The Japanese diet is one of several high carb diets that leads to excellent health and longevity. Many of the most successful regional diets are based heavily on rice, legumes, and vegetables, and are very carb-heavy. Ignoring those historically successful diets requires either an extremely myopic view of diet, or someone who has a controversial new book to sell.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that following Taubes advice would necessarily be a bad thing. He recommends whole foods, and cutting out sugar and simple carbs and processed foods, which are excellent dietary choices to make. Most Americans would get healthier by eating as Taubes recommends. But, to claim that a low-fat, high-carb, diet is unhealthy, when there are mountains of evidence to the contrary in the form of several Asian and Mediterranean diets, is misleading, at best. The problem with the American diet is not in any one macro-nutrient...fat or carb. It is that we, as a people, eat garbage at every meal. Processed, sugared, stripped of everything good and injected with everything bad. 80% of the food at a supermarket is probably something humans shouldn't be eating, even in moderation, but most of us eat it daily and as the primary source of calories.
Taubes is another fad diet promoter. His fad diet is better than most, and has some decent science behind it. But, it's not the ultimate reference, and it's not on my list of books to recommend to people who just want some ideas about how to eat better (I recommend In Defense of Food for that; it's anti-fad, free of hyperbole and outlandish claims and is based on tradition and science).
Good Calories, Bad Calories is about why the "garbage" people eat has caused them to get fat, and why it's not the saturated fat like experts have been telling the public for a generation.
It's not a book about the best way for everyone to eat like Michael Pollan's books are. If you believe it's about telling people "eat food, but not too many carbs" I understand why you think little of it.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnpp.usd...
Maybe the real culprit in the obesity epidemic is fats, oils, and sugar. It certainly fits the data.
[1] At the beginning of the century, whole wheat flour was uncommon except in rural areas. It spoiled too quickly.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
There are lots of other articles concerning this, but I felt this was the best one for pure information. He's not alone in discussing this, so I don't have to just take his word for it. But like I said, I'm not a professional in this area.
(By "increase", I mean from 1909-2004. See table 4 of my link.)
Also, FWIW, I have seen the video, and to me the main message was that fructose is bad when fiber consumption is too low.
The problem could be primarily that the Kool-Aid, fruit juice, Tang, soda and Sunny Delight (and other sweet food like sugared-up yogurt and maybe even infant formula) that we've been feeding our kids for the last sixty years has halfway burned out many of their metabolisms while they were still young. It may have nothing to do with wheat. But we can be quite sure that the suspect(s) is a carbohydrate.
If that's so, those folks with a permanently injured insulin response will have a need for an appropriate diet, which may not be like what metabolically-healthy individuals can enjoy. Taubes takes the position that the most effective diets for them are ones which restrict some or all carbohydrates, which is not going to give you clogged arteries like the medical establishment has been saying.
That's about it. There are definitely other places you can go (i.e. the Heart Scan Blog) if you want to see arguments for wheat as a demon of the modern diet. Yet again, that also interacts with the modern insulin resistance that wasn't as much of an issue in the 1920's.
How can we be so sure? The most obvious culprit is total calories. From 1980 to the present, total caloric consumption increased by 500 calories/day (see table 1 of my report). Coincidentally, obesity increased over the same period. But lets ignore that.
Carb consumption decreased, both as a fraction of diet and in absolute numbers. Obesity increased. Taking these two facts together, you need to make a very convincing argument that carbs are really the problem, in spite of the fact that obesity and carb consumption are negatively correlated.
But I don't see where gross carbohydrates are decreasing in Table 1. It seems like they went from 420g in the 80's (from under 400g in the 70's) to 480 or so a decade ago.
