Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

Percy writes:Let's compare two diets that are equal in calories. One diet is low fat, the other is low carb. You try the low fat diet and do not lose weight. You then try the low carb diet and you do lose weight. For the low carb diet, where did the calories that were not used to maintain your weight go?Let's look at this in just a little more detail. You try the low fat diet. The food you eat is turned into nutrients in the bloodstream. These nutrients are sufficient for maintaining your weight, so you do no lose any weight.Now you try the low fat diet. The food you eat is also turned into nutrients in the bloodstream. These nutrients are not sufficient for maintaining your weight, so you do lose weight, but there were an equal number of calories in the food, so where did those calories go?Many people report being more energetic and less hungry on a low carb diet, so one possibility is that the extra calories were consumed by additional activity. Whether true or not, I don't believe there's any compelling research for or against this.

Percy writes:The little detail is where you say, "Insulin encourages calories that would otherwise be burned to be stored...as fat." This is true, but insulin also encourages energy to be stored in all other types of cells as well, including muscle cells. All cells need energy.

Cat Sci writes:Ran across this and was reminded of this topic, if anyone wants to read an interview with the author:
Gary Taubes, the Man Who Knows Why America Is Fat | GQ

A key initial experiment will be carried out jointly by researchers at Columbia University, the National Institutes of Health, the Florida Hospital—Sanford-Burnham Translational Research Institute in Orlando, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. In this pilot study, 16 overweight and obese participants will be housed throughout the experiment in research facilities to ensure accurate assessments of calorie consumption and energy expenditure. In stage one, the participants will be fed a diet similar to that of the average American50 percent carbohydrates (15 percent sugar), 35 percent fat and 15 percent protein. Researchers will carefully manipulate the calories consumed until it is clear the participants are neither gaining nor losing fat. In other words, the calories they take in will match the calories they expend, as measured in a device called a metabolic chamber. For stage two, the subjects will be fed a diet of precisely the same number of calories they had been consumingdistributed over the same number of meals and snacksbut the composition will change dramatically.The total carbohydrate content of the new diet will be exceedingly lowon the order of 5 percent, which translates to only the carbohydrates that occur naturally in meat, fish, fowl, eggs, cheese, animal fat and vegetable oil, along with servings of green leafy vegetables. The protein content of this diet will match that of the diet the subjects ate initially15 percent of calories. The remainder80 percent of calorieswill consist of fat from these real food sources. The idea is not to test whether this diet is healthy or sustainable for a lifetime but to use it to lower insulin levels by the greatest amount in the shortest time.Meaningful scientific experiments ideally set up a situation in which competing hypotheses make different predictions about what will happen. In this case, if fat accumulation is primarily driven by an energy imbalance, these subjects should neither lose nor gain weight because they will be eating precisely as many calories as they are expending. Such a result would support the conventional wisdomthat a calorie is a calorie whether it comes from fat, carbohydrate or protein. If, on the other hand, the macronutrient composition affects fat accumulation, then these subjects should lose both weight and fat on the carbohydrate-restricted regime and their energy expenditure should increase, supporting the idea that a calorie of carbohydrate is more fattening than one from protein or fat, presumably because of the effect on insulin.

Faith writes:I sometimes think about the diet my English-Scottish grandparents and their eleven offspring ate on their ranch in Canada. Was it the extremely hard work they had to do to run the place, feed the animals, milk the cows, gather the eggs, weed the garden, kill the chickens and pluck them, can it all for overwintering and so on, or was it that the food itself was natural that explains why they were so skinny and tough and lived into their eighties and nineties? Maybe both. They ate all the "bad" things including white bread they made themselves, butter they made themselves, etc etc etc.

Faith writes:I haven't been motivated enough to bring God into it, I just don't care.

Faith writes:I think we need a thread like this because the American diet has been CAUSING us to gain weight and have all kinds of health problems, so unfortunately we need some guidelines to get us out of the situation. We aren't getting fat just because we overeat good natural food, though that may be the case for some, we're getting fat because there's so much processed stuff out there with so many bad things in it. Even the meat we eat is full of alien substances like hormones that affect our metabolism. Read some labels on packaged things in the market, to find out how much sugar is put into all sorts of foods you wouldn't think needed it, and different forms of sugar too so you have to know what all the chemical terms mean. And then there are the long lists of completely undecipherable chemicals in some things.
There's nothing natural about this problem, at least in America. Maybe South Africa doesn't have the same problems we have. Exercise is always a good thing of course and maybe it would do it for most of us -- not me though, too many joints down to bone on bone, but there are some forms of exercise I could do with my upper body if I could get motivated.I sometimes think about the diet my English-Scottish grandparents and their eleven offspring ate on their ranch in Canada. Was it the extremely hard work they had to do to run the place, feed the animals, milk the cows, gather the eggs, weed the garden, kill the chickens and pluck them, can it all for overwintering and so on, or was it that the food itself was natural that explains why they were so skinny and tough and lived into their eighties and nineties? Maybe both. They ate all the "bad" things including white bread they made themselves, butter they made themselves, etc etc etc. I do doubt any of them had a self-indulgent moment in their lives, too many of them, too few resources for starters.