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Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health Paperback – September 23, 2008

by Gary Taubes (Author)

2,254 ratings

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This groundbreaking book by award-winning science writer and bestselling author of Why We Get Fat and The Case for Keto shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet despite this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates, like white flour, easily digested starches, and sugars, and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number.

Called “a very important book,” by Andrew Weil and ”destined to change the way we think about food,” by Michael Pollan, this groundbreaking book by award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A vitally important book, destined to change the way we think about food.” —Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food“Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom.” —The New York Times“A very important book.” —Dr. Andrew Weil “Brilliant and enlightening. . . . Taubes is a relentless researcher.” —The Washington Post“Easily the most important book on diet and health to be published in the past one hundred years. It is clear, fast-paced and exciting to read, rigorous, authoritative, and a beacon of hope for all those who struggle with problems of weight regulation and general health.” —Richard Rhodes“A watershed. . . . Lucid and lively. . . . It could literally change the way you eat, the way you look and how long you live.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune“Taubes tackles the subject with the seriousness and scientific insight it deserves, building a devastating case against the low-fat, high-carb way of life endorsed by so many nutrition experts in recent years.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

About the Author

GARY TAUBES is cofounder and senior scientific advisor of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). He's an award-winning science and health journalist, the author of Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, and a former staff writer for Discover and correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and has been included in numerous Best of anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Science Writing (2010). He has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. He is also the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. He lives in Oakland, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue: A Brief History of BantingFarinaceous and vegetable foods are fattening, and saccharine matters are especially so….In sugar-growing countries the negroes and cattle employed on the plantations grow remarkably stout while the cane is being gathered and the sugar extracted. During this harvest the saccharine juices are freely consumed; but when the season is over, the superabundant adipose tissue is gradually lost.–Thomas Hawkes Tanner, The Practice of Medicine, 1869William Banting was a fat man. In 1862, at age sixty-six, the five-foot-five Banting, or “Mr. Banting of corpulence notoriety,” as the British Medical Journal would later call him, weighed in at over two hundred pounds. “Although no very great size or weight,” Banting wrote, “still I could not stoop to tie my shoe, so to speak, nor attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty, which only the corpulent can understand.” Banting was recently retired from his job as an upscale London undertaker; he had no family history of obesity, nor did he consider himself either lazy, inactive, or given to excessive indulgence at the table. Nonetheless, corpulence had crept up on him in his thirties, as with many of us today, despite his best efforts. He took up daily rowing and gained muscular vigor, a prodigious appetite, and yet more weight. He cut back on calories, which failed to induce weight loss but did leave him exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding horseback, and manual labor. His weight increased. He consulted the best doctors of his day. He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight increased.Luckily for Banting, he eventually consulted an aural surgeon named William Harvey, who had recently been to Paris, where he had heard the great physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes. The liver secretes glucose, the substance of both sugar and starch, Bernard had reported, and it was this glucose that accumulates excessively in the bloodstream of diabetics. Harvey then formulated a dietary regimen based on Bernard’s revelations. It was well known, Harvey later explained, that a diet of only meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic. This in turn suggested that complete abstinence from sugars and starches might do the same. “Knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals,” Harvey wrote, “and that in diabetes the whole of the fat of the body rapidly disappears, it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, although widely diverse in its development; and that if a purely animal diet were useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable diet as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat.”Harvey prescribed the regimen to Banting, who began dieting in August 1862. He ate three meals a day of meat, fish, or game, usually five or six ounces at a meal, with an ounce or two of stale toast or cooked fruit on the side. He had his evening tea with a few more ounces of fruit or toast. He scrupulously avoided any other food that might contain either sugar or starch, in particular bread, milk, beer, sweets, and potatoes. Despite a considerable allowance of alcohol in Banting’s regimen–four or five glasses of wine each day, a cordial every morning, and an evening tumbler of gin, whisky, or brandy–Banting dropped thirty-five pounds by the following May and fifty pounds by early 1864. “I have not felt better in health than now for the last twenty-six years,” he wrote. “My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.”We know this because Banting published a sixteen-page pamphlet describing his dietary experience in 1863–Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public–promptly launching the first popular diet craze, known farther and wider than Banting could have imagined as Bantingism. His Letter on Corpulence was widely translated and sold particularly well in the United States, Germany, Austria, and France, where according to the British Medical Journal, “the emperor of the French is trying the Banting system and is said to have already profited greatly thereby.” Within a year, “Banting” had entered the English language as a verb meaning “to diet.” “If he is gouty, obese, and nervous, we strongly recommend him to ‘bant,’ ” suggested the Pall Mall Gazette in June 1865.The medical community of Banting’s day didn’t quite know what to make of him or his diet. Correspondents to the British Medical Journal seemed occasionally open-minded, albeit suitably skeptical; a formal paper was presented on the efficacy and safety of Banting’s diet at the 1864 meeting of the British Medical Association. Others did what members of established societies often do when confronted with a radical new concept: they attacked both the message and the messenger. The editors of The Lancet, which is to the BMJ what Newsweek is to Time, were particularly ruthless. First, they insisted that Banting’s diet was old news, which it was, although Banting never claimed otherwise. The medical literature, wrote The Lancet, “is tolerably complete, and supplies abundant evidence that all which Mr. Banting advises has been written over and over again.” Banting responded that this might well have been so, but it was news to him and other corpulent individuals.In fact, Banting properly acknowledged his medical adviser Harvey, and in later editions of his pamphlet he apologized for not being familiar with the three Frenchmen who probably should have gotten credit: Claude Bernard, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and Jean-François Dancel. (Banting neglected to mention his countrymen Alfred William Moore and John Harvey, who published treatises on similar meaty, starch-free diets in 1860 and 1861 respectively.)Brillat-Savarin had been a lawyer and gourmand who wrote what may be the single most famous book ever written about food, The Physiology of Taste, first published in 1825.