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Author | Topic: Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories challenges conventional thinking about the effect of diet on health. He argues that dietary fat has been falsely implicated as the primary cause of the western life-style diseases of heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and that the actual cause is refined carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, and worst of all, refined sugar.
He makes a strong argument, but he's only a science writer, not a scientist. He was interviewed this past December on the The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, and the audience responses read during the following week's podcast were largely critical, generally saying that science writers should communicate scientists' opinions, not their own. I've also read Taubes' book Cold Fusion chronicling the cold fusion fiasco, and I've read a number of his articles in science magazines, and I've come to have a great deal of respect not only for his writing but also for his opinions, and so I treat his opinions about diet very seriously. They seem to make a lot of sense. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
The premise of Good Calories, Bad Calories is that most modern diet advice is wrong, and it supports this premise by exploring the relevant research and showing that it really doesn't support the advice. But if that's the case, then how come it is always claimed that this advice is supported by evidence. Good question.
It appears that some very appealing hypotheses, appealing because the very facts of reality itself argue that they must be true, have interfered with the scientific process. These hypotheses are:
The research actually supports none of these, so how can health professionals claim that they do? The answer is that these hypotheses are so appealing and seem so obvious that most research has been interpreted under the assumption that these are true. The facts of the matter appear to be:
I haven't quite finished the book yet, but this seems very much to be where Taubes is going. Bottom line: if you want to lose weight, cut way down on the carbohydrates. --Percy
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 4170 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
As an anecdote,
I was 40+ pounds overweight and had triglyceride levels over 800, LDL cholesterol over 300. My doctor said it would be physically impossible for me to reduce these numbers into safe levels with lifestyle changes alone. I decided to try anyway. I tried the low-fat route and not only was it rediculously difficult to keep up with I actually gained weight. I stopped doing that and I said I would eat whatever fatty foods I wanted, excluding fast food, and instead cut out sugar and refined grains after reading similar stuff. Not only was this a lot easier to do, it has immediate benefits. I dropped my triglycerides to 300 and LDL to 190 both within striking range of the effect of exercise able to reduce them to normal. I also lost 25 pounds over the course of a year that I have kept off for more than a year. I started slowly, I stopped with the 2 biggest offenders. Soda and alcohol. Luckly I can have a good time without having a beer and soda was easily replaced with tea. Then I did a few other easy things, whole grain breads and pasta replace the refined versions. If you make a good sandwich/sauce you will barely notice. Replace candy with nuts for snacks. GO with whole grain/oat based cereal, if you want better flavor use fresh fruit. The harder steps were in locating the hidden sugar in the food you buy. Ketchup, lunchmeat, peanut butter, etc. They aren't obvious but you just have to read that pesky ingredient tag. Don't buy anything whatsoever that has high frutcose corn syrup and watch out for hippy sounding alternatives like "dried cane syrup". Don't try to kid yourself that "Earth Power" cookies are any better for you than Oreos. One that I recently discovered which I never expected was popcorn. It is better to eat a whole bowl of icecream than to go for that favorite movie snack. The only popcorn that is moderately good for you is the kind that doesn't taste good. Other than that I buy everything else full fat. Milk, yogurt, eggs, meat, etc. It tastes better and seems to satisfy more. Now if I could only get my ass to the gym on a regular basis... Not necessarily for the weight issue but exercise DOES in fact improve your lipid profile. Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Much of what you say echos the book, and except for the popcorn much of what you say is consistent with my own experience.
