New Taubes NYT Essay on JAMA Energey Partitioning Study
My favorite nutrition author, Gary Taubes, has an essay in yesterday's New York Times: "What Really Makes Us Fat."
The historical and scientific background is familiar to those of use who have read Taubes's Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet and Disease and Why We Get Fat (And What to Do About It). The new information is that last week, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of a clinical trial, which, "while the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial," really speaks innovatively to the far more intriguing issue of energy partitioning by the human body.
What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. ... The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. ... And this while consuming the same amount of calories. ...[T]he study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. ... A controversial conclusion? Absolutely... As in any science, these experiments should be replicated by independent investigators. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century. Let’s put it to rest with more good science.
The historical and scientific background is familiar to those of use who have read Taubes's Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet and Disease and Why We Get Fat (And What to Do About It). The new information is that last week, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of a clinical trial, which, "while the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial," really speaks innovatively to the far more intriguing issue of energy partitioning by the human body.
What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. ... The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. ... And this while consuming the same amount of calories. ...[T]he study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. ... A controversial conclusion? Absolutely... As in any science, these experiments should be replicated by independent investigators. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century. Let’s put it to rest with more good science.