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Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 25, 2007

by Gary Taubes (Author)

4.5 2,229 ratings

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In this groundbreaking book, the result of seven years of research in every science connected with the impact of nutrition on health, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes 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 with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) and sugars–via their dramatic and longterm effects on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation–and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. There are good calories, and bad ones.

Good Calories
These are from foods without easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. These foods can be eaten without restraint.
Meat, fish, fowl, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy vegetables.

Bad Calories
These are from foods that stimulate excessive insulin secretion and so make us fat and increase our risk of chronic disease—all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. The key is not how much vitamins and minerals they contain, but how quickly they are digested. (So apple juice or even green vegetable juices are not necessarily any healthier than soda.)
Bread and other baked goods, potatoes, yams, rice, pasta, cereal grains, corn, sugar (sucrose and high fructose corn syrup), ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fruit juices, bananas and other tropical fruits, and beer.

Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then –wrongly–were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

With precise references to the most significant existing clinical studies, he convinces us that there is no compelling scientific evidence demonstrating that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, that salt causes high blood pressure, and that fiber is a necessary part of a healthy diet. Based on the evidence that does exist, he leads us to conclude that the only healthy way to lose weight and remain lean is to eat fewer carbohydrates or to change the type of the carbohydrates we do eat, and, for some of us, perhaps to eat virtually none at all.

The 11 Critical Conclusions of Good Calories, Bad Calories:

1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, does not cause heart disease.
2. Carbohydrates do, because of their effect on the hormone insulin. The more easily-digestible and refined the carbohydrates and the more fructose they contain, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.
3. Sugars—sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup specifically—are particularly harmful. The glucose in these sugars raises insulin levels; the fructose they contain overloads the liver.
4. Refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are also the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the other common chronic diseases of modern times.
5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.
6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter any more than it causes a child to grow taller.
7. Exercise does not make us lose excess fat; it makes us hungry.
8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.

Good Calories, Bad Calories is a tour de force of scientific investigation–certain to redefine the ongoing debate about the foods we eat and their effects on our health.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Taubes's eye-opening challenge to widely accepted ideas on nutrition and weight loss is as provocative as was his 2001 NewYork Times Magazine article, What if It's All a Big Fat Lie? Taubes (Bad Science), a writer for Science magazine, begins by showing how public health data has been misinterpreted to mark dietary fat and cholesterol as the primary causes of coronary heart disease. Deeper examination, he says, shows that heart disease and other diseases of civilization appear to result from increased consumption of refined carbohydrates: sugar, white flour and white rice. When researcher John Yudkin announced these results in the 1950s, however, he was drowned out by the conventional wisdom. Taubes cites clinical evidence showing that elevated triglyceride levels, rather than high total cholesterol, are associated with increased risk of heart disease-but measuring triglycerides is more difficult than measuring cholesterol. Taubes says that the current U.S. obesity epidemic actually consists of a very small increase in the average body mass index. Taube's arguments are lucid and well supported by lengthy notes and bibliography. His call for dietary advice that is based on rigorous science, not century-old preconceptions about the penalties of gluttony and sloth is bound to be echoed loudly by many readers. Illus. (Oct. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Noted science journalist Taubes probes the state of what is currently known and what is simply conjectured about the relationship among nutrition, weight loss, health, and disease. What Taubes discovers is that much of what passes for irrefutable scientific knowledge is in fact supposition and that many reputable scientists doubt the validity of nutritional advice currently promoted by the government and public health industry. Beginning with the history of Ancel Keys' research into the relationship between elevated blood-cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease, Taubes demonstrates that a close reading of studies has shown that a low-cholesterol diet scarcely changes blood-cholesterol levels. Low-fat diets, moreover, apparently do little to lengthen life span. He does find encouragement in research tracking the positive effects of eliminating excessive refined carbohydrates and thus addressing pernicious diseases such as diabetes. Taubes' transparent prose brings drama, excitement, and tension to even the most abstruse and clinically reserved accounts of scientific research. He is careful to distinguish the oft-confused goals of weight loss and good health. Given America's current obsession with these issues, Taubes' challenge to current nutritional conventional wisdom will generate heated controversy and create popular demand for this deeply researched and equally deeply engaging treatise. Knoblauch, Mark

Review

“Gary Taubes's Good Calories, Bad Calories is 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--as who does not? If Taubes were a scientist rather than a gifted, resourceful science journalist, he would deserve and receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine.”
-Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“If Taubes were inclined to sensationalism, he might have titled this book ‘The Great Low-Fat Diet Hoax.’ Instead, he 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. With diabetes and heart disease at stake as well as obesity, those ‘experts’ owe us an abject apology.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich

