Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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Good Calories, Bad Calories is often based on incomplete science. It certainly does not make sense when viewed through the lens of some of the largest human dietary studies ever performed (such as the China Study; which Taubes "debunked" in his own unique fashion, but he can't alter the fact that it's among the best, longest, widest, and broadest studies of human diet available; to ignore it is to ignore good science and put your faith in hunches, which Taubes has a lot of).

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).

His premise is simply that for the vast majority of people who are obese, the culprit is located within the high-carbohydrate aspect of their diet.

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.

So how come we were thinner back when we had a high carb, low fat diet?

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnpp.usd...

Different types of carbs, man, different types of carbs. =)

So processed white flour [1] isn't the culprit? Good to know.

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.

I'm not a nutritionist. My understanding, however, is that sugars are the culprit. When you look at what has changed over the years, that's the big one.

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.

Actually, if you look, you'll discover fats and oils have increased more than sugar. Consumption of fats and oils increased 90% (from 12.6% of diet to 23.9%), while sugar consumption only increased 34% (from 12.9 to 17.3%).

(By "increase", I mean from 1909-2004. See table 4 of my link.)

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's the increase in the fructose in our diet via juices and sugars. Be wary as well, as those charts lump different things together.

If between fats and sugars, one is "bad" and the other is not, then any increase in the one that is bad will have negative effects regardless of how much the non-bad one is increased. Nutrition and human biology is obviously more complicated than just this, but I'm just pointing out that data like this provides as much evidence for Jason's argument as it does for your argument.

Also, FWIW, I have seen the video, and to me the main message was that fructose is bad when fiber consumption is too low.

It's hard to know enough to say definitively what the culprit is. That's why Taubes is mostly content to argue merely the cause of increased obesity is located within the high-carbohydrate aspect of the modern diet. But even that has been a controversial enough position.

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.

But we can be quite sure that the suspect(s) is a carbohydrate.

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.

First off, I think this is good data and commend you for going back to the numbers to make your point. It's not perfect data - as the report says, by nature it's overstating actual consumption - but for short-term trends it is valuable.

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.

Taubes argues from the perspective of percentage of total intake. I suppose someone arguing with him could do the same. I tend to prefer the idea of discussing absolute consumption, as you've done, and when we look at it that way, Americans are eating more of everything, across the board: More fat, more sugar, more carbs, more white flour, more pasta, more sodas, more fruit, more meat, etc.

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.

Hmm. Maybe Gary Taubes has changed his approach, because in a typically-logorrhetic blog post last year, he went on about why low-fat calorie-restricted diets work exactly because the "absolute amount of carbohydrates consumed goes down."

http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydra...

Sorry, I meant a decrease from 1909-1919 to the present. I was definitely unclear, sorry about that. You are right, total carb consumption did increase since 1980.

But if carbs were the issue, shouldn't we have been fat in 1909-1919, thin in the 80's, and fat again?

Again, you can't lump all carbs together. You can't just say carbs are bad for you. Fiber, for example, is a carb, but isn't going to make you fatter.

I think it's troublesome to compare general disappearance data from so long ago. There can be long-term trends of things like waste and changing methodologies that mess things up.

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.

For the record, I realized something interesting about wheat consumption in the USA, which is that sugar follows wheat very often in the modern diet. It's very challenging to find packaged sandwich bread in a USA supermarket which doesn't contain a significant amount of sugar or HFCS. So today, wheat consumption tells you a lot about sugar consumption, but that may not have been the case a hundred years ago.

At the beginning of the century, most people lived in rural areas. [1]

[1] http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WUP2005/2005wu...

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