ranging from breast implants to pesticide residues has been admirably resistant to the health scare du jour, questions the conventional wisdom that weighing "too much" is unhealthy. Like other dissenters from the War on Fat, such as University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos and University of Chicago political scientist Eric Oliver (see "Lay Off the Fatties!," November 2006), she tells fat people they will probably stay that way but simultaneously reassures them that the medical implications are not as dire as they've heard.

Many of the health risks associated with obesity may be due to the poor diets and sedentary habits associated with fatness rather than the extra pounds per se. Kolata notes that it's unclear whether exceeding the government's recommended weight range is inherently hazardous or whether fat people who become thinner thereby become healthier. Yet scientists who point out such inconvenient facts can expect to be pilloried for failing to toe the party line. Kolata describes the dismay of two researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Katherine...