Gary Taubes: The Inanity of Overeating | Hacker News Reader

Gary Taubes: The Inanity of Overeating

garytaubes.com

55 pointscwan76 comments

Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called "The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.")

He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial) 20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an organism's weight is a feedback mechanism in which the mass of the organism appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term.

Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever it is--help us all--taken seriously.

I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so obviously wrong right out of the gate.

I don't know the answer, but I presume that 40 lbs of fat requires far fewer calories to maintain than 40 lbs of lean body mass. Does the 11/cal/day/pound rule of thumb apply to fat? Muscle?

I have no actual numbers on hand but muscle is a lot denser and needs a lot more energy to maintain; putting on even a small amount of muscle and doing just enough exercise to keep the muscles around helps with weight loss (as well as general fitness)

I'm not sure how the maintenance expenditure is relevant to his point - the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight. The fact that the baseline changes is an irrelevant detail. Regardless of what the baseline is at any given point, how does the system (meaning the person's body+brain) know when to stop eating?

the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight.

The point is that you won't ever gain the 40 lbs if you only eat the 20 cal/day extra.

Imagine you start eating the 20 cal/day extra. Initially, your weight climbs at 1 lb/year. However, by the time you gain that one pound, you have to spend an additional 11 cal/day to maintain that weight, so now you're gaining at a bit less than 1/2 lb/year. By the time you (asymptotically) approach having gained 20/11 ~ 1.9 pounds (which really only happens at infinity, but let's imagine you splurged to put yourself over), then you're at maintenance for your new weight. In order to gain more, you have to increase your uptake again.

As you gain weight, you accumulate metabolic load, so it takes a serious surplus of calories to continue to gain in the long term.

The steady-state condition of obesity requires a large ongoing surplus of calories to maintain.

Plausible fixes are incorporating more fiber in the diet to increase the feeling of satiety, reduce portions generally, cut out high-calorie drinks, and start exercising, even if only moderately but consistently.

Succinctly, the amount you "should" eat is not the amount to maintain your current weight, but the amount you need to maintain a healthy weight.

This is all true, but I'm wondering if you are mistaking a strawman for Taubes actual argument. The bit about '20 calories/day' is his attempt to explain the current philosophy, which he feels is fatally flawed, in the way you mention among others. He's setting up this argument merely to tear it down. Despite being the simplified version of the standard wisdom, he agrees with you that it's wrong.

His actual point is at the end: 'Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat'. He might be wrong about this, but his point is that the difference between an obese and non-obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over a lifetime. There must be something else in play.

...his point is that the difference between an obese and non-obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over a lifetime...

If that's his point, it's wrong. The intake difference between the obese person and the non-obese person is just shy of 1 big mac/day after 40 years (440 cals maintenance + 20 cals excess).

Defen is correct, you're using a different referent of "excess". Taubes means excess of maintenance (which may vary), not excess from ideal. No one is disputing that if a 300 lb person ate what a 180 lb person needs, he would probably loose weight. Taubes refers to this low-cal diet as a starvation diet, but his book has more to say about its problems and limitations. His point is that staying within 20 cals of maintenance by counting is nearly impossible, so counting isn't what is responsible for weight control, otherwise everyone would be wildly far from ideal weight.

Worth mentioning, maybe, because I was surprised by this factoid when I learned it: Gary Taubes is not one of the 10,487 "nutrition experts" hawking diet books; his best-known book, _Good Calories, Bad Calories_, is a serious pop-sci look at the scientific controversies behind nutrition; prior to writing it, Taubes was already a science writer of no small repute.

Interesting to see him take the "laws of thermodynamics" meme head on.

This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people who don't know how to dissect an argument.

Was it hard writing this comment while waving your arms so wildly about?

How about some of your own facts/links/corrections showing where he "clearly doesn't know what he's talking about".

I have read several of Gary Taubes books, including Good Calories, Bad Calories that he mentioned and his earlier book (massive tome, might be better) Bad Science on the cold fusion debacle. He might tend to get a little carried away with enthusiasm for his subject at times, but they have all been both fascinating reading and well documented.

Well, it's good to see that Taubes also gets people just makin' up this sort of stuff about him, even though his credentials aren't in doubt; and that it's not just me.

