What I'm Reading: Good Calories, Bad Calories

What I’m Reading: Good Calories, Bad Calories

Scott Kustes on 01 Feb 2008 11:25 am

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Table of contents for Book Reviews - 2008

So I’m late to the party, but it took a long time to get through the request list at the library. I finally got a hold of Gary Taubes excellent book Good Calories, Bad Calories and went through it. My reaction is that this could be the book that turns things around in the nutrition world, but only if people can put aside their preconceived notions of the causes of obesity and ill health and actually read it with an open mind. That’s going to be the problem.Since so many other people have already reviewed the book quite thoroughly, I’m just going to point out a few of the parts that really resonated with me. First was the thorough discussion of how we got to our present “fat is bad, fat makes you fat” advice. Having read The Great Cholesterol Con, there wasn’t a whole lot of new information there. But for the person that hasn’t read Colpo’s book, there’s a good deal of revelation there.

Taubes devoted a good bit of time to discussing the politics surrounding where our nutrition advice has gone and the lack of good science to support it. He mentions, as others have, that a good bit of the problem has been a lack of faith in the ability of the public to grasp difficult concepts. We want it boiled down to the easiest thing to implement. Since officials didn’t think people would understand “eat less saturated fat” at the time that it was believed to be the cause of heart disease, they just told us to eat less fat and therefore more carbohydrates.

The part that I think has the potential to do the most good is the discussion of biochemistry and the reasons why it’s not about “calories in versus calories out”. For those that haven’t read it, the basic premise is that you don’t get fat because you eat too much, you eat too much because you’re fat. The cells are starving and force you to eat more. It’s a hormonal drive that causes fatness, not a caloric one. That isn’t a big surprise to those of us that understand the workings of insulin (it locks up fat), but to most of the public, it could be a big surprise.

I really see two problems with the acceptance of this book. First, people simply refuse to put aside their preconceived notions that it’s calories that make us fat; that cholesterol is a harmful substance that must be controlled and that since fat raises cholesterol, it leads to heart disease; and that carbohydrates could be bad for you. Second, I think the book is simply too dense for the lay person. But doctors should be able to read this and go “Duh! How could I have not seen that?” and then advise their patients accordingly.

In the end, it all boils down to eating a diet of real, unprocessed foods. Meat, tons of vegetables, nuts and seeds. Fruit and starches can be useful, but aren’t necessary to health. Grains, especially processed grain products like bread and pasta, should be avoided at all costs. They drive fat storage through their actions on insulin.

And if you haven’t yet, get this book and read it front to back. Even those of us that have a passion for nutrition and read everything we can get our hands on will learn something. One of my favorite parts was in the Epilogue where Taubes talked about expecting the science to reveal something totally different to him than it did. Yet he still wrote the book showing what the science says and interpreting it against his preconceived notions and the common wisdom that was already in his mind. It’s similar to Charles Darwin setting out to prove evolution false and coming home saying “Boy was I wrong.” Too many of our health advisers are invested in their version of the story and are unwilling to take a look from a different angle.

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Tags: carbohydrate, Gary Taubes, Good Calories Bad Calories, insulin, low carb, low fat, Nutrition Myths and Facts, obesity

Filed in Obesity and Disease 4 Comments so far

4 Responses to “What I’m Reading: Good Calories, Bad Calories”

Charles on 01 Feb 2008 at 12:22 pm #

I’ve been reading books on nutrition for 40 years, and this was the best such book I’ve ever read. it’s probably the best science book I’ve ever read as well. When I got it, I could barely put it down and read it straight through in about 3 days.

I don’t think people should be scared away by the description of it as “dense.” It’s dense with information, I guess, but Taubes is a great writer (not just a great science writer), and it reads like a good novel or detective story.

I think you hit on the key concept that I would hope would come out of the book: we don’t get fat by overeating, we overeat because we become fat. That is going to take some head-stretching for people to get, but if you do understand it, everything changes.

If you haven’t read this book, you really can’t intelligently discuss the field of obesity and diabetes.

One of the major things Taubes also points out is that many times the conclusions of papers about various research studies aren’t supported by the results of those studies. Too often, researchers stretch the facts to support their pre-conceived notions, whereas when you look at the actual data, it’s the opposite.

It’s a great book not only about nutrition, but about the politics and sociology of science and public health, and you really get the sense of how much nutritional science acts more like a religion than science.
Joe Matasic on 01 Feb 2008 at 12:50 pm #

It’s laying on my floor with all my other books to read. It’s next in the pile though. I have read Colpo’s book though so I figure, I knew the first part you discussed.
GK on 01 Feb 2008 at 2:23 pm #

“In the end, it all boils down to eating a diet of real, unprocessed foods. Meat, tons of vegetables, nuts and seeds. Fruit and starches can be useful, but aren’t necessary to health. Grains, especially processed grain products like bread and pasta, should be avoided at all costs.”

