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

by Gary Taubes (Author)

4.5 2,167 ratings

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

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

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

Review

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

About the Author

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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

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September 23, 2008
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6.18 x 1.32 x 9.24 inches
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1400033462
ISBN-13

978-1400033461
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (September 23, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400033462
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400033461
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.81 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.18 x 1.32 x 9.24 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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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.

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

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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P Gaenir

Both the big picture and the little details

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2008

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A book this detailed and controversial is difficult to review without writing another book in the process. Since many reviews have already covered much of the content and conclusions, I'll try to say things that aren't already in the list of 156 reviews so far (that I recall). (...which is not easy.)

This book is a review of science. That the science happens to be about nutrition is primary only if that is your actual interest. People interested in the nature of science and its process, politics and pitfalls, should find this fascinating even if they never gave a thought to why fat seems so much easier to gain than to lose (particularly in the larger amounts), or to why the "diseases of civilization" (diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer, schizophrenia, cancer, etc.) are skyrocketing.

There are several critically important topics in nutrition and related areas that could have been added to this, but I suspect a 2000 page book would have been difficult to sell. It's obvious he had to choose a focus and a linear path through a gigantic topic.

As part of the fact that it is a science review and not a novel or diet book, there are a few important considerations.

1. It is a review of science; it is not science itself except in the form of intelligent inquiry and review; it is not "research". Taubes is not a formal researcher, though he is science-trained and specializes in investigating and writing about science. In short, this is OLD research, not NEW research: it's just that it's research many people probably either don't know about or learned about rather differently.

2. Aside from a small 'final conclusions' bit, there isn't really anything to argue about in terms of 'disagreeing with Taubes' in this; rather, people would have to argue with the actual research reviewed. Readers could complain about what is included or excluded ('too much' some say, 'not enough' say others), that's about it. Even if one disagrees with Taubes's overview-conclusions, the degree of careful detail combined with the linear-layout and the courage to present a truly alternative view on highly politicized issues (some of his ideas left me stunned, they were so new to me!), is worthy of respect.

3. This book is just slightly like a nutritional version of 'Forbidden Science' (about Archeology), and I translate the point of it rather like this: "For those formally educated, here's the stuff you probably didn't learn, or didn't learn in this way for sure, and of what you did learn, here's a new look at some of the assumed cornerstones of belief-system edifices. And for those not formally educated, here's a trail through history and science to start with: here's what's accepted then and now, and here's an alternative path to consider." What readers want to do with all that is entirely up to them. The most important thing is getting the information into the larger world to be at least considered and brought to light finally or differently in some cases; what part of all this turns out to be right, or wrong, or misunderstood, or differently understood, in the end is less the issue here than just finally beginning some kind of dialogue on these important points.

4. I doubt the Final Answer[tm] of nutrition is yet at hand, and so I'm sure there must be plenty of areas to further explore and in the end, it might not all agree with the general framework Taubes ended up with (or, it might--I don't know). It's a review of so many different studies and related areas, that it is highly unlikely any single work could be perfect or perfectly complete on all that -- it would have to be 10x its length, at least, and be written from a century in the future. The important thing is that the book became available at all, because it is the first thing courageous enough to "question authority" to this degree, detailed enough to provide a jumping-off point for legitimate medical 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 public.

5. This is an educational book, but it is not entry-level except for very good readers with some understanding of basic science. This is no dumbed-down textbook; this actually requires some decent cognitive skills. I found it fascinating, but although I can read about 800 pages in a day if I have all the daylight hours, it took me a full week to wade through it in long evenings after work. (This might have gone faster, did I not have to keep stopping to rant and rave to a friend about things in the content!) If you are not a strong reader, I do not recommend it unless you have a year to work on it.

6. The book is very dense in information, and this is its strong point and its purpose. That means if you're not into the topics of science or nutrition etc., it's either going to put you to sleep or fry your brain. I loved it: the world has more than enough simple diet books for laymen. What we really needed was a book that combined science detail with readability, and science history with the commercial present, for an understanding of how we got to where we are, and what that means to science, to nutrition, to health, and to our future, both as individuals and as a species.

7. On the problem side, the publisher's presentation makes this seem like a "diet book". This is not a paint-by-number eating plan. If you want a book about what to eat and when and how to count it, there are many, but this isn't one of those. It's also not a "pleasant afternoon reading," unless you're a fairly serious intellectual. That is sure to disappoint many who are unlikely to be willing to get through it. (Some people are simply better with other forms of learning than dense text, and this really IS "dense text".) It is a good thing this book is not exactly for the masses, though, since I think if we could take all this information and distill it into sound-bytes that the public would easily understand, there might be lynch mobs arriving at some health agency doorways.