It occurs to me that I haven't seen this question addressed anywhere: Is everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally efficient at extracting energy from food? (Rhetorical question.)

To illustrate with an extreme example, lactose is a sugar and carries energy, but some people can digest it (and their bodies will get the full complement of calories from it), and some people can't (it'll get digested by bacteria and they'll get gas and feel unpleasant; I'm pretty sure they don't get calories from it). It is incorrect and stupid to say that an item of food with significant lactose component carries "N calories" without specifying whether the person who eats it can digest lactose. Likewise, with cellulose, I think cows get a lot more energy out of cellulose than humans can.

Also, it seems likely to me that people's digestive systems' performance varies with "outside" conditions in the body. For example, I've heard that being pumped full of adrenaline puts digestion on hold; and subjective experience suggests to me that if you eat a lot of food (over a period of, say, a day), your system will send it through pretty quickly, without digesting it fully.

I suspect there are a lot of other situations in which one's body doesn't get all N calories from an "N-calorie" item of food. I suppose that if that happens, then the remaining part probably will be digested by bacteria, and one may notice symptoms of... oh, hey, there's a name for this, "indigestion". (Though if the amount of left-over energy is really small, then the symptoms are probably too slight to notice. If 10 or 20 calories a day matters, then this may make things unpredictable.)

I suppose one could count the bacteria digesting the food that you didn't as "calories burned", but then that means you may be burning a bunch of calories without doing any physical activity.

Does someone more knowledgeable than me know a) whether these things are really significant and b) whether these researchers take them into account?

I also often wonder about the indigestion issue. A few years ago I moved house and found a fantastic Indian kebab shop a five minute walk away. Most evenings consisted of having a kebab and maybe a couple of cans of beer as well. The morning's indigestion was unpleasant but worth it for the tastiness. The real fun was that I was slowly losing weight on this fantastically unhealthy diet, something that the girls I was living with hated me for after seeing what went in :)

It is pretty clear that digestion varies dramatically from person to person, and from moment to moment for the same person. You hit upon two major things in your question; what flora are in your gut, and how the rest of your body is.

Anecdotally I've noticed I can change my stomach on purpose by what I eat, and rebalance the flora. For example I used to eat Tums all the time to deal with acid indigestion. Then I did a 3 day fast at the suggestion of my mother in law, and found I was free of indigestion for months after that. Now whenever I find myself getting heartburn more than a couple times I do a fast and it clears up for awhile.

There is increasing evidence the balance of flora also contributes to how you process food, and can contribute to greater development of fat when out of whack.

You write:

"Is everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally efficient at extracting energy from food?"

The ability of people to digest food is influenced by a number of factors including the amount of bacteria in their gut:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S026156149780252...

"The human large intestine contains a microbiota, the components of which are generically complex and metabolically diverse. Its primary function is to salvage energy from carbohydrate not digested in the upper gut. This is achieved through fermentation and absorption of the major products, short chain fatty acids (SCFA), which represent 40–50% of the available energy of the carbohydrate. The principal SCFA, acetate, propionate and butyrate, are metabolized by the colonic epithelium (butyrate), liver (propionate) and muscle (acetate). Intestinal bacteria also have a role in the synthesis of vitamins B and K and the metabolism of bile acids, other sterols and xenobiotics. The colonic microflora are also responsive to diet. In the presence of fermentable carbohydrate substrates such as non-starch polysaccharides, resistant starch and oligosaccharides, bacteria grow and actively synthesize protein. The amount of protein synthesis and turnover within the large intestine is difficult to determine, but around 15 g biomass is excreted in faeces each day containing 1 g bacterial-N. Whether bacterially synthesized amino acids are ever absorbed from the colon remains unclear."

Also:

http://mic.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/132/6/1647

Also, there is the possibility that changing the bacteria can have positive results:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2672.1993....

On a personal note, having taken a lot of antibiotics, I can tell you that dramatic swings in weight are possible when you take antibiotics.