* In it, Brillat-Savarin claimed that he could easily identify the cause of obesity after thirty years of talking with one “fat” or “particularly fat” individual after another who proclaimed the joys of bread, rice, and potatoes. He added that the effects of this intake were exacerbated when sugar was consumed as well. His recommended reducing diet, not surprisingly, was “more or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury.”Dancel was a physician and former military surgeon who publicly presented his ideas on obesity in 1844 to the French Academy of Sciences and then published a popular treatise, Obesity, or Excessive Corpulence, The Various Causes and the Rational Means of Cure. Dancel’s thinking was based in part on the research of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, who, at the time, was defending his belief that fat is formed in animals primarily from the ingestion of fats, starches, and sugars, and that protein is used exclusively for the restoration or creation of muscular tissue. “All food which is not flesh–all food rich in carbon and hydrogen–must have a tendency to produce fat,” wrote Dancel. “Upon these principles only can any rational treatment for the cure of obesity satisfactorily rest.” Dancel also noted that carnivores are never fat, whereas herbivores, living exclusively on plants, often are: “The hippopotamus, for example,” wrote Dancel, “so uncouth in form from its immense amount of fat, feeds wholly upon vegetable matter–rice, millet, sugar-cane, &c.”The second primary grievance that The Lancet’s editors had with Banting, which has been echoed by critics of such diets ever since, was that his diet could be dangerous, and particularly so for the credibility of those physicians who did not embrace his ideas. “We advise Mr. Banting, and everyone of his kind, not to meddle with medical literature again, but be content to mind his own business,” The Lancet said. When Bantingism showed little sign of fading from the scene, however, The Lancet’s editors adopted a more scientific approach. They suggested that a “fair trial” be given to Banting’s diet and to the supposition that “the sugary and starchy elements of food be really the chief cause of undue corpulence.”Banting’s diet plays a pivotal role in the science of obesity–and, in fact, chronic disease–for two reasons. First, if the diet worked, if it actually helped people lose weight safely and keep it off, then that is worth knowing. More important, knowing whether “the sugary and starchy elements of food” are “really the chief cause of undue corpulence” is as vital to the public health as knowing, for example, that cigarettes cause lung cancer, or that HIV causes AIDS. If we choose to quit smoking to avoid the former, or to use condoms or abstinence to avoid the latter, that is our choice. The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt. It is easy to insist, as public-health authorities inevitably have, that calories count and obesity must be caused by overeating or sedentary behavior, but it tells us remarkably little about the underlying process of weight regulation and obesity. “To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’ ” as the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer suggested back in 1968, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’ ”After the publication of Banting’s “Letter on Corpulence,” his diet spawned a century’s worth of variations. By the turn of the twentieth century, when the renowned physician Sir William Osler discussed the treatment of obesity in his textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine, he listed Banting’s method and versions by the German clinicians Max Joseph Oertel and Wilhelm Ebstein. Oertel, director of a Munich sanitorium, prescribed a diet that featured lean beef, veal, or mutton, and eggs; overall, his regimen was more restrictive of fats than Banting’s and a little more lenient with vegetables and bread. When the 244-pound Prince Otto von Bismarck lost sixty pounds in under a year, it was with Oertel’s regimen. Ebstein, a professor of medicine at the University of Göttingen and author of the 1882 monograph Obesity and Its Treatment, insisted that fatty foods were crucial because they increased satiety and so decreased fat accumulation. Ebstein’s diet allowed no sugar, no sweets, no potatoes, limited bread, and a few green vegetables, but “of meat every kind may be eaten, and fat meat especially.” As for Osler himself, he advised obese women to “avoid taking too much food, and particularly to reduce the starches and sugars.”The two constants over the years were the ideas that starches and sugars–i.e., carbohydrates–must be minimized to reduce weight, and that meat, fish, or fowl would constitute the bulk of the diet. When seven prominent British clinicians, led by Raymond Greene (brother of the novelist Graham Greene), published a textbook entitled The Practice of Endocrinology** in 1951, their prescribed diet for obesity was almost identical to that recommended by Banting, and that which would be prescribed by such iconoclasts as Herman Taller and Robert Atkins in the United States ten and twenty years later.Foods to be avoided:1. Bread, and everything else made with flour . . .2. Cereals, including breakfast cereals and milk puddings3. Potatoes and all other white root vegetables4. Foods containing much sugar5. All sweets . . .You can eat as much as you like of the following foods:1. Meat, fish, birds2. All green vegetables3. Eggs, dried or fresh4. Cheese5. Fruit, if unsweetened or sweetened with saccharin, except bananas and grapes“The great progress in dietary control of obesity,” wrote Hilde Bruch, considered the foremost authority on childhood obesity, in 1957, “was the recognition that meat . . . was not fat producing; but that it was the innocent foodstuffs, such as bread and sweets, which lead to obesity.”The scientific rationale behind this supposed cause and effect was based on observation, experimental evidence, and maybe the collected epiphanies and anecdotes of those who had successfully managed to bant. “The overappropriation of nourishment seen in obesity is derived in part from the fat ingested with the food, but more particularly from the carbohydrates,” noted James French in 1907 in his Textbook of the Practice of Medicine. Copious opinions were offered, but no specific hypotheses. In his 1940 monograph Obesity and Leanness, Hugo Rony, director of the Endocrinology Clinic at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, reported that he had carefully questioned fifty of his obese patients, and forty-one professed a “more or less marked preference for starchy and sweet foods; only 1 patient claimed preference for fatty foods.” Rony had one unusual patient, “an extremely obese laundress,” who had no taste for sweets, but “a craving for laundry starch which she used to eat by the handful, as much as a pound a day. . . .” So maybe carbohydrates are fattening because that’s what those with a tendency to gain weight eat to excess.To others, carbohydrates carry some inherent quality that makes them uniquely fattening. Maybe they induce a continued sensation of hunger, or even a specific hunger for more carbohydrates. Maybe they induce less satiation per calorie consumed. Maybe they somehow cause the human body to preferentially store away calories as fat. “In Great Britain obesity is probably more common among poor women than among the rich,” Sir Stanley Davidson and Reginald Passmore wrote in the early 1960s in their classic textbook Human Nutrition and Dietetics, “perhaps because foods rich in fat and protein, which satisfy appetite more readily than carbohydrates, are more expensive than the starchy foods which provide the bulk of cheap meals.”This belief in the fattening powers of carbohydrates can be found in literature as well. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for instance, written in the mid-1870s, Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky, abstains from starches and sweets in preparation for what turns out to be the climactic horse race. “On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo,” writes Tolstoy, “Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the officers’ mess of the regiment. He had no need to be in strict training, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required weight of one hundred and sixty pounds, but still he had to avoid gaining weight, and he avoided starchy foods and desserts.” In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, published in 1958, the protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, expresses his distaste for the plump young ladies of Palermo, while blaming their condition on, among other factors, “the dearth of proteins and the overabundance of starch in the food.”This was what Dr. Spock taught our parents and our grandparents in the first five decades, six editions, and almost 50 million copies of Baby and Child Care, the bible of child-rearing in the latter half of the twentieth century. “Rich desserts,” Spock wrote, and “the amount of plain, starchy foods (cereals, breads, potatoes) taken is what determines, in the case of most people, how much [weight] they gain or lose.” It’s what my Brooklyn-born mother taught me forty-odd years ago. If we eat too much bread or too much spaghetti, we will get fat. The same, of course, is true of sweets. For over a century, this was the common wisdom. “All popular ‘slimming regimes’ involve a restriction in dietary carbohydrate,” wrote Davidson and Passmore in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, offering this advice: “The intake of foods rich in carbohydrate should be drastically reduced since over-indulgence in such foods is the most common cause of obesity.” “The first thing most Americans do when they decide to shed unwanted pounds is to cut out bread, pass up the potatoes and rice, and cross spaghetti dinners off the menu entirely,” wrote the New York Times personal-health reporter, Jane Brody, in her 1985 best-selling Good Food Book.* When the first American edition of The Physiology of Taste was published in 1865, it was entitled The Handbook of Dining, or Corpulence and Leanness Scientifically Considered, perhaps to capitalize on the Banting craze.** Endocrinology is the study of the glands that secrete hormones and the hormones themselves.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 23, 2008
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400033462
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400033461
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 1.32 x 9.15 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #55,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Gary Taubes

