Two Amazing Non-Fiction Books by Gary Taubes
Two books by science journalist/historian Gary Taubes have impressed me enormously. Over the past few months, I’ve read the public library copies of his newer, shorter, easier-to-read, mass-audience Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It twice, and his older, longer, densely-packed, scholarly-audience Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease once, and I’ve added both to my Amazon wish list; they invite and deserve rereading. If I had the money, I would be sending copies to everyone I love -- the short one or the long one or both, depending on the individual -- because I want the people I love to be healthy and happy and live long. That’s how big an impression these books have made on me.
I need to stop renewing them and return them to the library this afternoon. It’s only fair. But first, let me tell you just a little about them, and urge you to check out your own public library copies, or buy copies, or at least read the introductory chapters using Amazon’s “look inside” feature.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) is the older and much more detailed of the two. As the subtitle declares, Mr. Taubes challenges the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control and disease. He does this with a rich history of individuals and societies -- advances, egos, politics, economics, discrimination, bowing to authority -- as well as clear and careful explanations of the scientific evidence he cites.
History
The historian in Taubes is what first brought me to these books, of course. Remember how excited I was to learn about the history of pellagra and nixtamilization? I was researching nineteenth-century eating. Well, Good Calories, Bad Calories kicks off with the story of the Victorian William Banting. Mr. Banting is an archetypal case study. As he became progressively obese, he fought it, consulting every doctor who would see him and following their prescriptions diligently. He tried vigorous exercise, semi-starvation, everything you can think of. He only got fatter and sicker. Finally, he spoke with a doctor who did not treat obesity, but rather treated diabetes (which Banting did not have). In those days, diabetics were treated nutritionally, not by insulin injection, of course -- and, interestingly, were much less likely to be obese than they are today -- and this gentleman suggested a diet that we today would describe as pretty-much “low-carb.” It worked for Banting. He was so happy! And so many people asked how he did it that he printed a little pamphlet to hand out: “A Letter on Corpulence.” When its popularity exceeded his means, he sold it at cost. The Lancet primly reprimanded him for daring to interfere in the medical profession, and -- horrors! -- to suggest that all the eminent men he had consulted over the years were in some way mistaken in their highly-authoritative advice.
I speculate that Taubes begins with this anecdote because The Lancet’s reaction exemplifies the subsequent pattern, becoming worse and worse in the latter half of the twentieth century, leading us to our dire state today. (As if, “How dare you challenge the authority of eminent men? You must respect the pronouncements of the authorities, no matter how ineffective, disconnected, or unsupported! Hey, what do you mean, science requires proof? Pbbt!”) What Taubes carefully chronicles is how the pronouncements of eminent authorities on nutrition, weight and disease have more and more diverged from the accumulating actual scientific evidence. Ego, politics, economics and all the foibles of humans have played their roles in this stunning divergence. Most of all, the mass media is hurting us, every one of us, by its poor understanding of science and the way it jumps to simple conclusions from complex data.
The Diseases of Civilization
Before people realized the term was culturally offensive, they were called “the diseases of civilization:” all those maladies that were vanishingly rare before the Industrial Revolution, became progressively more common through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are nearly epidemic today. We’re talking here about heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, fatty liver, and many, many more -- every one of the most wanted health villains of our day. (Later, “the western diseases” and “Syndrome X” were tried out as names. Today, some of the diseases are bunched together as “metabolic syndrome,” while the others follow that syndrome around in an unacknowledged entourage.)
The story of from where those villains came is rich, intriguing and extensively documented in Taubes’s books. I don’t want to spoil you unduly. But do you remember what I learned about pellagra? How this disease -- niacin deficiency, it was eventually discovered to be -- didn’t exist until some non-Native Americans began consuming most of their calories from corn? That the problem was that while Native Americans prepared their corn in such a way as to release all its nutrients, nobody else had bothered to adopt that method, and so the corn was literally killing them? When this discovery was made, instead of saying, hey, let’s all prepare our corn the way Native Americans did, governments said, hey, let’s mandate that all refined grains be enriched with the niacin that our corn is locking out! This is an archetypal example of what happened over and over in public nutrition through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is why we have highly enriched, highly processed flour instead of real food.
