Customer Reviews

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage)

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4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This book is one of the most important health books I have ever read.

(My copy was called 'The Diet Delusion' which is the UK and Australian etc. title of this book, I think.)

The author is incredibly intelligent and that this book took the author more than five years to write, shows. I've read few health books so intelligently written as this one.

I thought I was quite well educated about diet and the need to restrict refined carbohydrates (for good health and to stop weight gain) but I learned so much from reading this book.

This book is not a simple book offering practical advice and a diet sheet but a detailed analysis of why low calorie diets don't work and why restricted carbohydrate/high fat diets do.

The book explains that:

1. The 'calories in, calories out' mantra is a myth

2. 'A calorie is a calorie is a calorie' is a myth

3. The 'just eat less and do more exercise to lose weight' message seems to be logical but is actually wrong and unhelpful

4. Overweight and obese people often eat no more calories, or even less, than their thinner counterparts

5. Low calorie diets also reduce the amount of nutrients in the diet

6. It is a myth that the brain and CNS needs 120 - 130 grams of carbohydrate as fuel in order to function properly, as the body can use fat and protein equally as well, and these fuels are likely the mixture our brains have evolved to prefer.

7. Restricting calories with a low fat/high carb diet just makes you hungrier and more lethargic and slows your metabolic rate. Weight loss is only maintained if the patients stays on a semi-starvation diet forever, which is impossible for most people and also undesirable. Being far more active just makes you far more hungry.

8. It is a myth that reducing calories slightly or increasing activity slightly will lead to weight loss.

9. It is a myth that we evolved through periods of feast and famine to be very good at holding onto fat. Fat gain is due to excessive insulin levels caused by high dietary refined carbohydrate intake. It is a sign of something in the body going wrong, not a healthy adaptation.

10. Fructose is not much better than glucose and the two together may cause more harm than either individually.

11. The idea of a weight 'set point' is a myth

12. Insulin is the overall fuel control for mammals. High insulin levels cause the body to store fat and stop the body from using fat as fuel. This means that high carbohydrate foods make you put on more fat, and also leave you still feeling very hungry and unsatisfied.

13. Our bodies have evolved to do best on a diet of plentiful fat and protein (including saturated fat), lots of greens and minimal fruits and starchy vegetables. This diet is the best for health and also for losing weight and stopping weight gain.

14. Dietary fat, including saturated fat, is not a cause of obesity. Refined and easily digestible carbs causing high insulin levels cause obesity.

15. To say that people are overweight due to gluttony and slothfulness is just not correct and it is very unfair. Overeating and a sedentary lifestyle are often CAUSED by eating a high carbohydrate diet! This association has wrongly been interpreted as a cause of weight gain, rather than an effect.

16. Hunger caused by eating a high carbohydrate diet (or excessive exercising while on a low calorie diet) is a very strong physiological drive and should not be thought of something mild and psychological that can be overcome with willpower. This is something serious occurring in the body, not the brain!

Thus psychological 'treatments' for obesity are inappropriate and cruel. Most people are overweight due to bad medical advice, NOT a lack of willpower, greed, laziness or because they lack 'moral fibre'

17. People have different insulin secretory responses. Even if insulin secretion is slightly off, weight gain can occur.

18. Eating large amounts of a high sugar and high fat food like popcorn is easy because the body will not use most of the carbohydrate and fat for immediate fuel but will store much of it as fat - leaving you able to eat a lot of it and still be hungry a short time later as well.

19. Eating foods with a large bulk or high in fibre wont fill you up, you need the correct proportion of macronutrients and will stay hungry until you get them.

20. Those advocating the low calorie and high carb diets for health and weight loss are not involved in legitimate science. These approaches are not supported by the evidence.


I have still not covered so many other great points!

The bottom line is that we have evolved to eat a diet that contains enough fat and protein to cause satiety, lots of green vegetables and minimal amounts of fruits and starchy vegetables. Our bodies really can't cope with huge levels of refined carbohydrate as have recently been added to the modern diet.