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Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It and Good Calories, Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK). Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. These include the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. (He is the first print journalist to win this award three times.) Taubes graduated from Harvard College in 1977 with an S.B. degree in applied physics, and received an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981).

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Customers find the book brilliantly researched, densely packed with technical scientific information, and consider it one of the most important books they will ever read. Moreover, they appreciate its content on low-carb eating and its positive effects on cholesterol levels, with customers reporting increased energy and reduced body aches. However, the book's length and density receive mixed reactions, with some finding it very long and dense, while others consider it well put together and substantial. Additionally, the rigor receives mixed feedback, with one customer describing it as heavy on facts and details, while another finds it meandering.

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568 customers mention "Information quality"468 positive100 negative

Customers praise the book's thorough research, with one customer noting it is densely packed with technical scientific information and exhaustively quotes research throughout.

"...Taubes is an impressive researcher, and as he said at one point, prior to the internet and its ability to facilitate research, this particular book..." Read more

"...thing courageous enough to "question authority" to this degree, detailed enough to provide a jumping-off point for legitimate medical people to re-..." Read more

"...Good Calories, Bad Calories" is brilliantly researched and intelligently written. But in the end, we're still absent an answer about what to eat...." Read more

"...this book consists solely of the references, works, and studies cited for every sentence he writes as he moves through each chapter...." Read more

451 customers mention "Readability"342 positive109 negative

Customers find the book highly readable and well-written, describing it as a magnificent opus and one of the most important books they will ever read.

"...understand the full extent of why that weight came off so easily and quickly, how effortlessly I reached my ideal weight, and why I came to realize..." Read more

"...people to re-evaluate some old ideas on their own, and yet readable enough to provide an entry gateway to at least a small portion of the layman..." Read more

"...Good Calories, Bad Calories" is brilliantly researched and intelligently written. But in the end, we're still absent an answer about what to eat...." Read more

"...Pollan's book and enjoy it immensely, mainly due to his conversational writing style, but it was Good Calories Bad Calories that really set me into..." Read more

166 customers mention "Calorie count"145 positive21 negative

Customers appreciate the calorie count information in the book, particularly noting that a high-fat diet is beneficial for health and helps reduce hunger.

"...Actually, I felt better than fine, to my great surprise. My energy level was high and I didn't feel hungry at all...." Read more

"...of why that weight came off so easily and quickly, how effortlessly I reached my ideal weight, and why I came to realize I hadn't known what it felt..." Read more

"...Taubes makes an excellent case to support the low carbohydrate approach to diets with the intent of keeping insulin levels normalized within the body..." Read more

"...nutritional beliefs such as eating lots of fruits and veggies, restricting fat intake, watching your calorie intake, keeping away from red meats,..." Read more

35 customers mention "Cholesterol level"32 positive3 negative

Customers report positive effects on cholesterol levels, feeling more energetic and experiencing reduced body aches.

