Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

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.

Starch Solution diet
The makeup of the diet you will adopt through The Starch Solution consists of 70 percent starch, no meat or dairy, 10 percent fruits and 20 percent vegetables. Starches identified in this book are barley, buckwheat, corn, millet, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, wheat, wild rice, beans, lentils, peas, fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Mercola Interviews Dr. Jason Fung (Full Interview)

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.

Pressie writes:Maybe the answer is moderate excercise and books don't need to be sold about it?

And my problem is I've reached a point where I can't get myself motivated to do much about it anyway.

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