And this is very important to consider:

http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/content/83/4/460.full

"Obesity results from alterations in the body's regulation of energy intake, expenditure, and storage. Recent evidence, primarily from investigations in animal models, suggests that the gut microbiota affects nutrient acquisition and energy regulation. Its composition has also been shown to differ in lean vs obese animals and humans. In this article, we review the published evidence supporting the potential role of the gut microbiota in the development of obesity and explore the role that modifying the gut microbiota may play in its future treatment. Evidence suggests that the metabolic activities of the gut microbiota facilitate the extraction of calories from ingested dietary substances and help to store these calories in host adipose tissue for later use. Furthermore, the gut bacterial flora of obese mice and humans include fewer Bacteroidetes and correspondingly more Firmicutes than that of their lean counterparts, suggesting that differences in caloric extraction of ingested food substances may be due to the composition of the gut microbiota. Bacterial lipopolysaccharide derived from the intestinal microbiota may act as a triggering factor linking inflammation to high-fat diet-induced metabolic syndrome. Interactions among microorganisms in the gut appear to have an important role in host energy homeostasis, with hydrogen-oxidizing methanogens enhancing the metabolism of fermentative bacteria. Existing evidence warrants further investigation of the microbial ecology of the human gut and points to modification of the gut microbiota as one means to treat people who are overweight or obese."

Also, there is this, again, very important:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11...

"A dramatic rise in obesity has occurred among humans within the last several decades. Little is known about whether similar increases in obesity have occurred in animals inhabiting human-influenced environments. We examined samples collectively consisting of over 20 000 animals from 24 populations (12 divided separately into males and females) of animals representing eight species living with or around humans in industrialized societies. In all populations, the estimated coefficient for the trend of body weight over time was positive (i.e. increasing). The probability of all trends being in the same direction by chance is 1.2 × 10−7. Surprisingly, we find that over the past several decades, average mid-life body weights have risen among primates and rodents living in research colonies, as well as among feral rodents and domestic dogs and cats. The consistency of these findings among animals living in varying environments, suggests the intriguing possibility that the aetiology of increasing body weight may involve several as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors (e.g. viral pathogens, epigenetic factors). This finding may eventually enhance the discovery and fuller elucidation of other factors that have contributed to the recent rise in obesity rates."

My own guess is that some of the obesity epidemic can be explained by bacteria. This would either be a new strain of bacteria, or (more likely) an old one that has mutated due to the abundant supply of food that humans have been exposed to over the last 150 years. Likely this is a bacteria that has lived in the guts of mammals for a very long time, possibly millions of years.

It is interesting to consider that, while a good deal of research has been done into how mammals react to famine, no research that I know of has been done into how the bacteria in our gut responds to our experience of famine. Or prolonged abundance.

Of course, there are many novel factors in the environment today. Some chemical that effect our metabolism is also a possible explanation.

That's a great point.

One thing I've always done is if I slip up and eat a lot more than I wanted to during the course of a day (e.g., big lunch, big dinner) I'll go ahead and keep eating a whole lot the rest of the day.

I figure my body can only store so much fat in one day so any additional calories won't hurt. I've never seen this idea proven or disproven anywhere but logically it seems to make sense to me.

A high-carb meal would spike insulin which leads to fat storage. The cycle only lasts a few hours, so even if there is a limit per cycle, you wouldn't want to have 3 cycles instead of one.

I think you're right about the concept of sharing energy with gut microbes. I calculate that a 160 pound man would lose about 250 calories to gut microbes each day if he were consuming sufficient protein, fat, and minerals to sustain efficient gut microbe multiplication activity. A diet poor in supportive nutrition would curtail gut microbe activity resulting in more efficient energy absorption into the bloodstream. That is, a higher proportion of the energy consumed would be available for metabolic needs and fat storage. In my own experience, if I consume extra calories, I just have more bowel movements and don't gain any weight unless the extra calories are carbohydrate.

where can i learn more about gut microbes? probiotics? gary taubes new book?

When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science.

1. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather than, say, how much you workout or your genetics.

2. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad food.

3. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense.

#1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses (genetics).

#2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case but we are just now catching up to that science.

For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone: 1. Eliminate grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think watermelon) 2. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries) 3. No oils other than coconut or olive 4. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet potato etc) 5. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them. 6. some fruit, but only of the berry/cherry variety 7. minimal diary

http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ is a great place to start.