More detailed information about this type of diet (and the benefits of traditional foods as well such as raw milk, organ meats, bone broths and fermented foods) can be found in books such as 'Nourishing Traditions' and 'Eat Fat, Lose Fat' by Sally Fallon (of the Weston A. Price Foundation) and Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan and Luke Shanahan, among others.

This book is a *very* dense read. (Those that are very ill and can't read such a long and complex book may do best to read just the first chapter and the last 2 chapters as these provide a summary to some extent.)

My only criticisms of the book are that a brief, maybe half page summary, of each chapter at the end of each chapter may have been very helpful for those of us that struggled taking in so many new facts at once due to illness or any other reason. I'd also have liked the ideas of Weston A. Price to be featured a bit more prominently than just on the acknowledgments page! But I accept that space was a concern for the author, as he states.

To the author, thank you so much for all your hard work. This is such an impressive body of work. I wish we had more investigative jounalists writing about 'controversial' topics to such a high standard.

I highly recommend this book. Check your library for a copy, at least!

Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

I've worked in hospitals or have been in a teaching position in health care since 1972. That entire time I marched to the unceasing drum of dietary-fat-and-cholesterol-lead-directly-to-heart-disease, now called the lipid theory of heart disease. It never occurred to me to ask "Where is the hard evidence?" I assumed it had been irrefutably proven. Then factors in my own life led me to eventually question that ever present mantra.

My own mother had her first heart attack when she was just 48 years old. In her seventies she was put on a statin for elevated cholesterol and became someone I barely recognized; argumentative, irritable, forgetful, poor coordination and very depressed. Nothing in my own medical care education lead me to blame any of that on statin drugs. What was even more puzzling was that she had never been one to eat fatty foods or things laden with cholesterol. But I never stopped to think about that. I did know she struggled with weight her entire life and hence was vigilant in eating things low-fat, as well as only using polyunsaturated oils for cooking. But it is also true she had a problem with carbohydrates - they always were the majority of her diet. I lost her to a heart attack in 1995.

Three years ago, as my own cholesterol nudged up a bit, but still within traditional normal range, I did not hesitate to comply with my doctor's suggestion to begin a statin (Lipitor). If anything, I felt I was getting ahead of the danger of losing my life as my mother had. But also like her, I struggle with my weight and like her I gravitate to carbohydrates. I was strictly avoiding all saturated fats and dietary cholesterol, cooking with the "healthy" polyunsaturated oils and always choosing fat-free or low-fat dairy products. In all that time in hospitals and health education we had a two other mantras - "a calorie is a calorie" and its corollary "calories in calories out" as the only approach to weight management. Every calorie restrictive program I tried just left me hungry and with only short term weight loss.

I developed, in those three years, various aches and pains, initially too varied to form a pattern. I was aware that I was having a marked increase in short term memory problems, and my joints were getting so troublesome I was unwilling to do the exercise my doctor kept harping about to keep my weight under control. I found myself getting irritable, less interested in life and feeling O.L.D. @ 60. Out of frustration with both weight and how crummy I was feeling, I read a couple of food advise books, and one, "In Defense of Food" started making sense to me. Two other books were mentioned within that one, so I moved on to one of them - "Good Calories, Bad Calories." The author already had an excellent track record of science journalism.

Just imagine how startled I was while reading Gary Taubes book to find out there never has been definitive reproducible studies to prove the connection between consuming dietary saturated fat and cholesterol to the development of high blood cholesterol, nor to cholesterol numbers being a directly predictive factor in heart disease mortality. This was a jaw dropping revelation to me. Then I went on to read about the abundance of information revealing "healthy" seed oils, such as corn, safflower, sunflower, soy and canola, showed no evidence of lowering either heart disease itself or the mortality rate from heart disease. Then the came the real shocker.......the most consistent risk factor for developing heart disease, as far as diet is concerned, is the intake of carbohydrates. I was dumb struck. He also challenges, then destroys, the assumption that all calories are created equal and that saturated fat is harmful. One whole chapter is devoted just to how our bodies manufacture and use insulin and the stress that excess carbohydrate puts on our system, leading eventually to insulin resistance and finally type 2 diabetes.