The simplest explanation is that we eat too much. Taubes often argues that's not true, and comes up with elaborate theories about insulin response and such to indicate that we eat too much not because we're gluttonous and too rich for our own good, but because we are victims of some hyper-fattening food (carbs). Taubes theory is a hunch, based on incomplete science. This was the point of my comment way up there at the start of all this. His theory might have some validity. But, you can't simply wave away the fact that we have vast data indicating that a high carb, low fat diet, can be extremely healthy and not lead to weight gain. In fact, the best evidence we have today from large populations indicates that a low-fat, low-sugar, high fiber diet, like that eaten by the Japanese until very recently or in some Mediterranean regions, is probably the best we can do for health and longevity.
It will take a lot of science to convince me that flipping that on its end and making saturated fats and animal proteins a core part of your diet is healthier (or even healthy, at all, though it does appear to be dramatically less dangerous than the American scientific establishment would have us believe).
Anyway, I don't know if Taubes is right or wrong about his insulin and carbs conspiracy theory. I do know, however, that our food production industry has figured out how to cram a lot of calories into foods with little to no nutrition. So, skip the processed/packaged foods. Eat more whole foods. More fresh/frozen produce. Stop buying things that are unrecognizably separated from their original form. i.e. if it started out as a pile of corn and some other ingredients and is now a can of Coke, a snack cake, a donut, a breakfast bar, a "chicken" nugget, or a "whole grain" breakfast cereal; skip it; it's probably not really food and is probably a net negative for your health.
http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydra...
But if carbs were the issue, shouldn't we have been fat in 1909-1919, thin in the 80's, and fat again?
I think your point -- that overall carbs are not the issue -- is right on, though. Looking at wheat data from Statistics Canada going back about as far, people seem to have been eating a ton more wheat a hundred years ago than they do today, like 30% more. And yet in those days obesity had a <1% incidence, by some accounts.
I think that's not inconsistent with fingering particular carbohydrates (and even the way they're consumed) as the cause of modern weight problems. That is, I don't think that falsifies the Sunny Delight hypothesis I proposed earlier. There's a reason the Kool-Aid Man is that large -- as mentioned by others, it seems like fructose is the trans fat of carbohydrates.
And, I would say, food disappearance data doesn't help at all in answering the question of the best way for the obese to lose fat. After all, in the 1910s, there almost weren't any obese people! Now that over a third of Americans are statistically obese, this is its own highly relevant issue.
[1] http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WUP2005/2005wu...
> "One can lose weight on a low-calorie diet if it is primarily composed of fat calories or carbohydrate calories or protein calories. It makes no difference!"
Quoted from one of the "experts" refuting taubes. And yet, research by Robert Israel and Michel Cabanac (full list of references in Roberts' "What Makes Food Fattening" bibliography) shows that this is completely untrue - even flavor makes a huge difference, let alone "caloric intake". (BTW, if anyone can point me to any peer reviewed paper that validates "calories in-calories out" theory, I would be thankful. It appears to be an argument of faith, not of science, as far as I can tell).
Good Calories Bad Calories is meticulously referenced. You may disagree with the content, but as far as science writing goes, it doesn't get any better or more rigorous.
(And that's less of a compliment to Taubes, and more an indication of the sad, sad state of science writing).
Taubes is a scientist and a journalist. The fact that nutrition is not his original field doesn't change much.
The problem is many of the very scientists that Taubes referenced were furious about him misrepresenting their work, and taking extremely selective quotations to make it sound like they were supporting theories that they did not actually believe were true.
>"Taubes is a scientist"
The claim that Taubes is a scientist is unsupported by anything I've ever read about him, or his current wikipedia file. What science has he actually done, as opposed to reported on?
RE calories in / calories out: Here's article might interest you. It details a nutritionist's "twinkie diet". He dropped 27 lbs in two months, shed body fat and improved various blood markers while eating 1800 calories a day, mostly from junkies. It's not a peer reviewed study, but it was conducted by a professor of nutrition at the university of Kansas. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
In that case, we should send a single rice grain to all starving persons to serve as their only nutrition.
I imagine you have a more nuanced point, but the statement you quoted is clearly true taken for what it actually is saying.