"...on the Atkins diet the weight fell off effortlessly and I felt marvelous...." Read more

"...I'm now normal weight for my height, and I always feel nimble and energetic compared to how I used to feel before reading this book...." Read more

"...This will help you feel full longer and reduce your cravings that come with sudden sugar highs and lows that come from eating refined carbs and..." Read more

"...months until my next check up, but I can report that my body aches have lessened, I have more energy, my short-term memory is better and my..." Read more

23 customers mention "Sturdiness"23 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's sturdiness, describing it as well put together, substantial, and in good condition.

"...I suggest that everyone read this book....it's a substantial and involving read, and it probably needs to be read several times to truly digest it..." Read more

"...Amazing cohesiveness with the incredible amount of information Taubes had to juggle to put this book together *..." Read more

"This is by far the most well put together, non biased, thoughtful, coherent book on nutrition I have ever read...." Read more

"...a light read, the book exhaustively quotes research, and meticulously builds its case for calling into question the validity of conventional dietary..." Read more

29 customers mention "Length"15 positive14 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's length, with some finding it very long and noting its extensive bibliography, while others wish it was shorter.

"...But the good thing about this book is that there are about 150 pages of references - when you see something you want to know more about, look at the..." Read more

"...and contains crucially important information, but it's a hard read - long, dense, meandering, and repetitive...." Read more

"...The book is 601 pages and this includes 140 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. Do you want a history book of dieting?..." Read more

"...Some will find this book overly long and exhaustingly exhaustive; I found it compelling...." Read more

27 customers mention "Density"10 positive17 negative

Customers find the book dense.

"...contains crucially important information, but it's a hard read - long, dense, meandering, and repetitive...." Read more

"...and worth the not inconsiderable time and effort that such a large, dense, and closely documented work demands...." Read more

"...were a bit painful and it took a while to read the whole book, its very dense...." Read more

"...As others have said this is a dense and challenging read. It's not for everyone, but it was absolutely for me...." Read more

12 customers mention "Rigor"4 positive8 negative

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"...crucially important information, but it's a hard read - long, dense, meandering, and repetitive...." Read more

"...' book, simply eat foods that come to you as nature intended; whole, real, micronutrient dense and carbohydrate sparse...." Read more

"...Frankly, I recommend the book, notwithstanding the rather disturbing conclusions which really gives one pause." Read more

"...Do not test fundamental assumptions, do not allow for alternative hypothesis to be researched, use political and media tactics to attack even..." Read more

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Sheryl Canter
Superb Research, Crucial Conclusions (but a hard read)
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2009
Verified Purchase

This review was originally posted in the Normal Eating newsletter and blog:

[...]

TAUBES' BOOK AND THE REAL CAUSE OF OBESITY

I just finished reading Gary Taubes' book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's superbly researched and contains crucially important information, but it's a hard read - long, dense, meandering, and repetitive. I fear that many people won't get all the way through it. And while the extensive detail on studies is great, the forest gets a bit lost among all the trees. So here is a summary of the book's main findings, which start with this revolutionary notion:

Overeating is not the cause of obesity, but rather its consequence - a form of body wisdom caused by dietary fuel being abnormally locked away as fat. The cells of your body don't have enough usable energy, so you eat more and move less. Sound crazy? There's actually voluminous research to support this theory.

A Heart-Healthy Diet is High Fat

The book starts with a thorough debunking of the idea that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. I'm not going to repeat all the evidence here (read the book for that), but there is no question that the dietary cause of atherosclerosis is excessive dietary carbohydrate, not excessive saturated fat. In fact, eating saturated fat is protective of your heart.

Study after study shows this is true. But unfortunately, before the evidence became so clear, the government and medical establishment made some premature pronouncements about low-fat diets being good for your heart, and now they can't find a face-saving way to back off from it.

In addition to the experimental evidence, there is the cultural evidence. The chapter on "Diseases of Civilization" gives example after example of hunter-gatherer cultures that never experienced heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, or the rest of the diseases that plague our society - until they started eating the Western diet dominated by white flour, white sugar, and white rice.

Human breast milk is very high in cholesterol. We evolved as hunter-gatherers eating a high-fat diet composed chiefly of red meat. How in the world could this be bad for us? The new food in our diet - processed and excessive carbohydrate - is the obvious cause of the new diseases. There is a wonderful quote about this from Peter Cleave's testimony before George McGovern's Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs:

I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment. For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life. If anybody tells me that eating fat was the cause of coronary disease, I should look at them in amazement. But, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up ... that is a very different proposition.

Low-Fat Diets Make You Fat

The gigantic mistake that the government and medical establishment made in advising a low-fat diet also affected the advice to people struggling with obesity and diabetes. Doctors who recommended a high-fat, low-carb diet for weight loss risked censure because of the widespread - and erroneous - notion that this was bad for the heart.

All obesity research results were interpreted - sometimes tortuously - to be compatible with the idea that carbs are good for you. And one entire area of evidence - the biology of fat metabolism - was completely ignored, because there was no way to reconcile this with the bad advice to eat lots of carbs.

When you eat carbohydrates - particularly processed carbohydrates like white flour, white rice, or sugar - your body secretes insulin to remove the sugar from your blood. Insulin is the hormone necessary to store fat into your fat cells, and also inhibits the release of fat from your fat cells. You can't get fat without insulin, and you can't lose fat with insulin. Obese people virtually always have chronically elevated insulin levels, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes that makes it almost impossible to lose weight.