I am not easily swayed, so it is important to me that when someone makes such revolutionary counter-to-accepted-belief statements, they had better be able to back it up. Taubes book has over 60 pages of references. It is exhaustively researched, going back through dietary research for the past century. His book led me to a few others that focused on carbohydrate dangers. cholesterol, fats and the harmful effects of statins. For those interested here are some recommendations: Natural Health & Weight Loss, Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food, The Statin Damage Crisis, The Modern Nutritional Diseases: And How to Prevent Them : Heart Disease, Stroke, Type-2 Diabetes, Obesity, Cancer, Cereal Killer, The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It and The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy Four of these are written by MDs - informed, well educated, science background people working with current research information.

Information I uncovered left me shocked about how manipulative Big Pharma is as far as pressuring doctors to use their drugs, (complete with "incentive" packages that can only be compared to flat out bribery) about how they fund their own studies and then get to interpret their own results to be sure they are favorable, and/or they can choose to fail to publish anything negative. Agribusiness is also enormously influential in getting studies done, with their own highly lucrative contracts with research groups, to "prove" that oils made from their excess harvest, that are cheap and highly profitable, must be part of our daily diet at the expense of traditional fats. The power the pharmaceutical industry and the agribusiness has on such supposedly trustworthy institutions such as the American Heart Association, the FDA and the NIH is not to be believed. So sad for all of us.The food pyramid is absolutely wrong for heart health, weight management and avoiding type 2 diabetes.

As I read these books, I began to have hope about finally managing my own weight. Taubes book is all bout arming you with proper facts, about making intelligent choices for your own dietary direction. It is not focused on the use of statins (I found that informations in other related books listed above) - rather, he is making the point that while we have been concentrating on fats as the cause of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, it has really been the shift toward more carbohydrate and seed oil consumption for the last 60 years.

But Taubes is NOT offering "program" as such. Rather, for someone like me, who really wants to understand WHY things are the way they are, this is a wealth of information about how we went down the wrong path as far as national nutritional health advise and who was behind it all. He lets you connect the dots for yourself. If instead you would rather have help with a program for redesigning your nutrition, two of the books I listed are better for that, specifically "Deep Nutrition" by Dr. Shanahan, or Mark Sisson's "Primal Blueprint". Both books have at their core a target of total carbohydrate in a day of about 70 mg if you need to lose weight. Using these guidelines, I dropped 25 pounds in 11 weeks, without feeling hungry, and I feel excellent. I have also slowly tapered off, then stopped my Lipitor. I will not know my lab numbers for several 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 depressed mood has vanished.

I bought two extra copies of Taubes book and will be giving them to both my Family Practice doctor and my Endocrinologist. This information is vital. I believe my mother would have remained her normal self until her passing if she had not been given a statin and I also believe we may have had the joy of having her longer if any of us (including her doctors) had fully understood the implications of the carbohydrate laden low-fat diet she consumed for years.

Good luck to you. Be well.

P.S. - An eye-opening DVD is "Food Inc." that lays out the case for how we as citizens are at the mercy of only a handful of agribusiness companies. Profit, not our well being or the the survival of family farms matters to them. Their influence on our government's policies at all levels is truly shocking.

I am a product formulator for a company that specializes in blood glucose normalization. I've talked and worked with thousands of chronic T2 diabetics over the last 12 years. I have researched the central question of diabetes (obesity, hyperinsulinemia, proper nutrient intake, exercise, etc.) for many years to arrive at the most beneficial recommendations for our customers, and I can say that after reading hundreds of books and research articles, I found Mr. Taubes' book to be the most comprehensive discussion of how and why we, in the U.S., ended up with what is, by all accounts, the most irrational and ineffective set of dietary recommendations on the planet. That what we are doing is not working is without question. The real question up to this point for most people has been, "What is the truth about the role of diet for our health?"