Early twentieth-century European nutrition research was unfortunately wiped out by WWII. This is especially unfortunate, because they were way ahead of their US counterparts, who started over from scratch after the war. Worse, one of the leading lights of US nutrition -- Ancel Keys, the guy who invented the MRE and named it after himself (“the K-ration”) -- hated Germans, as a consequence of his war experiences, so much that he not only ignored their past studies, he fought tooth and nail in claiming that reality was the opposite of what the German doctors had observed. Problem is, Keys was the one who was wrong. Oops! The pre-war Europeans had had it right. Key’s data was terrible, slanted and misinterpreted in ways that would not have passed high school science. But he was on the cover of Time magazine, interviewed everywhere, and promoting his mistaken conclusions as a personal crusade. How many people have died in the past six decades because Keys was both a poor scientist and an egomaniac? How many people have died because the media rolled over for Keys, and no challenger was as bold and charismatic?
Here’s What You Really Came For:
White Flour is Very Bad. So is White Rice. Sugar is the Worst!
Eat More Healthy Fats, More Green Vegetables and No Refined Carbohydrates.
Never Go Hungry.
Kinds of calories are more important in weight control than numbers of calories. Your body is a complex machine, not a simple one. It does not process all macronutrients -- proteins, fats, carbohydrates --in the same manner. Taubes steps his readers through the science several times, from several angles, and it becomes obvious that the only reason we believe otherwise is that our society has been mindlessly repeating Keys’s “calories in/calories out” hypothesis all these years. Your body always burns carbohydrates first, and shunts all other nutrients away into fat cells or the liver until it has burned all the carbohydrates available. Only when all carbohydrates are handled will your body be the slightest bit interested in burning fats or proteins -- and while carbohydrates are good for energy, they’re not good for anything else. There’s no such thing as an “essential carbohydrate” the way there are essential amino acids, or anything built from carbohydrates in, for example, the way your brain cell walls are built from fats!
(A Curiosity: Did you know that the Inuit -- Eskimos -- traditionally ate no plants at all? Plants were considered unfit for human consumption except in times of famine. They are not the only human group that has been healthfully carnivorous. Intriguing!)
Fat cells are not static. Your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding the triglycerides inside your fat cells. They do not get packed away and stay there, unchanged, for years, as many of us think! Instead, the molecules are every day being disassembled, kicked into your bloodstream and reassembled from other molecules. How this is done and when depends on what kinds of macronutrients -- fats, proteins, carbohydrates -- you are feeding your cells, and in what relative quantities. If you eat proportionately a lot of carbohydrates, your body won’t get around to what’s in your fat cells, because carbohydrates always come first. If you eat proportionately few carbohydrates, on the other hand, your body will go ahead and use what your fat cells are releasing into your bloodstream instead of packing it back in.
(A Curiosity: Did you know that insulin -- the central thing in regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body -- is a hormone? Did you know that estrogen also plays a role in regulating metabolism?)
Exercise does not cause weight loss. Your body attempts to maintain homeostasis -- that is, stay in a predetermined range -- in weight as well as in temperature and all those millions of other fiddly little vital things that it regulates without your conscious attention. So when your body expends more calories, it demands more calories (you get hungry). When you refuse to give it the additional calories it demands (“self-control”?), it slows down to expend fewer calories (you get tired). Very few people can exercise themselves thin (among the many examples Taubes cites is a study that trained obese, sedentary people to run a marathon: after a year of training and a successfully completed marathon, the male subjects had lost an average of two pounds each, while the women had averaged no weight loss at all!). No matter how vigorously you exercise, because your body will strive for homeostasis, exercise will not of itself cause your body to reach into your fat cells for energy (unless you are literally starving). Think about each muscle and brain and nerve cell in your body looking out for its own energy needs, pressing the hunger button to drive you to feed it; as long as your blood sugar is up, nothing but carbs can be used as fuel for them, no matter what's waiting over in your fat cells. That's why exercise, great as it is for many other things, is impotent in creating weight loss.
(A Curiosity: Did you know that there is not a single published, scientifically-rigorous study demonstrating that exercise causes weight loss? Ever, from anywhere.)
There is no compelling scientific evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. Seriously. Taubes examines every one of the studies cited in defense of that assertion; results reported in the media as life-changing are at best inconclusive, and at worst damaging to patients. It should be a scandal! At any rate, some of the fascinating things in the latest research include the fact that it is the molecules to which so-called “LDL cholesterol” attaches itself that can actually be dangerous -- not the cholesterol -- and that the dangers these molecules pose depend on their density: the big, fluffy version can’t get inside your cells to cause problems, while the compact, dense version blasts through cell walls like a bullet and does its business. What makes the difference? Apparently, people with sufficient fat consumption get the big, fluffy type, while people with restricted fat intake get the compact, dense type.
