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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

Excellent to see this, it's a western myth that eating fat makes you fat. It's carbs.

Carbs are cheap, carbs are bad for you and carbs are often marketed as health food.

We don't need carbs. We evolved eating meat and veg. Meat, veg and water is the perfect diet. It's hard to stick to that diet though as carbs are so highly accessible.

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Don't make the same mistake of oversimplifying diet that led to the "fat is bad" and "fat makes you fat" myths.

Neither fat nor carbs are "bad" for you. Eating too much saturated fats plus a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your heart, pretty much independent of your weight. Eating too many refined carbs (foods with a high glycemic index) is also bad for you and can facilitate weight gain and potentially lead to other health problems in people who are genetically predisposed (e.g. type 2 diabetes). However, eating a Mediterranean diet high in unsaturated fat and whole grains (fat and carbs) is one of the healthiest diets possible according to a huge volume of research, so just throwing around the "fat" and "carbs" labels is not necessarily helpful.

A lot of that research starts both sets of mice on high carb diets, then draws the wrong conclusions about how the little fat they received affected the groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#Medical_rese...

I agree, fat does not make you fat, but carbs will not make you fat either. Excessive calories make you fat. Excess calories from any macronutrient will make you fat, including fat.

Can you please provide real studies, that do not involve Taubes that say or prove otherwise? Real studies, not blog posts. Pubmed or similar.

Here is a list of studies (some relevant, some not, but still interesting) that you may find interesting regarding diet, fat loss, etc:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/nv8ip/do_you_have_a...

Also, you might be interested to read Martin Berkhan's low carb taliban's blog post. He is very highly regarded and everything he advises, does, and advises his clients are backed by real studies and science.

http://www.leangains.com/2009/02/low-carb-talibans.html

I'm not the most knowledgeable on these subjects, but I really believe stating, "It's carbs." is an outright lie, unless you can back up this with some sort of study or studies or legit real world proof.

I'm not sure why you would say not Taubes. The reason people like him is because of how relentless he is in quoting real studies and interviewing the actual authors of those studies. There are like 200 pages of notes in the back of GCBC.

Yes, I know this, but have you or anyone you know or can link to that has actually gone through and reviewed the studies in full? Not just picking out certain pieces or statements? From people I have talked to that have, they stated that he had taken out parts of the studies that agreed with his theories or were able to see how the studies were flawed and not setup correctly to begin with.

I'm just stating what I have been told and believe it since it was people in the fitness community that are highly regarded and much more knowledgable than I.

Edit: Spelling.

Have you done the same for every study that points to calories in/calories out? In fact, there aren't many such studies actually. Somehow this was given the benefit of being the null hypothesis, which is an underserved benefit in my opinion and many others including Taubes. One of the other things he does in GCBC is go through the anthropological evidence as well. We know quite well that our ancestors ate a very high fat/low carv diet because they mainly ate the organ meat. I don't think that is actually in dispute. Its also part of the foundation of the whole paleo/primal movement.

At the end of the day, Taubes might be wrong about some or all of what he thinks. But the reason why he is generally well liked on HN, a community of very smart, very analytical people, is because Taubes is highly analytical and highly rigorous in his approach. This isn't some woo-woo magic stuff. I've never met a more methodically and rigorously researched book than GCBC. I can't review every study he cites because that would take 5 years at least.

> calories in/calories out

This is a fundamental law of thermodynamics.

Not in the way you think it is. It's true that if you gain weight then you must have consumed more calories than you burned. It is not true that if you consume more calories than you burn that you will gain weight. This is not a closed system. You could literally poop out the difference.

As far as it goes, it is a useless statement anyway. The point of calories in/calories out rhetoric is not about the physics; it's about how animals regulate their weight. You could make the same case that body temperature is about heat in/heat out but that would be missing the point of how humans regulate body temperature. The criticism of calories in/calories out is in this vein. Do you think you control your body temperature by consciously monitoring heat transfer? Then what makes you thinks complex animals control their body weight and composition by consciously controlling their calorie usage and intake?

Your body reacts differently to different macronutrients. Thermodynamics isn't the last word here.

I certainly haven't been exhaustive, but after reading Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat I pulled a couple dozen studies to read. Most were because I found his claims implausible, a few because they were just interesting. A couple times I thought he was full of shit (eg. claiming there's no link between increased saturated fat in diet and precursors to atherosclerosis) and tried to find studies to disprove his claims.

I didn't find him to be misrepresenting studies, and I didn't find research that disproved the claims I found implausible. I was underwhelemed by the rigor of a few of the studies he cited, but he was either citing them as historical curiosities or alongside other, more rigorous notes.

I regularly pull sources for the science I read and Taubes fared far better than usual.

Italians have a very high rate of carb consumption, yet the countries obesity percentage is 1/3 of North Americas.

Regarding 'We evolved eating meat and veg'. Anatomically modern man evolved eating cooked food, namely yams, roots and vegetables. Meat consumption was a relative luxury in man's early years.

Vegetables are mostly carbohydrates, so I don't know how you can say we should eat vegetables but not carbohydrates.

That's somewhat misleading. It's true that in vegetables the carbohydrate:fat/protein ratio is much higher than in most other food sources, however the total amount of carbohydrates in most vegetables is still low. Vegetables are mostly water, but are also a source of a great deal of vitamins and minerals.

For their weight, vegetables don't contain a lot of digestible carbohydrates compared to the carb dense staples that are used world wide.

Refined carbs / refined sugar seem to be the problem with most foods these days. With the fear of 'fats' many food producers replaced the 'fat' with refined sugars to add the flavour with less fat (on paper).

- http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/sugar-problem/refined-sug...

- http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/nutrition/a/fructosedangers...

"Sugar" isn't the problem. It's fructose. Hard on the liver, can't even be used by muscles.

That's only partially true, and would still be useless if it were totally true. When people say "sugar", they're referring to sucrose, which is half fructose. Even glucose on its own will spike your blood sugar, which will make it harder to burn fat.

Also, your body converts starch into glucose, so starch can spike your blood sugar the same way. Fiber makes your body absorb glucose more gradually, which is why it's important to eat starch and sugar as part of whole foods, rather than in refined form.

> It's fructose

So fruit is bad?

No, because fruit includes a lot of fiber and releases the fructose into your digestive tract over time. Fruit juice is bad, though. It's essentially uncarbonated soda, and sometimes has a higher sugar content than soda. Compare grape juice to Mountain Dew, for example.

>it's a western myth that eating fat makes you fat. It's carbs.

A western myth? I've lived most my adult life in east Asia surrounded by people who eat rice or dumplings 2-3 meals a day. I have yet to see any Asian city with as fat of a populace as the high-protein, high-fat loving western cities.

What about fruit? I know little about our evolution, but I'd be surprised if our ancestors skipped over any fruits they would have found in the wild.

Fruit is fine, but it's not something you should eat huge amounts of. If you look at people drinking fruit juice, they're eating the equivalent of half a dozen oranges per glass.

The fiber helps a lot to moderate the hit, though this varies greatly among different fruits.

I keep my heavy carb intake (fruit, whole grains) to mornings and post-workout.

Fruit was available for about 2 weeks a year, so they ate some but not year round.

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