This topic is far from new. It's been a battleground between the "low-fat" people and the "low-carbohydrate" people for decades now, but the low-fat camp has always had the upper hand in spite of dozens of credible books (Food and Western Disease, Lindeberg; Insulin: Our Silent Killer, Smith; Genocide!, Carlson; The Leptin Diet, Richards) discussing the effectiveness of the the low-carbohydrate approach. This book does much more than just tell you why a low-fat diet doesn't work, it tells you why it doesn't, and in fact, cannot work long term. Further, it explains in great detail how this misguided low-fat belief, and the whole set of federally-mandated recommendations that it spawned, came to be. It is hard to walk away after reading this book without realizing that you have just read an incredible and admirable work that answers the question, "What is the truth about the role of diet for our health?"

I've seen hundreds of people normalize their blood glucose levels and lose greater amounts of weight than ever before following the low-carbohydrate diet, and this book explains why. It simply is the best book available on this topic.

After four years of attending a well known hospital "Heart Attack" prevention program, I had not lowered my cholestol, had gained weight 40 plus pounds and had been formally diagnosed as a diabetic. My nutritionist told me to excercise. I did. 60 minutes a day for over 1 year. Still nothing.

Then I read this book. I was astounded. Finally someone had taken all the studies on obesity, diabetes, heart disease and diet and had evaluated the implications and linked the research without bias. I learned that there was a reason for my weight gain, increased cholesterol, high triglycerides and high blood sugar and it most likely had to do with the fact that my nutritionist had me on a high carb, low fat diet. So I took the initive and went on a low carb, high fat (protein) diet similar to the one recommended by Atkins.

In five weeks, I lost 8 pounds (which doesn't seem like a lot but if you compare it to the previous five years, it is huge). Better than that, my bad cholesterol dropped 55 points, my triglycerides dropped 85 points. My doctor was floored when I told her how I had chantged my diet. I told her about this book and told her that she should read it before making final judgment.

After four months I have now dropped 20 pounds and now my blood sugar is below the line for being classified as diabetic. I ran into my nutritionist who had gotten this book and read it. She told me that both she and her husband had started a high fat, low carb diet and were experiencing the same results that I had. She actually bought two copies of the book. One for the cardiologist and one for the other nutritionist. My endochronologist and her assistant are also so impressed with my restults they are getting the book to read. My sister and Dad have also experienced great results. All because of the information contained in this book.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who cares about health and diet. Buy it for yourself or buy it for a loved one. I believe it has saved my life.

Wow. This is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It is neither a quick nor an easy read, but then most books worth reading aren't. Whether or not you believe in a carbohydrate-restricted approach to health, the junk research that has been accepted as medical gospel is inexcusable and infuriating.

Taubes presents an excellent systematic review, and repeatedly mentions one of the first and most fundamental concepts that any statistician learns in the course of their education: correlation DOES NOT IMPLY causation. He does an excellent job pointing out this illogical, often egregious, "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy in several studies (although Taubes uses "association" instead of "correlation"). I realize that the average medical student probably takes only one, maybe two, courses in statistics, and the average person perhaps none, but this inability of people in authoritative positions to think critically is a huge liability. (In general, I find that most people are unable to think critically, but I digress.)

Moreover, every time I hear someone claim that a study showed this or a study found that, I cringe. So what? Every single study has to be appraised critically to determine its merit, if any. Just some of the questions that immediately come to mind are: Who did the study? What are their qualifications? Who funded the study? What is the sampling method? What is the sample size? Is the sample representative of the population of interest? How was the data collected? Are the data measurement tools accurate? What statistical analyses were performed? Were the analyses appropriate? Were statistical assumptions tested? Were the assumptions violated? How were the results interpreted? Were the results interpreted correctly? Were the results interpreted objectively? These last two questions are ones that Taubes brings up several times. One cannot make a correct interpretation if they lack the knowledge to do so, and one cannot make an objective interpretation if their mind is clouded by preconceived expectations. (On a side note, an interesting read is John P.A. Ioannidis' (2005) article entitled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." For the curious, see also Goodman and Greenland's (2007) critique and Ioannidis' (2007) rebuttal.)