Conclusion
The last time that low-carbohydrate eating was in vogue, I scoffed at it. It seemed to me that all the explanations promoting it jumped from the Paleolithic era directly to the present. That offended my sense of history. It was all fine and good to point out that we humans evolved to eat the fattest meat we could kill -- we surely did -- but what about the Agricultural Revolution, huh? What about those pivotal changes that enabled us to stop being hunter-gatherers, build cities, write Hamlet? Taubes doesn’t make that mistake. He fills in those blanks as he goes. The Agricultural Revolution brought us whole grains, all right, but not refined grains, and, goodness knows, not table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. It took the Industrial Revolution to make the technological advances in refining grains to create the insulin-firecracker “enriched” garbage we eat by the ton today. And it took the late twentieth-century media/government/industrial complex to banish from our diets the healthy fats that naturally provide satiety, making us all eat more, worse carbohydrates and be the hungrier and fatter for it!
I apologize to those to whom I was so skeptical about South Beach, Atkins, Paleo and their kin those years ago. I was wrong. I was entirely wrong.
At the intersection of these books and my own personal experiences -- which I don’t wish to discuss in public; please don’t mind! please grab me privately if you’re a friend -- I am entirely convinced. I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm under control, to not overreach my personal results, to not trouble anyone who might be antagonized by my disagreement on this point. If eating a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet makes you healthy and happy, wonderful! But it never did me. I now understand that those of us who are at all sensitive to carbohydrates can improve our health and our appearances by striving to eat a diet in which we get our carbohydrates from real vegetables, especially greens, and some whole grains -- but never, ever from added sugars or refined grains -- and in which we do not shy from healthy fats.
You aren’t what you eat. You are what your body chooses to retain of what you eat.
Fat doesn’t make us fat. Or sick. Refined carbohydrates do. Forget calories. Consider carbs.
Please read the books and decide for yourself. ♥
---
Addendum 8:09 PM: Taubes's presentation incorporates a patient, rational, science-driven refutation of our society's hateful, smug, baseless confidence that being overweight is necessarily due to gluttony or sloth, if not both. Our society is very happy with that moral explanation, but society is as mistaken as when it historically asserted that tuberculosis was a failure of will. Imagine little thermostat dials for every internal setting your body unconsciously regulates in its quest for homeostasis; if just one gets off by even two percent, you will become obese over time and there is nothing you or anyone can do about it, except recalibrate that dial. For many of us, carbohydrates have jammed one or more of our dials at the wrong numbers; for many of us, reducing carbohydrates can return our dials to their factory-original settings.
I need to stop renewing them and return them to the library this afternoon. It’s only fair. But first, let me tell you just a little about them, and urge you to check out your own public library copies, or buy copies, or at least read the introductory chapters using Amazon’s “look inside” feature.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) is the older and much more detailed of the two. As the subtitle declares, Mr. Taubes challenges the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control and disease. He does this with a rich history of individuals and societies -- advances, egos, politics, economics, discrimination, bowing to authority -- as well as clear and careful explanations of the scientific evidence he cites.
History
The historian in Taubes is what first brought me to these books, of course. Remember how excited I was to learn about the history of pellagra and nixtamilization? I was researching nineteenth-century eating. Well, Good Calories, Bad Calories kicks off with the story of the Victorian William Banting. Mr. Banting is an archetypal case study. As he became progressively obese, he fought it, consulting every doctor who would see him and following their prescriptions diligently. He tried vigorous exercise, semi-starvation, everything you can think of. He only got fatter and sicker. Finally, he spoke with a doctor who did not treat obesity, but rather treated diabetes (which Banting did not have). In those days, diabetics were treated nutritionally, not by insulin injection, of course -- and, interestingly, were much less likely to be obese than they are today -- and this gentleman suggested a diet that we today would describe as pretty-much “low-carb.” It worked for Banting. He was so happy! And so many people asked how he did it that he printed a little pamphlet to hand out: “A Letter on Corpulence.” When its popularity exceeded his means, he sold it at cost. The Lancet primly reprimanded him for daring to interfere in the medical profession, and -- horrors! -- to suggest that all the eminent men he had consulted over the years were in some way mistaken in their highly-authoritative advice.