**
I feel that nobody in the field of medicine could write this book: they'd be ruined for the degree of questioning the party line/ status quo, and if they were researchers they wouldn't get funding from any of the all-pervasive sources (generally, the food industries killing us and the pharmaceutical industries not-curing but eternally-treating us), and the problem is, a person educated in that system is highly unlikely to break out of the mold to find this road to begin with, unless they are really exceptionally independent thinkers. Gary's position as a science writer, and the years he put into studying this, combined with him having no major vested interests in the conclusions (such as some of the more consumer-book authors of lowcarb diet plans), is the perfect combination. It's too 'heavy' to ever make him much money I bet (too small an audience), nowhere near worth the hours and years he put into it, but I hope that he doesn't regret the work, because I'm sure many people are genuinely grateful for the book -- I am.

**
I'm from a family of huge women. Women who basically diet constantly for 20, 30, 40 years and they're still fat. I was fairly athletic until my mid-20s, when two years of a very intense, work+school+commute, sleep deprived, high stress, not eating daily except mega-carbs right before sleep, resulted in a massive rapid weight gain. Later when traditional dieting didn't work at all for me, I simply gave up, not willing to be neurotic daily about something my family made seem unsolvable. (OK, I nearly shot myself over it in all honesty, but once I got over myself, I moved on.)

About 15 years later (now huge), I was hospitalized for untreated asthma infections. While there I had a heart-rate reaction to days of steroids plus pain and a situation, and that got me assigned a cardiologist (though I had no heart condition). When I got out of the hospital and visited him, he wrote me a prescription to the Protein Power Life Plan book by the Drs. Eades.

Helluva drug: I've kept off over 125lbs for 18 months now, and medical symptoms (acid reflux, complexion problems, severe asthma, allergies, unexplained rashes, chronic exhaustion, brain-fog, bloating, etc.) all vanished within weeks of making an effort to ditch most carbs and increase protein and fat and add some supplements (no exercise involved).

In fairness, this can't all be attributed to lowcarb, because getting off gluten (solely by accident to begin) is a good chunk of the symptom resolution. I am exercising more now that I can finally move enough to do some of it. (I can mow my lawn, weed it, rake it, shovel soil for the garden. As of September 18 2006 when I went on lowcarb, I couldn't even stand for 60 seconds without screaming back pain, couldn't walk around a store. The changes in my life are radical.)

But my respect for Taubes's book is not because of my experience; rather, it's because he finally gave me a way to help my brain's intellectual understanding connect with my body's experiential reality. I really needed to understand some of this which seemed very confusing as it contradicted all the tenets of "pop science". I am no expert on anything, and I was cynical about "lowcarb" at first, but the results have been good enough to change my life, and my future, and make me seriously interested in the subject. I may never be thin, but at least I've learned enough to head off destruction.

Reading about why poor science, social good-ol-boys and political peer pressure has resulted in the train wreck of modern nutrition/healthcare, realizing that nearly 20 years of my life were basically trashed as a result of believing the government's advice, made me a little homicidal for awhile, but I recovered. Now, I'd just like to see some decent, intelligent dialogue and research happening thanks to this guy's gutsy exploration and road map to another view. I'm guessing not too much will happen and he'll have to get old and die before the larger world recognizes just how important this book is (was) at this time.

If you are interested in these subjects and you read very well, this book is the boss. No matter what you believe or don't about nutrition, this book is worth a read.

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Deepu

Different point of view on calories

Reviewed in India on November 15, 2023

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Good and Bad calories book has a good review, and knowledge on foods.

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.

Tiago

Erudito - e ainda atual

Reviewed in Brazil on July 17, 2020

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Talvez o melhor livro jamais escrito sobre o assunto. Publicado em 2008, permanece atual, em especial quando o autor fala de como as pessoas com uma dieta rica em carboidratos adoecem com mais facilidade, ao contrário daqueles que se alimentam predominantemente com boas gorduras e proteínas. Além disso, aqueles que comem muito carboidrato e açúcar sofrem maior incidência de câncer, demência (como o Alzheimer) e envelhecimento precoce.

O capítulo 13 fala da a associação de Alzheimer com diabetes tipo II e resistência à insulina - doenças metabólicas -, uma tese que não era aceita na época, e curiosamente continua não sendo aceita hoje, quando temos não apenas evidências mas provas concretas disso, o que torna o livro ainda mais importante.

Para quem se interessar, recomendo também que seja lido "O Fim do Alzheimer", do neurocientista Dale Bredesen, a primeira pessoa, em 2018, a reverter Alzheimer e criar um protocolo para isso, protocolo que ainda não chegou ao Brasil e que a classe médica reluta em aceitar.

5 people found this helpful

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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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Cryss

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

Reviewed in France on November 29, 2016

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Voici un livre acheté il y a un moment... et j'ai mis longtemps avant de mettre mon nez dedans !
Je n'avais peut être pas fait attention aux critiques précédentes, dorénavant je l'ai avalé et je tiens à lui faire de la pub.

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

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

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

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