“Good Calories, Bad Calories is a remarkable accomplishment. From a mountain of diverse scientific evidence Gary Taubes has drawn an amazingly detailed and compelling picture of how diet, obesity, and heart disease link together–and how some of the world’s most important medical researchers got the story colossally wrong. Taubes proves, I think beyond doubt, that the dietary advice we’ve been given for the last three decades by the federal government and the major medical bodies rests on, shall we say, a slender empirical base.”
–Charles C. Mann, author of 1491

“A brave and bold science journalist . . . Taubes does not bow to the current fashion for narrative nonfiction, instead building his argument case by case . . . much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening.”
-The New York Times Book Review

“A watershed . . . Deeply researched and profoundly unsettling, the book proposes a seismic paradigm shift that could well undo our perceptions about the relationship between food and health. It could also literally change the way you eat, the way you look and how long you live . . . an unwavering challenge to conventional thinking . . . Taubes’ most elegant and surprising arguments examine long-held assumptions . . . lucid and lively.”
-Star Tribune

“Fascinating . . . Mr. Taubes has a gift for turning complex scientific principles into engaging narrative.”
-The Wall Street Journal

“A watershed . . . Deeply researched and profoundly unsettling, the book proposes a seismic paradigm shift that could well undo our perceptions about the relationship between food and health. It could also literally change the way you eat, the way you look and how long you live . . . an unwavering challenge to conventional thinking . . . Taubes’ most elegant and surprising arguments examine long-held assumptions . . . lucid and lively.”
-Star Tribune

“Fascinating . . . Mr. Taubes has a gift for turning complex scientific principles into engaging narrative.”
-The Wall Street Journal

“Bound to stir renewed debate . . .”
-Miami Herald

“His major conclusions are startling yet surprisingly convincing . . . his writing reflects his passion for scientific truth . . . offers plenty of food for thought.”
-Chicago Sun-Times

“I think this is a very important book. I’ve been recommending it to my medical colleagues and students. There are some very big ideas in this book…[Gary Taubes] has done a meticulous job of showing that many of the assumptions that are held by the conventional medical community simply rest on nothing…It’s very important to get these out to the medical community because a lot of the ways we try and prevent and treat obesity are based on assumptions that have no scientific evidence.”
-Dr. Weil, speaking on Larry King Live

About the Author

Gary Taubes, author of Bad Science and Nobel Dreams, is a correspondent for Science magazine. The only print journalist to have won three Science in Society Journalism awards, given by the National Association of Science Writers, he has contributed articles to The Best American Science Writing 2002 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and 2003. He lives with his wife and son in New York City.

From The Washington Post

In 2002, science journalist Gary Taubes published an article entitled "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" He argued that reputable scientists were coming around to the idea, advanced by diet gurus like Dr. Robert Atkins, that carbohydrates, not fat, are the ultimate dietary villain. If so, he wrote, "the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred . . . because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did."

The article helped revive the low-carb craze. Bread vanished from restaurant tables, and "dieters" began ordering steaks with a side of bacon. Many lost weight and became believers, but many did not, and the conventional wisdom on how to lose weight shifted only slightly.

In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes tries to bury the idea that a low-fat diet promotes weight loss and better health. Obesity is caused, he argues, not by the quantity of calories you eat but by the quality. Carbohydrates, particularly refined ones like white bread and pasta, raise insulin levels, promoting the storage of fat.

Taubes is a relentless researcher, shining a light on flaws in the scientific literature. For example, he charges that when scientists figured out how to measure cholesterol in the blood, they became "fixated on the accumulation of cholesterol in the arteries as the cause of heart disease, despite considerable evidence to the contrary."

He also reveals how charismatic personalities can force the acceptance of unproven theories. For instance, nutritionist Jean Mayer persuaded Americans that exercise leads to weight loss when in fact, writes Taubes, exercising may increase hunger and calorie intake. According to a 2000 review of the medical literature, "some studies imply that physical activity might inhibit weight gain . . . some that it might accelerate weight gain; and some that it has no effect whatsoever." Yet the latest government dietary guidelines, released in 2005, recommend 60 to 90 minutes a day of moderately intense exercise and a low-calorie diet to achieve weight loss. Once again, Taubes shows, conventional wisdom wins out.