I speculate that Taubes begins with this anecdote because The Lancet’s reaction exemplifies the subsequent pattern, becoming worse and worse in the latter half of the twentieth century, leading us to our dire state today. (As if, “How dare you challenge the authority of eminent men? You must respect the pronouncements of the authorities, no matter how ineffective, disconnected, or unsupported! Hey, what do you mean, science requires proof? Pbbt!”) What Taubes carefully chronicles is how the pronouncements of eminent authorities on nutrition, weight and disease have more and more diverged from the accumulating actual scientific evidence. Ego, politics, economics and all the foibles of humans have played their roles in this stunning divergence. Most of all, the mass media is hurting us, every one of us, by its poor understanding of science and the way it jumps to simple conclusions from complex data.
The Diseases of Civilization
Before people realized the term was culturally offensive, they were called “the diseases of civilization:” all those maladies that were vanishingly rare before the Industrial Revolution, became progressively more common through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are nearly epidemic today. We’re talking here about heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, fatty liver, and many, many more -- every one of the most wanted health villains of our day. (Later, “the western diseases” and “Syndrome X” were tried out as names. Today, some of the diseases are bunched together as “metabolic syndrome,” while the others follow that syndrome around in an unacknowledged entourage.)
The story of from where those villains came is rich, intriguing and extensively documented in Taubes’s books. I don’t want to spoil you unduly. But do you remember what I learned about pellagra? How this disease -- niacin deficiency, it was eventually discovered to be -- didn’t exist until some non-Native Americans began consuming most of their calories from corn? That the problem was that while Native Americans prepared their corn in such a way as to release all its nutrients, nobody else had bothered to adopt that method, and so the corn was literally killing them? When this discovery was made, instead of saying, hey, let’s all prepare our corn the way Native Americans did, governments said, hey, let’s mandate that all refined grains be enriched with the niacin that our corn is locking out! This is an archetypal example of what happened over and over in public nutrition through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is why we have highly enriched, highly processed flour instead of real food.
Early twentieth-century European nutrition research was unfortunately wiped out by WWII. This is especially unfortunate, because they were way ahead of their US counterparts, who started over from scratch after the war. Worse, one of the leading lights of US nutrition -- Ancel Keys, the guy who invented the MRE and named it after himself (“the K-ration”) -- hated Germans, as a consequence of his war experiences, so much that he not only ignored their past studies, he fought tooth and nail in claiming that reality was the opposite of what the German doctors had observed. Problem is, Keys was the one who was wrong. Oops! The pre-war Europeans had had it right. Key’s data was terrible, slanted and misinterpreted in ways that would not have passed high school science. But he was on the cover of Time magazine, interviewed everywhere, and promoting his mistaken conclusions as a personal crusade. How many people have died in the past six decades because Keys was both a poor scientist and an egomaniac? How many people have died because the media rolled over for Keys, and no challenger was as bold and charismatic?
Here’s What You Really Came For:
White Flour is Very Bad. So is White Rice. Sugar is the Worst!
Eat More Healthy Fats, More Green Vegetables and No Refined Carbohydrates.
Never Go Hungry.
Kinds of calories are more important in weight control than numbers of calories. Your body is a complex machine, not a simple one. It does not process all macronutrients -- proteins, fats, carbohydrates --in the same manner. Taubes steps his readers through the science several times, from several angles, and it becomes obvious that the only reason we believe otherwise is that our society has been mindlessly repeating Keys’s “calories in/calories out” hypothesis all these years. Your body always burns carbohydrates first, and shunts all other nutrients away into fat cells or the liver until it has burned all the carbohydrates available. Only when all carbohydrates are handled will your body be the slightest bit interested in burning fats or proteins -- and while carbohydrates are good for energy, they’re not good for anything else. There’s no such thing as an “essential carbohydrate” the way there are essential amino acids, or anything built from carbohydrates in, for example, the way your brain cell walls are built from fats!
(A Curiosity: Did you know that the Inuit -- Eskimos -- traditionally ate no plants at all? Plants were considered unfit for human consumption except in times of famine. They are not the only human group that has been healthfully carnivorous. Intriguing!)
Fat cells are not static. Your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding the triglycerides inside your fat cells. They do not get packed away and stay there, unchanged, for years, as many of us think! Instead, the molecules are every day being disassembled, kicked into your bloodstream and reassembled from other molecules. How this is done and when depends on what kinds of macronutrients -- fats, proteins, carbohydrates -- you are feeding your cells, and in what relative quantities. If you eat proportionately a lot of carbohydrates, your body won’t get around to what’s in your fat cells, because carbohydrates always come first. If you eat proportionately few carbohydrates, on the other hand, your body will go ahead and use what your fat cells are releasing into your bloodstream instead of packing it back in.
(A Curiosity: Did you know that insulin -- the central thing in regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body -- is a hormone? Did you know that estrogen also plays a role in regulating metabolism?)