The only way you can lose weight on a low-fat, high-carb diet is by restricting calories - a semi-starvation diet. Not only is undereating unbearable - for experimental subjects as well as dieters - people almost always regain weight lost from semi-starvation, usually plus some. Study after study shows this to be true, whether you start out fat or lean.

So why isn't everyone fat on a Western diet? People differ in their sensitivity to carbs - they differ in the amount of insulin released after eating carbs, and the sensitivity of their fat tissue to insulin. Some people can eat cake for every meal and not gain weight, but others will quickly fatten on a high carb diet. Unfortunately, people who don't struggle with weight often have little sympathy for those who do because they don't understand that their bodies are different. They think they're morally superior.

Obesity is Not Caused by Gluttony and Sloth

The nice way of saying "gluttony and sloth" is "overeating and lack of exercise". But however you say it, the fact remains: The common wisdom is that fat people cause their own problem by committing two of the seven deadly sins. No wonder there is so much fat bias.

The conventional wisdom is that you get fat if you eat more calories than you expend - the positive caloric balance hypothesis. But the fact that semi-starvation diets almost never produce long-term weight loss strongly suggests that positive caloric balance - overeating and lack of exercise - is not the underlying cause of obesity.

The positive caloric balance hypothesis assumes that (1) the source of the calories doesn't matter - a calorie is a calorie, and (2) energy intake and energy expenditure are independent variables. Neither of these assumptions is true:

- A carb calorie has a very different affect on the body than a fat calorie (see above).

- Energy expenditure is highly dependent on energy intake. Our bodies work hard to maintain a constant body weight. Research shows that if you undereat, your metabolism slows to compensate, and if you overeat, your metabolism speeds up. The idea that you can gain or lose weight over time by altering your intake by 100 calories a day is ridiculous. Your body easily compensates for this small variation (and much larger variations).

Growing children have a positive caloric balance. But the reason they are growing is not because they are eating more calories than they are expending. They are eating more calories than they are expending because they are growing. The cause of their growth is growth hormone, not overeating. The same is true in obesity.

Obesity is a fat storage disorder, not an eating disorder. The body is storing too many of the calories you eat as fat instead of making this dietary energy available to your muscles and organs. On a cellular level, you are experiencing semi-starvation. So you eat more, and you conserve energy by moving less. You don't get fat because you're overeating and under-exercising, you overeat and under-exercise because you're getting fat. Just as vertical growth is driven by hormones, so is the "horizontal growth" of obesity - in this case, insulin. Insulin becomes elevated by a diet too high in carbohydrates.

Have you noticed that people who are fat don't gain weight continuously? You gain weight and then stay at that weight. This is not because of some "set point" that your body is stuck at. Your body maintains a dynamic equilibrium around usable energy, not fat. One hypothesis is that as fat cells expand, it becomes easier for them to release their fat - just as the pressure inside a blown-up balloon will push out the air. Once enough fat is in the cells that it can be mobilized (burned for fuel), a new equilibrium is reached and you stop gaining. Once fat can be mobilized, you don't need to eat as much because your cells have fuel.

The more insulin circulating in your blood, the harder it is to mobilize your fat stores and burn fat for energy. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin will be circulating in your blood. For those who are genetically vulnerable, a high carb diet eventually causes insulin levels to become chronically elevated, while muscle cells become increasingly resistant to insulin (unable to use dietary glucose for energy). Eventually, fat cells also become insulin resistant, and diabetes is the result.

The cellular semi-starvation from excessive fat storage may be why obese women have trouble getting pregnant. It's actually similar to what happens to women who are underweight.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOMETHING TO TRY...

Taubes' book is quite long and extremely detailed. I'm just highlighting its main conclusions. For the evidence - which is voluminous - read the book. Or try some experiments on your own body.

I wrote in a previous post that there are two main reasons that people become overweight: emotional eating and processed food (which is generally high carb). Processed carbohydrates are an unnatural food that cause our body wisdom cues to go haywire. Even if you vanquish emotional eating entirely, you will tend to overeat processed carbohydrates because they induce cravings.

Processed carbs taste good, but they don't make your body feel good. They give you a buzz followed by a crash, and then constant cravings. They also can affect mood, making you depressed. If you've never gone without carbs for a period of time, you may not even realize you feel this way because of what you eat. If you have nothing to compare it to, you may think it's just you. This is why food experiments are such an important part of Stage 2 of Normal Eating. You have to experience first-hand how different foods make you feel to internalize the body wisdom. You can't read this and believe it, you have to feel it.

So in the spirit of experimentation, try reducing your carb intake for a few days or a week and see how you feel. Don't get black-and-white about it - just see if you can slowly push down your carb intake over time. In particular, try to minimize white flour, white rice, and sweets of all kinds - including honey and artificial sweeteners. If you're feeling ambitious, try minimizing all grain for a few days - even whole wheat and brown rice. Grain is a Neolithic food, introduced with agriculture. It's not what we evolved eating, and now it's the staple of the Western diet.

Why cut out artificial sweeteners? Research has found that artificial sweeteners will cause the body to secrete insulin, same as sugar - sweet is sweet. When I read that, I wondered if some people failed to lose weight on low-carb diets because of overuse of artificial sweeteners. If you try lowering your carbs, don't go the Atkins route of weird ingredients, using highly processed substitutes for flour and sugar. Just skip the bread and the sweets. Stick with real food, recognizable from nature.

I've been trying this myself the last few weeks. I had no problem cutting out grain, but sweets were a sticking point. No sweet taste at all? That was tough. But I was able to taper off it, and then - surprisingly - it didn't bother me. It's really true that eating carbs induces carb craving. The physiological reasons are detailed in Taubes' book. Once you wean off it, you stop craving it. It's a bit like quitting smoking.