I've been paying attention only to the carbohydrate/sugar portions of the nutrition labels, and that's been working pretty well, with one possible exception. It's too soon for me to reach any firm conclusions, but I suspect meat snacks (beef jerky genre) and cold cuts (ham, salami, roast beef, etc) of being fattening somehow, even though they contain little to no carbohydrates or sugars. What's been your experience? About soda, I drink very little soda, usually only when we go out to lunch from work, but I've switched to diet soda to eliminate the refined sugar (I assume it would usually be 55% glucose and 45% fructose). I don't care about candy or alcohol (usually), I just can't stand being hungry. My ability to overcome hunger with willpower has declined with age. --Percy
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 4170 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
RE: Meat snacks
Yea meat snacks are going to make you gain weight because of their high sodium content. It is not going to be that big of an issue if you do the occasional beef jerky or pastrami sandwich but if you eat processed meat every day then you will probably notice it on the scale although it shouldn't affect your overal lipid profile more than regular meat. It also may affect your situation if you have high blood pressure which for me isn't an issue (knock on wood). If you need a snack, sub the jerky for unsalted or lightly salted nuts. Its overall less sodium if you need the salty fix. RE: Diet soda I can't find the original place where I read it but I have memory of reading something about how diet soda actually increases appetite. It was a long time ago that I swore off soda so its hard to remember. By doc though does say that going with diet versions is just as bad as regular although I cannot recall the logic. RE: Hunger The trick I think is not to try to fight hunger. That is just a recipe for disaster. Even if you willpower away from the cookie you will actually eat more at your next meal to compensate. Eat until you are satasfied and just make sure you are filling yourself up with things that will fill you up faster, keep you full longer, and that you actually enjoy. The biggest thing for me was to not feel frustrated and like I was on a "diet" or that I was depriving myself. Portions do matter but if you eat the right things, you will naturally adjust how much you eat. What you eat when also seems to make a big difference. I noticed that I was pigging out at lunch and dinner because my breakfast was usually just a piece of fruit. I realized later that my breakfast choice was actually not much better than eating nothing because all it did was get my appetite going and I gave my body nothing for hours. I switched to oatmeal with walnuts mixed in to give me the 1-2 punch of soluble fiber and protien to start they day. Immediatly I was less hungry at lunch and leaving half my plate at dinner. My biggest challenge then was to make sure not to skip lunch either which I started doing which switched back on my big dinner appetite. I generally try to do all my carbs in the day and try to make dinner heavy on protien. So if I eat pasta I try to make sure its for lunch. I taught myself how to do lots of neat things with beans for dinners to avoid just eating steak or chicken every night (which was also getting expensive). Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
I didn't actually intend this book thread to be a diet discussion, though I'm more than happy to discuss diet recommendations and experiences, too. The main issue is how could the health community have gone so wrong when it comes to diet advice. Why, for example, does the American Heart Association insist that very low carbohydrate diets are "fad diets" worthy of no more consideration than the grapefruit diet or the ice cream diet?
Last night I read another key section of the book, this time about the research supporting the dietary recommendation that we should eat plentifully from all the major food groups in order to insure proper health and nutrition. The research does not support this claim. It is another claim that is made simply because it makes so much sense. For example, studies in the first half of the 20th century revealed the importance of various vitamins and minerals to health, and their presence in fruits and vegetables led to recommendations that these were necessary to health. But many human populations throughout history have had little to no fruits or vegetables in their diet, and they not only survived but thrived. It is possible, even likely, that the importance of a balanced diet is a myth perpetrated by well-meaning officials in governmental positions of responsibility regarding the health of the country (e.g., the Surgeon General, top officials at the National Institutes of Health, etc.), by the food industry, by the supplement industry, and by diligent researchers who allow underlying (and false) assumptions about dietary influences to affect their assessments of evidence. I've long believed that the conventional wisdom about balanced diets was wrong, so naturally I'm very receptive to Taubes' conclusions, but the argument makes a lot of sense. The diets of most animals are very unbalanced, and I'm sure this has also been true for humans throughout our evolutionary history, including right up the present for isolated primitive societies. For example, Eskimo diets are almost exclusively meat. The fact of the matter is that teasing out the influences of individual dietary contributions is exceedingly difficult. For example, in the case of heart disease the conclusion that increased intake of fat is associated with increased rates of heart disease is a very, very mild correlation, but in the aggregate across an entire country the size of America heart disease affects a huge number of individuals, and so government officials responsible for health feel it imperative to provide advice. But the actual effect is of an order less than 1%, and this effect is so tiny in any individual, it means that despite all the research into cholesterol, HDLs, LDLs, VLDLs, triglycerides, saturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, etc., etc., researchers still haven't identified any mechanism by which increased fat intake increases the risk of heart disease. Ironically, considering the American Heart Associations stance on carbohydrates, you know what correlates with heart disease far better than fat intake? Obesity. And you know what is the most likely cause of obesity? Carbohydrates. In effect, the American Heart Association's dietary recommendations increase the risk of heart disease. Go figure. Also ironically, fat is good for you. Mortality is higher with low fat intake than with high fat intake. Specifically, the mortality rate from cancer is higher with low fat diets than the mortality rate from heart disease with high fat diets. Choose your poison, and remember, the effect is so tiny, the possibility that you're doing yourself any measurable good by modifying your fat intake is minuscule. Eat butter, drink whole milk, eat lots of meat and cut the carbs. Fat is good, while carbs, especially the refined carbohydrates found in sugar, soda, bread and pasta, are bad. Very bad. --Percy
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 4170 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
I think the effect of the Balanced Diet recommendations are to stave off problems at the population level. Yea for any given individual you will be making little difference but for the college kid who eats nothing but Doritos and and Pepsi the effect may be to shift away from a poor diet to a better one.