You are right, of course. Without quantifying (how low is "low calorie"?) these statements are useless.
There was an experiment in Mass General some 15 years ago, in which they were able to get people with similar lifestyle/activity on 1500 cal/day diet. About one third lost weight, one third stayed the same weight, and one third gained weight, depending on how exactly the diet was composed.
Yes, you will lose weight, regardless of diet composition, on less than 800 kcal/day. Is that "low calorie"? "too low calorie"? "moderate"?.
No, you will not necessarily lose weight on more than 800 kcal/day. You probably will if your diet was not specially crafted to make you keep your weight on 800 kcal. When you get up to the 1200-1500 range, there is a non-negligible probability of "accidentally" gaining weight (or at least not lose it) by randomly stumbling on a bad diet composition.
One of Cabanac's (If I'm not mistaken) experiment was able to make rats gain weight for 3 weeks on a diet of water+chalk (caloric value 0) for a while, by feeding them water+sugar+chalk for a while, and then dropping the sugar. Sure, it was water gain - but the calories in - calories out theory fails so miserably in this case (and countless others) that it cannot be taken seriously. (For only 3 weeks for a rat; it might not hold for a human for a few months in similar conditions).
The calorie accounting is an approximation at best, which possibly takes several months to a year to average out reasonably, whereas a lot of the research focuses on results over 3 months or less.
800kcals a day is typically enough for a 100 lb person to lose nearly a half a pound of fat a week. That's low calorie by most people's measure. Certainly mine at 200lbs
When most people are talking about 'losing weight' they mean losing fat. At least losing actual body tissue. Anyone can gain or lose 10% of their body weight in a few days by controlling for carbs. But its just water.
Try to ignore rat studies if you possibly can. Their metabolism, particularly their capacity for denovo lipogenisis is very very different than that of human beings.
99% of nutrition studies are, but this one wasn't. I can't find the reference now, though.
Personally, I've been on a ~1200kcal/day diet for years (for some of that time, I did very detailed tracking), and stayed at my 220lbs. Which, of course, makes no sense, and it didn't to my girlfriend at the time who was an MD - so she decided she'd show me how wrong I am by eating the same as me. She lost weight quickly and started blacking out (apparently some form of malnutrition) within a few days, and stopped after a week with a SEP field resolution ("Contradicts everything I know, so I'm just going to ignore it").
Then, 12 month ago, on essentially the same diet, I started gaining weight - slowly but surely. And then I decided to cut away wheat, and lost 30 pounds within a month. (In retrospect, I also noticed that my gain weight coincided with going from pure-egg protein powder to egg-and-wheat protein powder).
There are about a thousand more variables than calories, and the body can change its efficiency.
Ignore the rat studies if you like, but cabanac has similar experiments with humans -- basically, people fed through a nose tube lose weight almost independently of the amount of calories you put in their stomach. Body just doesn't use the food unless proper signaling (apparently, scent related) happens.
What likely happened is that reducing carbs reduced beagle3's appetite and he ate less. Unless...
...unless beagle3 has a magic body that has never once been seen in any controlled experiment. But he probably does, since every dieter who has problems believes they have a special body that science can't explain. So they buy a book and a program from someone who tells them what they want to hear. And if their guru is on their game they sell very very expensive supplements.
Because its a well known scientific fact that the first law of thermodynamics applies to everything in the universe except a disgruntled dieter.
You can get razor sharp lean on a diet with lots of carbs in it and you can get nice and fat on a ketogenic diet.
No controlled calorie study supports the idea that carbs, fats or proteins have any particular metabolic advantage over the minor differences in their thermic effects of feeding (TEF) (essentially energy required to digest).
As for modesty - that would not help his cause, whether that cause is educating others or making more money. What are you more likely to read, something titled "Most of what you know about nutrition is wrong", or "A humble suggestion to ignore nutritionists"?