The Carbohydrate Hypothesis I: Diseases of Civilization
I've read a lot of books, and it takes a lot to impress me these days. With that said, Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories is one of the most important books I've ever read. It's really three books in one: an eye-opening portrait of pathological science and its consequences, an incisive refutation of what's become conventional wisdom about nutrition and weight regulation over the past 50 years, and a compelling collection of biochemical facts which suggests that the most harmful diseases in the modern world have a common, and easily removable, cause.
I've spent many hours over the last six months devouring Taubes' oeuvre and, more importantly, chasing up his references, and I can say with confidence that the book is solid and should be read by everyone with an interest in health. This is the beginning of a series of posts in which I explore what I found to be the most valuable parts of the book, but my riffing on it isn't a substitute for the book itself. If all Taubes had done was to bring together a lot of scattered and little-known facts into a clear, readable format this would have been an enormous service, but what makes this book great instead of merely informative is that its author actually behaves like a scientist and suggests a simple, powerful theory to both explain those facts and predict others.
The first step toward understanding is an appreciation for sorely neglected insight of Claude Bernard (later rediscovered by Walter Cannon): that our bodies have been designed to automatically maintain the variables governing chemical reactions inside them at a sustainable dynamic equilibrium, and that changes in the inputs motivate corresponding adaptive changes in the outputs. Hormones and other messenger molecules serve to transduce signals from the environment into instructions to individual cells, coordinating their activities such that the organism as a whole mounts a coherent response to its challenges. Taking the example of obesity, this shifts our attention away from the thermodynamics and toward the signaling mechanisms; all diseases involving a maladaptive mismatch between inputs and outputs are diseases of cell signaling.
The second step is in understanding what specific signaling molecules do, and what inputs govern their actions, so that you can home in on what the particular signaling defect is. To cut right to the chase, insulin dysregulation is by far the prime candidate for involvement in every common metabolic problem, and also in numerous problems not widely recognized as metabolic but having their roots in the breakdown of normal metabolic processes. Obesity is the example that Taubes spends the most time on, but this only serves as a particular application of the general framework. Having already touched on it in a past post, I won't revisit it here -- watch the embedded talk by Taubes if you're interested.
Instead, I want to focus on an array of diseases that are of more interest to me, and probably to you too. Taubes spends a significant amount of effort establishing that empirically, there are a host of diseases that are common in modern societies but virtually unheard of in populations that subsist on diets resembling the kind our ancestors might have eaten ten thousand years ago. He uses a wide variety of historical sources, but was most strongly influenced by Weston Price, who devoted much his life to documenting this phenomenon. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancer are prominent on this list, but as I'll show there are many more stars of lower luminance in this constellation of disorders whose existence may be brought to our attention by their more conspicuous neighbors.
The arc that I'm going to trace out over the next few weeks begins with diabetes, which will be the subject of the next installment.
I've spent many hours over the last six months devouring Taubes' oeuvre and, more importantly, chasing up his references, and I can say with confidence that the book is solid and should be read by everyone with an interest in health. This is the beginning of a series of posts in which I explore what I found to be the most valuable parts of the book, but my riffing on it isn't a substitute for the book itself. If all Taubes had done was to bring together a lot of scattered and little-known facts into a clear, readable format this would have been an enormous service, but what makes this book great instead of merely informative is that its author actually behaves like a scientist and suggests a simple, powerful theory to both explain those facts and predict others.
The first step toward understanding is an appreciation for sorely neglected insight of Claude Bernard (later rediscovered by Walter Cannon): that our bodies have been designed to automatically maintain the variables governing chemical reactions inside them at a sustainable dynamic equilibrium, and that changes in the inputs motivate corresponding adaptive changes in the outputs. Hormones and other messenger molecules serve to transduce signals from the environment into instructions to individual cells, coordinating their activities such that the organism as a whole mounts a coherent response to its challenges. Taking the example of obesity, this shifts our attention away from the thermodynamics and toward the signaling mechanisms; all diseases involving a maladaptive mismatch between inputs and outputs are diseases of cell signaling.
The second step is in understanding what specific signaling molecules do, and what inputs govern their actions, so that you can home in on what the particular signaling defect is. To cut right to the chase, insulin dysregulation is by far the prime candidate for involvement in every common metabolic problem, and also in numerous problems not widely recognized as metabolic but having their roots in the breakdown of normal metabolic processes. Obesity is the example that Taubes spends the most time on, but this only serves as a particular application of the general framework. Having already touched on it in a past post, I won't revisit it here -- watch the embedded talk by Taubes if you're interested.
Instead, I want to focus on an array of diseases that are of more interest to me, and probably to you too. Taubes spends a significant amount of effort establishing that empirically, there are a host of diseases that are common in modern societies but virtually unheard of in populations that subsist on diets resembling the kind our ancestors might have eaten ten thousand years ago. He uses a wide variety of historical sources, but was most strongly influenced by Weston Price, who devoted much his life to documenting this phenomenon. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancer are prominent on this list, but as I'll show there are many more stars of lower luminance in this constellation of disorders whose existence may be brought to our attention by their more conspicuous neighbors.
The arc that I'm going to trace out over the next few weeks begins with diabetes, which will be the subject of the next installment.