#3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36 hours.

I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+ years.

That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy.

10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries.

This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I realized that modern fruit is often not the same fruit from 500 years ago. It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for example, used to be small, sour & bitter.

I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.

Yeah, grains are a tough one. We have to love grains as they basically helped humans take over the world! I firmly believe that without grains we wouldn't have 6 billion people today.

That being said, I don't think eating grains is optimal for our bodies. Most of what is coming out of science today shows that we still haven't evolved to eat grains and use them very efficiently in our body. We use them, but they cause an inflammatory response and that is obviously suboptimal for overall health and nutrition. We get some nutrition out of them (nothing that we couldn't get from veggies or meat), but it also damages at the same time...catch-22.

I think of it this way: at the zoo, you see the handlers feed tigers raw meat and pandas bamboo because that is what they evolved to eat. What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health. Personally I believe what I wrote earlier is what we evolved to eat and I believe most of the science supports that.

What did we evolve to eat?

In my opinion? Whatever we can manage to digest. We are omnivores, after all.

Yes, and we are enjoying the longest lifespan ever. We didn't evolve to automatically stent our arteries, but when folks with heart disease do just that they live longer.

"Eat what we evolved to eat" is a romantically appealing argument but it is not logically sound. It's better than, "if you want your brains to grow properly, eat brains; after all, they have exactly the nutritionaly makeup you need," but it's still flawed in proving that a diet that was available to early humans was optimal for longevity.

I admit, however, that a logically flawed argument sometimes proves to give the right answer after all, but for my money (and life!) I'm going with Western science and nutrition for the most part.

"What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health."

I hate this sort of blind naturalism. We evolved to be susceptible to polio, tuberculosis, and plague and to live to ~30. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's optimal -- science and technology can, when judiciously applied, add a lot to the quality (and length) of life.

Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity.

It's called a framework for making an educated decision. Perhaps I should have said 'on your way to optimal health' as one of the largest and most controllable things in our lives is what we eat.

As for 'modernism', I fail to see how knowing exactly what our body is adapted and designed to process is not useful information. Knowing this, which is the basis for knowing exactly what is optimal, you can then make a decision if that whey protein powder is good or bad for you...if creatine powder is good or bad for you...if sugar is good or bad for you...

Also, I don't think ANYONE would argue that diet is the only thing that plays into health issues. Modern medicine is fantastic and has done wonderful things for our lives, but it has failed in the past 20 or so years to provide us the optimal food paradigm.

Just an FYI, I eat this way, my family eats this way...my wife is a doctor..I have gotten PRP (platelet rich plasma) on my achilles (modern medicine...actually, pretty bleeding edge medicine) and we used modern methods for child birth (decreased mortality rate in child birth). Eating as we are intended to eat, and more importantly, knowing what we are intended to eat, in no way eschews modern medicine...please don't create a false dichotomy.

You've got a point, but you're going way overboard. Blind naturalism is a good first approximation for health advice, though it's obviously not an end point.

Men can conceive children into their 70s, so evolution does favor long life in some cases. We still have "modern afflictions" because evolution isn't perfect, and it isn't finished, and because there are tradeoffs in the biological design. For example, resistance to malaria comes with a propensity for sickle-cell disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease)

> […] and to live to ~30.

People used to die younger because of injuries, illnesses and poor nutrition, not because the body is only "supposed" to live for 30 years.

> Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc).

That's absolutely not true. It seems likely that older people have played an important role in society throughout, helping take care of children while the more able work, sources of wisdom &c. While evolution hasn't eliminated all diseases of the old age (because it doesn't work actively like that) longer-lived genes have provided some survival advantage.

I'm willing to bet that 10,000 years ago you wouldn't have been able to find a homo sapien on this planet that was older than 50. The vast, vast majority of evolutionary pressure occurred well before then.

"Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity."

But there is evidence (in Taubes' GCBC to begin with) that modern foods cause the "diseases of civilization".

Before agriculture, as hunter-gatherers, many people did live into what we would consider old age (if they didn't die from injuries, etc, which is not relevant to diet).

and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries)

Wouldn't you think that seafood is more preferable than meat? It is a great source of omega 3 fatty acids and also, while cattle is usually grain-fed and/or fed some hormones, the fish would not have such an issue.