Exercise does not cause weight loss. Your body attempts to maintain homeostasis -- that is, stay in a predetermined range -- in weight as well as in temperature and all those millions of other fiddly little vital things that it regulates without your conscious attention. So when your body expends more calories, it demands more calories (you get hungry). When you refuse to give it the additional calories it demands (“self-control”?), it slows down to expend fewer calories (you get tired). Very few people can exercise themselves thin (among the many examples Taubes cites is a study that trained obese, sedentary people to run a marathon: after a year of training and a successfully completed marathon, the male subjects had lost an average of two pounds each, while the women had averaged no weight loss at all!). No matter how vigorously you exercise, because your body will strive for homeostasis, exercise will not of itself cause your body to reach into your fat cells for energy (unless you are literally starving). Think about each muscle and brain and nerve cell in your body looking out for its own energy needs, pressing the hunger button to drive you to feed it; as long as your blood sugar is up, nothing but carbs can be used as fuel for them, no matter what's waiting over in your fat cells. That's why exercise, great as it is for many other things, is impotent in creating weight loss.
(A Curiosity: Did you know that there is not a single published, scientifically-rigorous study demonstrating that exercise causes weight loss? Ever, from anywhere.)
There is no compelling scientific evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. Seriously. Taubes examines every one of the studies cited in defense of that assertion; results reported in the media as life-changing are at best inconclusive, and at worst damaging to patients. It should be a scandal! At any rate, some of the fascinating things in the latest research include the fact that it is the molecules to which so-called “LDL cholesterol” attaches itself that can actually be dangerous -- not the cholesterol -- and that the dangers these molecules pose depend on their density: the big, fluffy version can’t get inside your cells to cause problems, while the compact, dense version blasts through cell walls like a bullet and does its business. What makes the difference? Apparently, people with sufficient fat consumption get the big, fluffy type, while people with restricted fat intake get the compact, dense type.
Conclusion
The last time that low-carbohydrate eating was in vogue, I scoffed at it. It seemed to me that all the explanations promoting it jumped from the Paleolithic era directly to the present. That offended my sense of history. It was all fine and good to point out that we humans evolved to eat the fattest meat we could kill -- we surely did -- but what about the Agricultural Revolution, huh? What about those pivotal changes that enabled us to stop being hunter-gatherers, build cities, write Hamlet? Taubes doesn’t make that mistake. He fills in those blanks as he goes. The Agricultural Revolution brought us whole grains, all right, but not refined grains, and, goodness knows, not table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. It took the Industrial Revolution to make the technological advances in refining grains to create the insulin-firecracker “enriched” garbage we eat by the ton today. And it took the late twentieth-century media/government/industrial complex to banish from our diets the healthy fats that naturally provide satiety, making us all eat more, worse carbohydrates and be the hungrier and fatter for it!
I apologize to those to whom I was so skeptical about South Beach, Atkins, Paleo and their kin those years ago. I was wrong. I was entirely wrong.
At the intersection of these books and my own personal experiences -- which I don’t wish to discuss in public; please don’t mind! please grab me privately if you’re a friend -- I am entirely convinced. I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm under control, to not overreach my personal results, to not trouble anyone who might be antagonized by my disagreement on this point. If eating a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet makes you healthy and happy, wonderful! But it never did me. I now understand that those of us who are at all sensitive to carbohydrates can improve our health and our appearances by striving to eat a diet in which we get our carbohydrates from real vegetables, especially greens, and some whole grains -- but never, ever from added sugars or refined grains -- and in which we do not shy from healthy fats.
You aren’t what you eat. You are what your body chooses to retain of what you eat.
Fat doesn’t make us fat. Or sick. Refined carbohydrates do. Forget calories. Consider carbs.
Please read the books and decide for yourself. ♥
---
Addendum 8:09 PM: Taubes's presentation incorporates a patient, rational, science-driven refutation of our society's hateful, smug, baseless confidence that being overweight is necessarily due to gluttony or sloth, if not both. Our society is very happy with that moral explanation, but society is as mistaken as when it historically asserted that tuberculosis was a failure of will. Imagine little thermostat dials for every internal setting your body unconsciously regulates in its quest for homeostasis; if just one gets off by even two percent, you will become obese over time and there is nothing you or anyone can do about it, except recalibrate that dial. For many of us, carbohydrates have jammed one or more of our dials at the wrong numbers; for many of us, reducing carbohydrates can return our dials to their factory-original settings.