Years ago I tried the Atkins diet and didn't even last a day because I felt so dizzy and weak. I now realize this is because I wasn't eating fat. One day last week I again tried eating zero carbs, but this time with lots of bacon and sausage (from the farmer's market - no nitrates), and I felt fine. Actually, I felt better than fine, to my great surprise. My energy level was high and I didn't feel hungry at all. And I've lost a few pounds since I started experimenting.

People in the forum hate when I talk about nutrition; they say it feels like a diet. But it's not a diet if it's just an experiment to see how you feel, and it's not a diet if you choose to eat a certain way because you feel good eating that way.

An important part of Normal Eating is understanding, on a deep level, that it is your right to eat whatever your want. But with rights come responsibilities, and this other side of the coin is just as important. No one can tell you what to eat, and that means you must take responsibility for your own eating. In the end, nutrition matters.

So what do you think? Are you willing to try lowering your carbs as an experiment? If not, why not? If yes, post your experiences in the blog, where this article is cross-posted:

[...]

Sheryl Canter
Author of "Normal Eating for Normal Weight"

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CMCM
Amazing, whistle blowing book
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2007
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This book is without a doubt the most all inclusive, exhaustively researched book on dietary issues that exists. I read it front to back and am now re-reading it with my pink marker. You have to have a real interest in the subject to wade through all the information, it's not light reading. However, what is presented is mind blowing yet I had a sense of "I knew this all along." What really amazed AND disgusted me was the extent of sloppy and often bad science that has existed over the years with regard to weight gain, the influence of politics and media in misleading the public, often quite deliberately, other times just due to weak intellect. Taubes discusses it all, and the evidence is pretty plain. He footnotes everything, all the studies, the conferences, he names all the names. The back of the book has 44 pages of footnoted references, followed by a 66 page bibliography. Taubes is an impressive researcher, and as he said at one point, prior to the internet and its ability to facilitate research, this particular book would have been a lifetime of work to assemble.

Four years ago, suffering from a sprained shoulder and broken rib from a ski fall, and therefore unable to exercise for a time, I embarked on the Atkins diet to lose that proverbial last 20 lbs which seemingly would not budge despite fairly careful eating and a strenuous 6-day a week exercise regime. To my amazement, on the Atkins diet the weight fell off effortlessly and I felt marvelous. A few years later, I realized that I was both gluten and casein sensitive and the lack of grains, sugar, fruit and dairy in the Atkins induction diet explained why I felt so wonderful. It was obvious those omitted foods influenced whether I gained or lost weight. After reading this book, I now understand the full extent of why that weight came off so easily and quickly, how effortlessly I reached my ideal weight, and why I came to realize I hadn't known what it felt like to food GOOD all the time.

Looking back at my childhood in the 50's and 60's, this was a time in which not I, not my family, not anyone I knew, none of my schooolmates were at all overweight and you just didn't see very many hugely obese people anywhere. The grossly bloated and obsese people you see so commonly today were a total rarity at that time. The cause of so much of today's overweight is fairly obvious to pinpoint, and you have only to take a walk thru your local supermarket, pay attention to the products of the fast food restaurants (can you find anything that isn't fried/breaded/carb loaded??), and look at the typical diet everyone today tends to eat: grains grains grains at every meal, high carbs at every meal, loads of sugar and high fructose corn syrup (in virtually everything processed), and relatively less protein, very few vegetables (no, french fries don't count as a vegetable!), not much fat and not enough fruit. We are overloading ourselves with pure junk food from morning to night, most of it almost totally deficient in nutrients, but in other eras our typical diet was not like this.

Growing up my mom cooked meat, fairly minimal amounts of starch such as potatoes/rice, lots of veggies, fruits. We rarely had sodas (occasional treat only), desserts such as cakes or pies were infrequent, we didn't have snack foods such as chips, crackers, cookies in the house. We just didn't munch on junk between meals and if we needed a snack it would be an apple or some nuts. Breakfast cereals were relatively few and were generally corn flakes, Wheaties, Rice Krispies, etc., but again, they were consumed in very small amounts and not so full of sugar and chemicals. Think about the cereal aisle of today's market: dozens and dozens of cereals, a very high profit item by the way, most of them pure junk and chock full of sugar and chemicals. They are eaten for breakfast, they are snack foods. Kids stuff themselves with junky cereals. So making these observations on my own, I've always felt these differences in eating were marked from that era to what it is today, and I now see that idea was completely on track. While at age 58 I remember how I used to eat as a kid and teen, today's kids have never had the contrast and they think the foods we eat today are as it has always been. And they are nutritionally illiterate.

It's hard to go against the grain of "medical wisdom", but the fact is, as Taubes so aptly reveals, that with regard to obesity research, there has been no mainstream "medical wisdom" and the researchers who WERE on track were ignored or disregarded. Look at how maligned Atkins was! Taubes points out that scientific research was SUPPOSED to pose a hypothesis and then try to prove it false. Obesity research has been marked by posing a hypothesis and disregarding anything that was contrary, and collecting only the evidence that proved the hypothesis true. There has been a LOT of political influence.....if a scientist and his research is funded by General Mills, for example, it's not in his interest to report that certain products are unhealthy. This sort of thing has been done to a truly remarkable extent, and the impact has been devastating to our collective health. There has not been honesty of purpose in much of obesity research.