Another interesting point I came across recently is that fish may accumulate mercury in its tissues. Therefore, it is recommended to eat smaller and short-lived fish which do not have enough time to accumulate any significant amounts of mercury. Not sure about what science says, but seems logical.

Fully agree to all other points.

Yes, I would generally agree that fish aught be included and used as a primary source of protein, though with fish I feel is very important to know the source.

Also, I personally am not a huge fan of fish so I do neglect it in my diet a bit, but I make up for it with grass fed beef and bison etc (all good sources of proper ration omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids).

To the other points....I do have this for people who have already gotten control of their diet.

After you optimize what you eat, optimize what your food eats!

Baby steps ;)

Boy it took him a long time to NOT get to the point... I want my 10 minutes back.

Noticed that as well; about half way through he introduces the thermo-dynamics issue and the implied (but useless) truth-ly-ness of fat people eating more than non-fat people, then spends the entire remainder of the article stating, re-stating and re-phrasing that same point again and again and again with different analogies, examples and mock conversations.

It was about 2 paragraphs away from the end (before the last mock conversation) that I realized he was baiting for his book OR doesn't have a conclusion strong enough to share.

I absolutely could be wrong, but I can't stand being lead around by my chin with arm-waving tomfoolery and flashing lights just to find out there is nothing there.

If he had made his compelling point, or at least hinted at it more than the very last comment -- "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear" -- I would have been more interested.

I don't know that what I quoted there was even the correct "hook" at his book premise as it starts "when we get fat..." talking about AFTER someone is already fat, when the premise of his book is "why we get fat" which is the before... the cause.

I am interested enough to want to pick his book up, but also annoyed enough to take my sweet time doing it in case it's hollow.

---- EDIT ----

I was critical above of Gary's blog post so I did some more reading to see if I would be interested in his book and his ultimate point being made.

I found this review on Amazon that completely sold me on it: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_per...

While I haven't read the book yet (downloading on iPad now) and proposition that Gary is making (according to this reviewer) is fascinating to me and jives with the way I feel at times.

Gary talks about how sugars and the insulin response feed your fat and your fat itself takes on a self-sustaining role in your body, not the passive storage-mechanism we understand it to be.

Agreed. In stark contrast, I appreciate Michael Pollan's pithiness:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

It's not that complicated, folks.

No offense, but that's complete bullshit, and the sort of tautological reasoning he's mocking. Of course you should eat "not too much" -- eating "too much" is too much!

The key word in that quote is "food", though; the "not too much" is an afterthought.

It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be criticized?

Not if the criticism is a blanket "this is total bullshit".

I agree with you. I thought I must have missed something, and I'm pretty sure it was the very last line:

"Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat..."

I think that's probably what he intends to elaborate on.

His point is that one of the major health problems in the US and elsewhere is blamed (almost universally by the media, government, medical and weight loss industries) on an idea which is simply wrong and is misleading people to even worse health. A detailed argument can't be made through tweets.

I'll start with one messed up point in this article: One way to get around this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on end and then we realize we’ve put on five or ten pounds...and then we decide to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it...But then how do animals do it?

Easy: most animals have weight which fluctuates significantly depending on food availability. In the wild, many are undernourished. Overeating is a real problem for domesticated animals. http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-obesity-fact-risks/

But now I'll argue against his real thesis. Based on other articles on this same topic, I get the impression Gary Taubes is an opponent of the "personal irresponsibility" theory of obesity - see this article for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&#...

But unfortunately, he proposes to replace it with a much higher entropy theory. Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. Occams Razor suggests he is probably wrong, and from what I've seen, he doesn't even try to address this.

Just to make sure I understood this correctly. Is your suggestion that low education, low income, obesity are all explained by personal irresponsibility?

> Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs.

I could go pick a bunch of correlated things and ascribe them all to "magic" or "Zeus" or what-have-you, but stuffing all the entropy into a black box like this shouldn't make it count as a "low-entropy theory".

It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several correlated things.

Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education)

"Intuitive" seems like a weasel-word there. How do you define "personal irresponsibility"? How do you measure it? It's practically a mystical concept in comparison to the well-defined, measurable factors that Taubes is concerned with.