Do you need to hit every food group? No. Does the impression in the public that you do help reduce nutrition related disease population wide? Maybe? I would look into the thing about carbs. There is nothing wrong with carbs and in fact some of the things I personally eat are very high in carbs. They just also happen to be very high in fiber which is a net bonus. They give me energy, fill me up, keep me regular, and are hopefully staving off lipid diseases later in life. I have in fact heard about what you mentioned regarding fat and resistance to certain diseases. I think I read somewhere that low cholesterol is actually associated with higher mortality for things like infection, cancer, etc. But it is true that obesity aggrivates almost all of those things so it is a double edge sword considering that it is rare to have low cholesterol paired with obesity. You shouldn't let that deter you from achieving a normal weight. The other issue is that one of the most common lipid diseases is having high triglycerides like I do. This is in fact a problem as it puts you at a much higher risk of diabetes which therfore puts you at risk for things ranging from heart disease to cancer to infection. The best thing to stave off high tryglycerides is low sugar and high fiber. Not to stay away from carbs all together. Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Jazzns writes: I would look into the thing about carbs. There is nothing wrong with carbs and in fact some of the things I personally eat are very high in carbs. They just also happen to be very high in fiber which is a net bonus. They give me energy, fill me up, keep me regular, and are hopefully staving off lipid diseases later in life. Just so people don't get the wrong idea, I think what you're saying is that the carbohydrates you personally eat happen to be in food that is very high in fiber, not that carbohydrates themselves are high in fiber. Refined sugar, for example, like that found in candy and soda, has 0 grams fiber. Refined carbohydrates, meaning carbohydrates unencumbered by much if any fiber, are particularly dangerous, and it isn't at all just the risk of obesity. Refined carbohydrates are digested exceptionally quickly and cause blood sugar spikes which in turn cause the liver to release LDLs that initially carry a large payload of cholesterol. Cholesterol is the big bugaboo of heart disease, but it has legitimate positive roles in metabolism, so the LDLs circulate throughout the body gradually delivering their cholesterol until there is little or none left, at which time they become small, dense LDLs that have a severe deleterious and wide-ranging impact that can best be summed up as accelerating the aging process. The proportion of small, dense LDLs in the bloodstream is a function of the how severely and frequently you spike your blood sugar through the intake of refined carbohydrates. The bottom line is that if you're happy with your weight, don't worry about carbohydrate intake, but definitely try to avoid rapid consumption of refined carbohydrates. This means that unless you're willing to consume them very slowly, don't drink sugared soda, don't eat candy, don't eat sugared breakfast cereals, don't eat bread, don't eat pasta. They're unhealthy. And if you're not happy with your weight, then reduce your carbohydrate intake to less than 100 grams/day, better is under 70 grams/day, though I personally find that hard to do. There is a bit of monotony to low carbohydrate diets. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Spelling.
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2900 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined: |
Refined carbohydrates are digested exceptionally quickly and cause blood sugar spikes which in turn cause the liver to release LDLs that initially carry a large payload of cholesterol. Percy, can you peek at the cites at the back of the book and find a couple of papers I can look up re: this point?
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1663 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
The results you've mentioned also echo what the South Beach Diet book says. This book also mentions studies done with doctors and nurses (don't have copy handy to cite them). This also matches what Jazzns states, and my experience.
Also ironically, fat is good for you. Mortality is higher with low fat intake than with high fat intake. Specifically, the mortality rate from cancer is higher with low fat diets than the mortality rate from heart disease with high fat diets. And some fats are better than others. Olive oil seems to rate high on all similar studies as a good fat. The worst sugars are in beer. Starches can act like sugars, and that's why white bread is bad.
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
In this particular case the book provides authors and years, not titles, but there may be enough information to track a few papers down for you. Internet's down at home right now, very bad timing for other reasons, so this'll have to wait a day or two. I knew I should have kept the DSL for backup.
--Percy
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2900 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined:
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Thanks, Percy.