Amen. I did exactly this 180-degree flip in my diet about a year ago, after reading Cordain’s _The Paleo Diet_. The result was 15 lbs off my already-slim frame (5′11″, now 142 lbs!) without effort. I read Taubes six months into my new diet lifestyle and everything jibed with my experience. What I changed after reading GCBC was that I no longer am afraid of fat. I eat as much of it as I want, and am more satisfied with less food, and it tastes better! I think Cordain’s anti saturated fat stance was a concession to dogma he had to make in order not to be dismissed as a quack, as was Atkins.

One point I worry about that Cordain makes is that if the world ate as I do, we would run out of food. Most of the world depends on grain to live. We reached a point of no return on grain consumption years ago.
Anna on 02 Feb 2008 at 6:34 pm #

Your last paragraph has a very important point:

“One of my favorite parts was in the Epilogue where Taubes talked about expecting the science to reveal something totally different to him than it did. Yet he still wrote the book showing what the science says and interpreting it against his preconceived notions and the common wisdom that was already in his mind. It’s similar to Charles Darwin setting out to prove evolution false and coming home saying “Boy was I wrong.”

That is what true, rigorous science is all about - challenging conventional thought. Real science always turns current theories upside down (history is full of examples and the “heretics” are rarely championed in their lifetimes).

The last sentence in that paragraph sums up modern medicine and health advice:

“Too many of our health advisers are invested in their version of the story and are unwilling to take a look from a different angle.”

Whenever I discuss paradigm changes with my husband (he’s a research scientist) he reminds me that “medicine” isn’t “science”. Many people are confused by this. Medicine is a practical application of whatever current theory prevails, usually lagging behind the science by quite a few years (at best) or decades. MDs are taught to avoid risk and go with the herd (or perhaps they are naturally risk-averse or else they would be research PhDs). Scientists (PhDs) are taught to be skeptics (or perhaps they are naturally skeptical or else they would have become MDs) and constantly question the status quo. MD-PhDs are a contradiction in terms and training. How that training combination works, I cannot figure out, because I think the MD training would really mess up the necessary skepticism that a PhD needs. No offense intended to MDs, of course :-).

In pure, “basic” science, the peer review system works reasonably well. But as Taubes and others have pointed out, some newer “soft” science disciplines, such as nutrition, have not been subject to standards as rigorous as in the “hard” sciences.

And sitting on the sidelines of science (as a non-science spouse) I can readily attest to how funding promotes research in some areas and not in others and shifts it like the wind (anytime the phrase “war on X” used). Anyone working in biomedical research, publicly funded (NIH, etc.) as well as privately funded (industry, foundations, charities, etc.) must work within the current paradigm of their discipline to get continued funding. When the funding emphasis shifts, everyone shifts the focus of their grant applications. If one doesn’t, funding dries up. I’ve watched that happen as funding moved into to AIDS research, then various cancers (breast, prostate, and colon cancer are the money pots now). Back in the early post 9-11 days infectious disease researchers with specialties in obscure diseases were awash with “biological agent” research money (including anthrax, I’m sure). I’m sure it happened in the 50s with polio research, too. A few decades ago, anyone in lipids, heart disease, or cancer research who didn’t get onto the low fat bandwagon, was left without funds (or careers) to continue their research. And so it goes. These days it is even hard to be properly (or at least publicly) skeptical as a scientist or else a career goes down the tube. I’m not saying it is all bad - I doubt we can go back to the early days of modern science when most research was done by private gentlemen “with means” (and a very few women) in their own personal laboratories - but with grant funding so scarce, one can’t be blind to the practicalities.

Note to Joe: GCBD, while “dense”, it is much easier to read than Colpo’s book. Go for it, you won’t regret it.

Note to GK: I’m more worried about the increasingly industrial production of food (both plants and animals) than not being able to feed the world. Enough food is already produced to feed all people today, yet people starve or are malnourished (though not in every geographic location), but societies all over the world choose not to feed all their people (lots of fodder on that topic!).

Food is a economic, social, and political issue more than a lack of quanity issue. Food commodity production (I hesitate to even call it agricuture even) is now an international wealth-building enterprise on a scale we’ve never before seen, not really a way to feed people. Colin Tudge, a UK writer, has a great book, So Shall We Reap, that goes into easy-to-grasp detail about the current projected world population figures, which will plateau perhaps in my son’s lifetime if he lives to 80 or so). Current projections are in stark contrast compared to the doomsday overpopulation projections of the 60s and 70s) and future food production capacities (Tudge is misguided on sat fat consumption though so ignore that small error in his writing) are likely to be fine if changes are put into practice soon. Not that I am holding my breath on that.

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