I suggest that everyone read this book....it's a substantial and involving read, and it probably needs to be read several times to truly digest it all, but it's fascinating all the way. It shows how we have been misled to be a nation of pill-takers for conditions that could largely be resolved by the proper DIET, and not with pills. (Think of the influence of pharmaceutical companies here: what would they do without the sales of diabetes meds, heartburn meds, cholesterol lowering meds, high blood pressure meds, the list goes on). The diseases of civilization....diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many others.....the link to your diet will crystal clear after reading this book, and the volume of evidence is undeniable. It's obvious that the wrong foods are hugely responsible for much, if not virtually ALL of the "diseases of civilization". It follows that the right diet could also eliminate these diseases over time. This is the amazing thing, the truth is actually quite obvious if people will get their heads out of the sand and look at it! Go into reading this book with an open mind, and you will see what you need to do. "Medical wisdom" is not the god you may have thought it was.

With regard to what you eat, most people tend to believe that if a food can be bought, it must be "OK." But that's just not true. There's a saying we should all remember: "Just because you CAN eat it, doesn't mean you SHOULD."

Taubes deserves a medal, some sort of major award, national scientific and medical recognition for his massive contribution to understanding and treating obesity with this book. Sadly, if things continue as they have in the last 50+ years, the book will be dismissed, maligned, and largely ignored by the scientific community AND with the press, who could, if they were so motivated, bring this information to the attention of the reading public.

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Camilla - Italy
Alimentazione, scienza e storia (in inglese)
Reviewed in Italy on August 2, 2018
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Questa è la seconda copia che compro di questo libro. L'ho regalata ad un amico con cui spesso si parla di alimentazione.
È un testo illuminante sui pericoli dell'eccesso di carboidrati che caratterizza l'alimentazione moderna. In più, è argomentato in maniera solidissima, con riferimenti così vari e dettagliati alla ricerca scientifica e alla storia della scienza dell'alimentazione da far comprendere come si è arrivati agli attuali modelli alimentari, alle loro criticità e le possibili alternative.
Il tutto scritto in maniera rigorosissima ma accessibile. Un esempio di giornalismo di divulgazione scientifica confortante in un panorama editoriale dove toppo spesso l'argomento è vittima dell'improvvisazione e della polemica.

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Andrew
Bahnbrechend, hervorragend, unglaublich, genial, ...
Reviewed in Germany on October 25, 2013
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Gary Taubes schafft es mit diesem bahnbrechenden Werk die Zusammenhänge der letzten 200 Jahre Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Medizin, Ernährungs"wissenschaft" und anderen nach zu zeichnen und so ein klares, unglaublich mutiges und differenziertes Bild der Entstehung, Ursachen, Hintergründe und Lösung vieler, ernährungsbedingter Volksleiden wie Adipositas, Übergewicht, Diabetes II, etc. dem Leser zu vermitteln. Der klaren, sehr spannenden Aufbereitung der wissenschaftlichen Fakten und menschlichen Schwächen zahlreicher (überbewerteter und fälschlich als vertrauenswürdig bewerteten) Wissenschaftlicher und v.a. auch Pseudo-Wissenschaftler, ebenso wie Politiker gebührt Dank und Hochachtung.

Es wird verständlich, warum über Jahrzehnte Falschinformationen und Meinungen einzelner den Bevölkerung, gerade in USA und Deutschland als "Ernährungsempfehlungen" verkauft wurden (wenig Fett, viele Kohlenhydrate z.B.), welche dazu führten (und immer weiter dazu führen), dass Übergewicht, Adipositas, Diabetes, jedes Jahr weiter zunehmen und nicht nur die Mehrheit unserer sog. reichen Industriestaaten davon betroffen ist, sondern bald unglaubliche 70 oder gar 80% nach div. Schätzungen. Zeit aufzuwachen aus dem Informationsnetz an Falsch- und Fehlinformationen, schlechter und Pseudowissenschaft, das überwiegend Meinungs-basiert ist und dem überwiegend keinerlei ernst zu nehmende Wissenschaft zu Grunde liegt.

Es ist durchaus als bahnbrechend zu bezeichnen, im Laufe der 650 Seiten fallen einem viele Zusammenhänge wie Schuppen von den Augen. Vieles klärt sich. Zum Beispiel, dass Reduktionsdiäten nur eine 1%-ige Erfolgschance haben und gleichzeitig als das Non-Plus-Ultra von allen Fachgesellschaften zur Gewichtsabnahme empfohlen werden. Wobei von vielen Stellen deren mangelnde Wirksamkeit inzwischen teilweise wenigstens erwähnt wird. Was diese jedoch nicht daran hindert sich gleichzeitig zu widersprechen und, wie die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung oder die Deutsche Diabetes Gesellschaft (ebenso wie deren amerikanische Pendants), weiterhin diese als einzig wirksame Methoden empfehlen. Ebenso, dass - und das ist zentral - die wichtigsten Ursachen der Übergewichts- und Adipositas-Epidemie ein (wie auch immer gearteter) "Bewegungsmangel" und eine "erhöhte Nahrungsaufnahme" seien (v.a die angeblich so schädlichen Nahrungsfette). Die Verwechslung von Ursache und Wirkung an dieser Stelle ist einschneidend. Die dargelegten (wissenschaftlich unstrittigen) Zusammenhänge von Kohlenhydrat-reicher Nahrung > dauerhaft erhöhtem Insulinspiegel > Aufbau von Körperfett und Verhinderung des Verbrauchs von Körperfett, ist einleuchtend. Und dennoch weitgehend ignoriert in der Fachwelt. Und in den Bevölkerungen oft unbekannt.