I feel your pain. My service went up and down for months and no tech could fix it ... until piece by piece they replaced every last thing ... the modem, the cable from the street to the house, the splitter, the ethernet cable and the ground plate. The ground plate did the trick (*knock on wood*). I did a bit of poking around ... and I can't find a link between insulin and elevated LDL and TG levels. And I can't find a link between carbs and obesity other than that's what folks overeat. Nor can I find anything about the "myth of the balanced diet". For what it's worth, my off the cuff impression is that assuming carbs with a high glycemic index are inherently bad (and lead to obesity and CHD) is overstating the case in the extreme. Japanese folks eats loads of high GI food (rice) and yet they have very low rates of obesity and CHD. And, although it isn't really on point, I wanted to mention a recent 60 Minutes report on bariatric surgery. Folks who have gastric bypass are, in many cases, relieved of their diabetes instantly -- the day of their surgery.
Fasting plasma glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin concentrations returned to normal levels (83%) or markedly improved (17%) in all patients. A significant reduction in use of oral antidiabetic agents (80%) and insulin (79%) followed surgical treatment. Here. This led an Italian surgeon to disconnect and reconnect the duodenum of a diabetic rat to assess the surgical procedure's effect. Answer? It was like an off/on switch. (Study.)
This spontaneous remission puzzled Italian surgeon Francesco Rubino, now at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. "We wanted to know what is making diabetes remit. We thought it could have been something to do with the small bowel," Dr. Rubino says. So he began performing the bypass on diabetic rats, and realized that when he disconnected the top of the small intestine, an area called the duodenum, the diabetes disappeared. Then, he reversed the operation. When he reattached it, the diabetes came back. This was a pivotal discovery. By merely blocking food from traveling through the duodenum, Rubino sent diabetes into remission, proving the effect was independent from weight loss. This meant diabetes could essentially be removed with a scalpel. Here. What this means, I haven't the foggiest. But it's odd. Which leads me to believe that the diet-diabetes link is missing a big chunk of something. There's no question that obesity = type 2 diabetes. But why the instantaneous results?
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
molbiogirl writes: For what it's worth, my off the cuff impression is that assuming carbs with a high glycemic index are inherently bad (and lead to obesity and CHD) is overstating the case in the extreme. Glycemic index can be a very misleading measure of the goodness/badness of carbohydrates. For example, table sugar has a relatively low glycemic index compared to other carbohydrate sources because it is 50% fructose, which isn't included in the glycemic index. Fructose is metabolized via a different route than glucose (the other 50% of table sugar) but still carries with it considerable health risks.
Japanese folks eats loads of high GI food (rice) and yet they have very low rates of obesity and CHD. This is the most commonly cited evidence against the carbohydrate hypothesis, but the details of the actual research do not exclude the possibility of carbohydrates as a significant factor in obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Even if they did, considering the wealth of other evidence, the Japanese experience would merely be an unexplained anomaly. The validity of the book's claims can be assessed in a more general and less scientific way, but still exceptionally enlightening. Whatever one might believe science demonstrates to be the case, reality is that while western countries have increasingly focused on fat as the cause of obesity and heart disease (just check the number of products touting "low fat" on grocery store shelves or the amount of shelf space in the meat department dedicated to lean meat, a result of following recommendations from agencies like the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health and the AMA), the incidence rates for these diseases of western civilization have increased. The only component of the diet that has increased significantly over this period is carbohydrates. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
I'd be very surprised if the book didn't include the titles of the works it cites. Even if the footnotes only include author and year it ought to have a list of references or a bibliography in the back which will let you find the titles (that arrangement is not unusual).
If it really doesn't include the titles anywhere that would be a huge warning sign.
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2900 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined: |
Even if they did, considering the wealth of other evidence, the Japanese experience would merely be an unexplained anomaly. They aren't the only ones. Up until last year, the French had an extremely low obesity rate. Since 2007, tho, their obesity rates have doubled. This dramatic increase in obesity cannot be attributed to "an increase in carbs". The French also have a historically low rate of CHD. The same is true of the Italians and the Greeks.
Whatever one might believe science demonstrates to be the case, reality is that while western countries have increasingly focused on fat as the cause of obesity and heart disease ... True. But devious marketing is beside the point. Stating categorically that refined carbs are very, very bad is just as deceptive as stating categorically that fats are very, very bad.
Glycemic index can be a very misleading measure of the goodness/badness of carbohydrates. Then how does one distinguish between good and bad? Other than "common sense" -- which, as you pointed out upthread, is a poor way to judge dietary needs. Edited by molbiogirl, : grammar
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