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Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

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.

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