An oft-mentioned adage is that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. I think I speak for many a statistician when I say that the data don't lie, people do. As Taubes says, the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. If you take nothing else away from this book, at least keep in mind that you need to think critically and not accept the gospel as truth. Last I checked, doctors, like all humans, are not infallible.

I have actually never written a review for anything on Amazon before, but this book compelled me to write one.

As a nutrition student, I am bombarded with the saturated fat causes heart disease theory, which, for as long as I can remember I could not really wrap my head around. It just didn't make sense to me that this nutrient, which we have eating for thousands of years, could be to blame for our health problems.

As I took biochemistry, it became even more clear to me that the carbs (especially refined carbs) are more likely to be the major factor in our society's deteriorating health.

Thank you, Gary, for pointing out the wrongs that have occurred over time. Let's just hope that this information will make it to public policy and nutritionists soon so that we can help patients who truly need this information. Sadly, even today, I am almost ashamed to admit to anyone in my classes the constituents of my diet - lots of fat, lots of protein, and minimal carbs. 11 servings of carbs?! Yeah right.

I recently saw an article that featured your information in Men's Journal and thought it was fantastic - great to see that your info is making it to mainstream media. Hopefully this means we'll have real change soon. Here's to hoping.

I have little to add to other reviewers' posts except a brief outline of my own journey, which I hope will inspire uncertain readers to at least give the "alternative hypothesis," outlined in this admittedly intimidating (but so worthwhile!) book by Gary Taubes, a fair chance to work for them.

My story is similar to many other commenters'/reviewers': I struggled since childhood with weight; standard low-fat diets made me gain; doctors, nutritionists, and WeightWatchers instructors implied I was cheating (along, I suppose, with the many, many others for whom low-fat plans failed). I finally tried Atkins, lost 50 pounds effortlessly, and then my doctor freaked out and said I was going to die young of a heart attack, so I quit. At age 43, weighing 220 pounds and miserable with depression and rheumatoid arthritis, I finally said to heck with my doctor and went back to low-carbing.

I now effortlessly maintain a weight in the 140s, have gone over three years without anti-depressants, and have no trace of joint stiffness. This book played a huge role in sustaining my commitment; without Mr. Taubes's meticulous research, I probably wouldn't have had the spine to stand up to the barrage of criticism I received from my doctor, and from well-intentioned friends and relatives in the medical field.

I am an M.D./PH.D pediatrician who sees obese children daily, and have been very frustrated how few are able to get fit. As an upper level athlete I also found it frustrating to gain weight as I get older, despite following the standard advise. This book is the best accurate evidence based medicine review on health and nutrition. It is also a fascinating history book on why we have been giving the wrong nutrition advice. This is not the first time well intentioned science has gone down the wrong road, but this book is a map on how to resolve the obesity epidemic. It should be required reading in medical school. For those intimidated by the scientific details I would recommend reading the more accessible "Why We Get Fat and What to do About It". Our entire medical group is currently reading this second book for our retreat. Lastly: it works. Twenty-five years later, I am fitter now than when I was a collegiate swimmer.

As is noted in other reviews, this is not a diet book. Rather, it is a review of the science and history behind high-carb vs. low-carb diets. Taubes' book is an important contribution to this literature, but it is not without its flaws.

Taubes makes a compelling case for why high-carb diets high in sugar, bread, rice, etc. may have contributed to a host of diseases of civilization (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.) and progressively worsening national obesity rates. He explains how high-carb diets heighten insulin, which may be the real driver of weight gain. This is familiar territory that is well covered in other books, but Taubes makes a decent contribution.

But Taubes overreaches in several areas. First, while Taubes makes the usual case that insulin is a major contributor to both hunger and increased body fat, and that elevated insulin blocks fat loss, he overstates the importance of carbohydrates as the sole contributor to insulin production. First, while Taubes notes the existence of anticipatory insulin secretion, even before anything is eaten (called the cephalic response), he fails to note that this insulin secretion will drive fat storage regardless of the macro nutrients that are actually eaten. Insulin is also triggered by smelling or even thinking about food, the latter of which is probably the reason I often get hungry when reading diet books (grin).