Das Buch beschreibt auch ein- und nachdrücklich, welche unglaublichen Vorgänge im Bereich der Forschung im Bereich Medizin (v.a. chronische Krankheiten und Adipositas, bzw. Übergewicht) und Ernährung die letzten Jahrzehnte beherrschten: schlechte oder völlig vernachlässigte Wissenschaft, Aufstellen von unbewiesenen Behauptungen und jahrzehntelanger Ignoranz und stetiges Verkaufen von persönlichen Meinungen als wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse. So konnte z.B. bis heute der Zusammenhang von Nahrungsfetten und Krankheiten wissenschaftlich nicht bewiesen werden (was auch von Fach-Autoritäten gerne anders dargestellt wird, aus welchen Gründen auch immer). Ebenso wenig, und das ist wohl der größte Verdienst von Gary Taubes, wurde seine Kohlenhydrat-Hypothese bisher ausreichend wissenschaftlich erforscht und wird glasklar verständlich, warum - z.B. aus Ignoranz und schlechter Wissenschaft vermutlich - was sich nach diesem Buch jedoch ändern dürfte. Nachdem die in Medizin, Ernährungswissenschaft und Gesundheitspolitik vorherrschenden Meinungen eben genau das sind - Meinungen, und nichts davon einer wissenschaftlichen Überprüfung stand hält, kann die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Gary Taubes Kohlenhydrat-Hypothesen richtig sind, als sehr hoch angesehen werden.

Dieses aufrüttelnde Werk sollte jeder Mediziner, Ernährungswissenschaftler, Gesundheitspolitiker, Forscher in den betreffenden Disziplinen und alle direkt von Übergewicht, Adipositas, Diabetes, und allen Volkskrankheiten betroffenen Menschen lesen und sein Wissen sollte in Grundschulen unterrichtet werden. Es schafft einmalige Klarheit. Das Wissen über die wissenschaftliche Faktenlage zu Kohlenhydraten und die schädlichen Auswirkungen auf den Stoffwechsel der allermeisten Menschen und die genannten, bekannten Volkskrankheiten, könnte vielen Millionen Menschen helfen, endlich gesund zu werden oder gesund zu bleiben.

Eines der mit Abstand bedeutendsten Bücher überhaupt.

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GS
Excellent review
Reviewed in Australia on September 2, 2018
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Great read for those interested in understanding how main stream diet advice had gotten it so wrong

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This book is an amazing tour de force which really spells out how such ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2018
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WOW. Just wow. This book is an amazing tour de force which really spells out how such twisted messages around carbs/fat/fibre/sugar have reached the public - in a scandalous way. A real expose of a book. It describes how many myths have been perpetuated by the media; how academics and their personal allegiances and personalities have influenced the outcomes of scientific research in a very non-scientific way; and exactly why carbs are so bad for us. I am immediately going to read all other books written by Gary Taubes. This book is VERY INVOLVED, so if you are looking for a simple overview or you don't want to get lost in the nitty gritty detail, it may not be the best book for you - but if you love to get stuck in and make decisions based on facts themselves, then this is THE book. I think it is possibly the best book I've ever read from a readable-science perspective...

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Cryss
Un must have, un must read... s'adresse au grand public, il faut le lire tellement il y a de sujets pertinents dedans !
Reviewed in France on November 29, 2016
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Voici un livre acheté il y a un moment... et j'ai mis longtemps avant de mettre mon nez dedans !
Je n'avais peut être pas fait attention aux critiques précédentes, dorénavant je l'ai avalé et je tiens à lui faire de la pub.

Pour les francophone, Gary Taubes est Julien Venesson aux USA. Un journaliste scientifique sans parti pris, qui s'intéresse à chaque bout d'un fait soit disant scientifiquement démontré, et qui nous expose sur différents sujet comme le cholestérol, les glucides, le sucre ajouté, l'obésité, le diabète ou le fonctionnement de l'insuline, un historique des connaissances et l'évolution des études pour chaque thème, ce qui est fort appréciable pour comprendre le cheminement de la pensée moderne actuelle, mais aussi qui met en lumière avec quelle facilité, et je dirais, par quelle sur-simplicité la science a su parfois se noyer dans son verre et passer à côté d'explications sensées, lorsqu'on prend un minimum de recul et qu'on n'arrive pas avec des préjugés.

Bref, cela se lit bien si vous n'êtes pas un pro de l'anglais, pensez à avoir un traducteur pour quelques mots de vocabulaire mais globalement ce livre est riche, et à mettre en parallèle de travaux plus récents pour ceux qui souhaitent comprendre une prise de poids et essayer de s'en sortir par l'alimentation, car ce ne sont pas des médicaments qui vous aideront, encore moins des restrictions selon moi. Et pour ceux qui prennent un traitement contre le cholestérol ou ont des valeurs en dehors de ce que l'on pourrait aussi remettre en question, les intervalles de tolérance, cela vous ouvrira votre raisonnement et vous montrera que dans une majorité des cas, la solution se trouve dans votre frigo et vos placards.

Lisez le et appréciez, toujours avec de la mesure, rien n'est absolu.

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Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health Paperback – September 23, 2008

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5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Research, Crucial Conclusions (but a hard read)

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, whistle blowing book

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5.0 out of 5 stars Alimentazione, scienza e storia (in inglese)

5.0 out of 5 stars Bahnbrechend, hervorragend, unglaublich, genial, ...

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent review

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is an amazing tour de force which really spells out how such ...

5.0 out of 5 stars Un must have, un must read... s'adresse au grand public, il faut le lire tellement il y a de sujets pertinents dedans !

Superb Research, Crucial Conclusions (but a hard read)

Amazing, whistle blowing book

Alimentazione, scienza e storia (in inglese)

Bahnbrechend, hervorragend, unglaublich, genial, ...

Excellent review

This book is an amazing tour de force which really spells out how such ...

Un must have, un must read... s'adresse au grand public, il faut le lire tellement il y a de sujets pertinents dedans !