Good Calories, Bad Calories goes a long way toward breaking the link between obesity, gluttony and sloth by demonstrating that genes, hormones and chemistry play as much of a role in weight gain as behavior does. Taubes's tales of lame science and flawed laboratory tests are at times brilliant and enlightening. But they can also become repetitive and wearying. In the end, the most compelling case Taubes builds is one against stark dietary advice of any kind; nothing simple can capture the complex reasons for the epidemic rise in obesity. H.L. Mencken once said, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." Taubes cites this quote in his book; he, and all of us, would do well to remember it.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue: A Brief History of Banting

Farinaceous 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, 1869

William 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 c...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; 1st edition (September 25, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400040787
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400040780
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.55 x 9.5 inches

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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's information well-researched and well-documented. They describe it as an engaging read with intelligent writing. The book helps readers understand the benefits of low-carb diets and how to regulate blood sugar levels. Many customers find the book substantial and well-put together. Opinions differ on the length, with some finding it too long while others appreciate the extensive bibliography.

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557 customers mention "Information quality"457 positive100 negative

Customers appreciate the book's information quality. They find it well-researched, with references and studies cited for every sentence. The book is thorough, concise, and coherent, focusing on the essentials.

"...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

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

"...On the contrary, his style is fluid, easy to follow and thorough...." Read more

"...that combined science detail with readability, and science history with the commercial present, for an understanding of how we got to where we are,..." Read more

441 customers mention "Readability"332 positive109 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the thorough research and clear presentation of information. The writing style is conversational and detailed, making it easy to understand.

"...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

"...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

"...This is a good book to read if you want to know why your attempts at dieting have failed, but it isn't the one to read if you're trying to work out..." Read more

"...That model was simple and made a lot of sense. But, Taubes convincingly argues, that is too simplistic and misleading...." Read more

159 customers mention "Calories"138 positive21 negative

Customers find the book helpful for reducing hunger and weight loss. They say it helps them understand the benefits of low-carb and high-fat diets, and how to optimize their diets. Readers mention feeling full longer and reducing cravings for sugary foods.

"...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

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

"...It seems to me that as a result I'm less hungry, eat less, and am losing weight without trying to, but it's only been a couple of weeks: too soon to..." Read more

43 customers mention "Cholesterol level"40 positive3 negative

Customers find the book helpful for lowering cholesterol levels. They mention it raises HDL, lowers triglycerides, and helps regulate blood sugar. The author also discusses the history of low-fat diets and the false war on saturated fat and cholesterol. The diet is good for treating obesity and preventing heart disease, keeping bones and muscles strong, and maintaining a healthy endocrine system.

"...restricting fat intake, watching your calorie intake, keeping away from red meats, and so on...." Read more

"...blood work performed by my doctor backed this up: I significantly lowered my triglyceride levels, significantly raised my HDL levels - both..." 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

"...not acknowledging it's value as my weight dropped, my blood pressure returned to normal, my "bad" cholesterol dipped while the "good" rose...." Read more

24 customers mention "Sturdiness"24 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's sturdiness. They find it well-written, with great material and well-sourced information. The book is substantial and engaging, with a clean copy in good condition. Readers mention feeling stronger after reading it.

"...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

"...I seem to even look younger every month (my wife is telling me) and my skin changed texture and apprearance...." Read more

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

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

29 customers mention "Length"15 positive14 negative

Customers have different views on the book's length. Some find it thorough and comprehensive, with a bibliography over 150 pages long. Others feel it could have been shorter and tedious to read.

"...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 have different views on the book's density. Some find it informative and concise, while others consider it dense and thick, with around 500 pages.

"...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

17 customers mention "Credibility"9 positive8 negative

Customers have different views on the book's credibility. Some find it factual and accurate, confirming what they have read for years. Others feel the logic is compelling but the book can be too heavy on facts and details. While some of the conclusions are disturbing, others feel the fundamental assumptions are not tested.

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

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

"...It most definitely IS NOT a Diet Book. Its science, its facts, its the TRUTH and its amazing...." Read more

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

[...]

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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AAMSEM
Très intéressant
Reviewed in France on November 28, 2024
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Pour améliorer ma santé

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Hogey One
Loads of Info
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2023
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This book is packed with loads of information in an easy to undersatnd format. Really enjoyed this book.

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Amazon Customer
Good book, great print!
Reviewed in India on September 21, 2023
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The book is amazing. Excellent presentation of the material. And my God! I wish every paperback I bought was of this quality! The book is heavy despite being only 611 pages long! The paper is of such great quality , I mistook it for plastic at first. Well done 👏. Both the author and the publisher did admirable work in making this tome . Must buy. 12/10.

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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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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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