That Taubes meticulously restricts himself to subjects that he's studied in depth (in this case, obesity and the associated literature) is a sign of intellectual honesty. I admire his refusal to go off on ideological tangents.

How do you define "personal irresponsibility"? How do you measure it?

You don't define personal irresponsibility, you change the word to one with less emotional baggage, that means something extremely close, that's easily measured.

High discount rate.

I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat" yesterday(both available on Kindle!).

GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the carbohydrate theory.

Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :)

[I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]

This article is inane. Just a sample:

"Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent."

The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.)

Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight.

It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand.

P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat

Why do people get fat?

He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand.

That's odd. You would have thought that an undergraduate physics degree (even from a liberal arts institution) and a masters in engineering (OK, that one's from a real school) would have given him at least a basic grasp of the issues. :)

His "20 calories a day" explanation is not the argument he is making. Rather, he's pointing out that it's absurd to think that the sole difference between an obese 70 year and his svelte wife is the one sugar cube per day the fat one added to his morning coffee. Are you arguing that it is indeed this simple, and that all we have to do to have a thin and fit population is to drink black coffee?

p.s. Why the new account?

It's rather more likely that we need a population who accepts that their weight fluctuates up naturally, and is willing to put in the extra effort to make it fluctuate back down by deliberate effort.

Taubes is portraying it as a sugar cube every day. Instead, it could be cookies, brownies and egg nog over Christmas, followed by a normal diet for many weeks. It could also be eating a diet acceptable for a 20 year old when you are 40.

Taubes is portraying overeating as mu=20, sigma=0. That's a fallacy.

What's more important, the two pieces of paper he received or the fact that his own arguments clearly depict he doesn't understand? He says:

" Does anyone – even Jonah Lehrer or the neuroscientists he consults – think that the brain, perhaps in cohort with the gut, is making decisions about how much we should eat, on how long we stay hungry and when we get full, so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent. (We consume, on average, about 2700 calories a day, so matching energy in to energy out and not overshooting by 20 calories requires better than one percent accuracy.)"

"...we actually have to be perfect in our matching of intake to expenditure or we’re going to get inexorably fatter (or leaner, if we err on the side of going hungry), or at least we have to average perfection over decades."

His argument is that the body is not accurate to within 20 calories a day. He appears unaware of the fact that this kind of regulation, which I agree isn't possible on a day-to-day basis (the brain never says "don't eat that last 1/12 of a candy bar"), is unremarkable when amortized over time. That is where his scientific inexperience shows. "Averaging perfection over decades" happens all the time and is perfectly unremarkable. He is oblivious to this fact.

This is a fatal error. Regardless of how it fits into his larger argument, he gets this basic and fundamental point wrong. When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments. And indeed, a random sampling shows they are fundamentally broken. I would not trust him to explain any kind of complex science.

When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments.

I agree that this is a pretty good standard to adhere to, but there are other explanations: perhaps Taubes understands the issues well, but didn't do a great job of translating them to analogies. Or perhaps you (as reader) are not correct in your understanding of his argument. I suspect Taubes would agree with you that given an appropriate long-term feedback method that fine regulation is possible, thus I presume the actual issue is something else.

I'm inclined to trust Taubes because I've enjoyed some of his prior writings. Here's an award winning article of his that was published in Science: http://www.junkscience.com/news3/taubes.html. You might enjoy this earlier article as an example of his style applied to a different topic. While it's certainly possible he's completely wrong here, I don't think it's because he lacks any fundamental understanding of science.

As I read it, Taubes' basic critique is that the 'calories equals weight gain' formula is so flawed as to be almost useless. The more I look into it, the more I agree with him. Yes, obviously at the extremes there are physical limits involved, but presuming a purely linear response just seems silly. I cheer him on in his attempts to come up with something better.

> Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight.

It's an excellent starting point, but it might not be that useful by itself unless you like working against your body's self-regulation mechanisms.

... stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight.

No, it's not useful. What defines "calories absorbed" and how is that related to the actual amount of food ingested? Do all possible calories in a given bite to eat always factor in the theromdynamic equilibrium or do some of them just pass through your system? What about "calories burned"? What proportion of calories burned in a day are due to walking, exercising, thinking, or just sitting there. How much does your metabolism fluctuate, and what controls it?