Moreover, while carbohydrates elevate insulin more than the other macronutrients, they are far from the sole contributor. Protein, an important component of any low-carb diet, generates about 60% of the insulin production of carbs on a gram for gram basis. Most meat, which has little or no carbohydrate content, nevertheless generates a very significant insulin response. While protein also spurs an increase in glucagon (normally thought of as a fat-reducing hormone), in this case glucagon is merely helping to break the protein down into glucose, which is necessary before insulin can do its thing. For more about insulin production, Google "Insulin Index" to see the true insulin production associated with different types of food.

These analyses show that just about every food heightens insulin, and the differences between foods are not quite as large as most low-carb practitioners would expect. To truly reduce insulin production, you must do more than just change the macro-nutrient balance, you must also reduce the amount of food consumed. In other words, you not only need to reduce carbohydrates, you must also control calories.

This leads us to a second point: Taubes' argument that excess calorie consumption may not be the real cause obesity but, instead, the simple side effect of eating excess carbohydrates. It is important to note that Taubes isn't saying that calories don't count, but it is easy to miss that because of the attention he gives to the poor track record of low-fat, calorie-controlled diets. Indeed, to the extent that such diets rely on refined carbohydrates as their primary calorie source, elevated insulin levels will block fat loss and contribute to fat storage. A lot of bodily wreckage occurs as a result of the battle between heightened insulin and calorie constriction, including a drop in metabolism, obsession with food, depression, and loss of sexual appetite, to name a few, all of which suggest we are doing something wrong. Not surprisingly, insulin usually wins these battles in the end.

But this argument is not the same as saying that calories don't count. The failure of calorie control on a low-fat, high carb diet does not mean that it will also necessarily fail on a low-carb diet. Once the barrier of heightened insulin is removed, calorie restriction may once again become a viable option. Taubes himself illustrates this when he cites the success of studies that restricted both carbohydrates and calories simultaneously (such as Ohlson's). Taubes points out that hunger was lessened on low-carb calorie-restricted diets, so the two approaches complement one another, but that does not make calorie restriction irrelevant or unimportant. Even Atkins accepted the need to control calorie intake, though he did not highlight this very clearly.

A similar case can be made for exercise, probably another overreach in this book. Taubes makes a point of indicating how little evidence there is that exercise helps with fat loss in the long run. But it is worth noting that the evidence that Taubes cites is all in the context of a high-carb, "balanced" diet. This is a repeat of the error made with calorie control. The failure of exercise on a high-carb diet does not mean that it will also fail once elevated insulin levels are removed during a low-carb diet. But Taubes doesn't explore the impact of exercise in a low-carb environment. He also doesn't differentiate between weight training and aerobic exercise. Weight training in particular seems to also have a number of beneficial hormonal side effects that influence fat loss, especially for men.

The limits of low-carb diets as a stand-alone strategy become more clear when you look at who is experiencing the greatest success on low carb diets, namely those who are the most obese. Stories of people losing 50-100 pounds on Atkins are common enough, but the underlying reality is that those people had 50-100 pounds to lose, and usually much more. What is notable about this group is that overall they often have the worst dietary habits to begin with, so any improvement in their diet is relatively easy to make and will result in dramatic weight loss. This more or less fits the description of the patients that Pennington, Donaldson, and Atkins himself treated with their low carb approach. What is notable, in my observation, is that many of these people achieve major weight loss on their way from obese to merely overweight, but they often plateau well short of their ideal weight if they rely on low-carb diets alone.

In short, it seems that the closer you get to your ideal weight, the more you may need to do. Dietary composition is one tool, and possibly the most important, but it probably must also be supplemented by calorie control and exercise to achieve optimal body fat and fitness.

Taubes' book is a very interesting and important contribution to the literature, but it is merely a step along our journey to understanding obesity and health. In fairness to Taubes, he does not argue that he has all the answers, merely that the prevailing wisdom deserves some serious questioning. In this, Taubes is absolutely right. Our knowledge of these matters should be driven by science, not faith-based assumptions, which too often is the case.

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.

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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:

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Sheryl Canter
Author of "Normal Eating for Normal Weight"