HANDBOOK OF OBESITY

It has been 15 years since the first edition of the Handbook
of Obesity was published, and these years have seen enormous progress in our understanding of the etiology and the
causes of obesity as well as innovative approaches to its
treatment. We are thus pleased to publish this update of
the Handbook of Obesity in the form of two coordinated
and comprehensive volumes. Shortly after the first edition,
translational research took hold and it became evident that
the “therapeutic” strategies for treatment of obesity would
need more space, and this was accomplished by splitting
the second edition into two volumes; subsequently, the
therapeutic volume was updated and published separately
without the basic science volume. By 2012, the growth of
the science underlying the increase in the prevalence of
obesity and the emphasis on translation research led to
the need for a new edition of each volume with many new
authors and entirely new content. For instance, many drugs
that were available in 1998 are no longer available now,
and new ones have come on the market. In brief, Volume 1