It's true that if you are overweight, then you absorbed more calories than you burned, but the converse doesn't necessarily give insight into what to do? You could eat less, but then maybe the body would be more efficient about extracting calories from the food passing through, or maybe it would lower your standing metabolism so as to not burn as many calories during the day.

I have maintained a healthy weight for some time, while my food and activity level has fluctuated wildly. Clearly, my body is doing some pretty fancy stuff "behind the scenes" to maintain energy balance, and that seems like the most important factor in weight gain or lack thereof.

Lastly, I will say your post brought up an interesting thing: you mention the law of large numbers. I believe this indicates you think there's a target caloric intake, and each day our body draws a random variable of calories, with the thermodynamic equilibrium as the expected value. It's an interesting model, but I'm not sure if that's realistic. I feel like what I eat in a given day is determined more exogenously than endogenously (e.g.: who I visit, what they want to do, what restaurant I walk by, what the special of the day is, etc). It's an interesting idea, though.

"That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t."

I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because there are people who are fat), it's a tautology.

I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's premise.

EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me being needlessly pedantic.

It's not that you ate more calories than you burned, it's that you absorbed more calories than you burned.

I think it's worth asking why some calories are more likely to be absorbed than others, and why some people are more inclined to absorb more calories than other people.

"We don’t know. It’s complicated." But then there's the thought bubble with the words "Moral failure" in it:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physician...

I take issue with his statement that there are plenty of animals that have abundant food, which don't get fat. I just don't think that's true. Even for the animals that have plenty of food, they still have to go out and forage/hunt. On the other hand, if you just pile up food in front of animals everyday, they will eat it and get fat. Some examples of this are my parents' dogs, and there are no animals but humans and domestics that have infinite food with no work attached.

I think people and animals eat, because that's how we are wired. Any animal gorges itself presented with work-free food. Our body wants as much fuel as it can get at a very basic level.

However, I don't think it comes down to "personal responsibility." I think society is successful at instilling logical discipline in many members, and less successful with others. If you are fat, it's probably because your family didn't raise you to have the tools to make good health decisions and follow through with your thoughts. I also think unsatisfied people tend to over-eat, over-smoke, and over-everything else.

It takes both luck and hard work to be happy and fit.

I weight between 135-145 pounds and I'm 6' tall. I'm well past thirty.

I eat as much as I can. The only that stops from eating is stomach pain from overeating.

Some people may get fat from overeating. But it's hard to generalize here.

No, it's very easy to generalize: an overwhelming majority of people will get fat from overeating, some quicker than others. I'd think your condition is somewhere in the single-digit percentages.

I've always been fairly lean – 176/70ish (5'9"/155ish in SU) – a "can eat anything" type, but taking an almost 3-month break from cycling while not reducing food consumption has resulted in a gain of about 8kg/17lbs. (Planning to drop to about 68kg by June).

The article is not helpful in any practical way. It simply gives the core thesis that eating too much doesn't make you fat, and that the author knows some secret that he will reveal in his book once you buy it.

Why should I give any more weight to this than any of the thousands of other "buy this diet secret!" books out there?

The article is not helpful in any practical way.

True, but what it does do is explain why the "thermodynamic" explanation, although correct, is not practically useful.

This is a fascinating article that uses logic really well. Of course, he doesn't go into the answers to the question he poses: "Why do people overeat?" I suppose you have to buy the book to figure that out.

He definitely has a hypothesis about that (read _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for more details --- or, Google [ucsf fructose] and watch that video again).

+1 for fructose video. Awesome watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I think the medical establishment would be overjoyed if people on average were putting on only 1 pound per year. The obesity "epidemic" is about 50-100 pounds of extra weight. Bariatric wards are filled with those hundreds of pounds overweight not 20.

Not sure that I trust a thin guy's advice on why people get fat.

Not sure I trust a human's insights on why animals get X ...

(you don't need to have condition X in order to study X)

Was he always thin?

Would you trust a fat guy's diet advice?

Funny, people seem to trust Dr. Phil.

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