Taubes - Chapter 18 - Nature of a Healthy Diet - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes addresses the three primary arguments which have been made against carbohydrate-restricted diets, which have been repeatedly made since the 1960s.
“1. That they’re scams---- because they promise weight loss without having to eat less and/or exercise, thus violating the laws of thermodynamics and the primacy of calories-in/calories out.
2. That they’re unbalanced – because they restrict an entire nutrient category --carbohydrates—and the first law of healthy eating is to eat a balanced diet from all the major food groups.
3. That they’re high-fat diets – and particularly high in saturated fat, and will cause heart disease by raising or cholesterol.”
He discusses them one at a time
The Con Job Argument
Taubes refutes this argument by calling attention to the fact that he has already explained, in the previous chapters, what happens in the body when we restrict carbohydrates, and why this leads to fat loss independent of protein and fat calories, and why the laws of physics have nothing to do with it.
The Unbalanced Diet Argument
Taubes says the unbalanced diet argument makes little sense if refined carbohydrates, starches and sugars do make us fat, because then the only rational argument would be to avoid them to fix the problem.
He says it’s the same thing as when we’re told to stop smoking because cigarettes cause lung cancer. Doctors don’t care if we find life less fulfilling without them, they want us to be healthy. Taubes says the same logic holds here.
Taubes - Chapter 17 - Meat or Plants? - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes addresses the history of meat eating, and discusses the argument of eating what we evolved to eat.
“The idea is that the longer a particular type of food has been part of the human diet, the more beneficial and less harmful it probably is - the better adapted we become to that food.
And if some food is new to human diets, or new in large quantities, it’s likely that we haven’t yet had time to adapt, and so it’s doing us harm.”
Taubes says the diets of the hunter-gatherers were very high in protein, high in fat, and low in carbohydrates “by normal standards”. All the most fattening:
“carbohydrate-rich foods …are very new additions to human diets. Many of these foods have been available for only the past few hundred years.
Corn and potatoes originated as New World vegetables, and spread to Europe and Asia only after Columbus.
the machine refining of flour and sugar dates only back to the late nineteenth century. Just two hundred years ago, we ate less than a fifth of the sugar we eat today.”
Taubes goes on
“Even the fruits we eat today are vastly different, and now they’re available year-round, rather than for only a few months of the year.
the kinds of fruit we eat today – Fuji apples, Bartlett pears, navel oranges – have been bred to be far juicier and sweeter than the wild varieties, and so, in effect to be far more fattening.”
He continues
“the modern foods that today constitute more than 60% of all the calories in the typical Western diet – including cereal grains, dairy products, beverages, vegetable oils and dressings, and sugar and candy – would have contributed none of the energy ...
Taubes - Chapter 16 - History on the Fattening Carbohydrate - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes discusses how carbohydrates were viewed in History.
In 1825 Brillat-Savarin wrote about the cause and prevention of obesity. Regarding the Cause:
Quote: “the roots of obesity were obvious. The first was a natural predisposition to fatten.
The second was the starches and flours which man uses as the base of his daily nourishment. ….and that starch produces this effect more quickly and surely when it is used with sugar.”
Regarding the Cure:
Quote: “a more or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury will lead to the lessening of weight.”
Taubes says very little that he has said so far is new.
“That includes the idea that carbohydrates cause obesity and that abstinence from starches, flour, and sugars is the obvious method of cure and prevention.”
The conclusion of Brillat-Savarin in 1825 has been repeated and reinvented numerous times since then. Up through the 1960s it was the conventional wisdom and what our grandparents instinctively believed was true.
In the 1960’s calories-in/calories-out took hold, and those prior diets were labeled faddish and dangerous.
“In 1973 the American Medical Association described them as bizarre concepts of nutrition and dieting .”
Taubes finds this a mystifying trend because the notion of the fattening carbohydrate has been around for most of the last two hundred years.
Taubes - Chapter 15 - Why Diets Succeed and Fail - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
According to Taubes,
“Any diet that succeeds does so because the dieter restricts fattening carbohydrates, whether by explicit instruction or not.
…those who lose on fat on a diet do so because of what they are not eating -- the fattening carbohydrates – not because of what they are eating. “
When we go on any serious weight-loss plan, whether Diet or Exercise, we always make changes in what we eat – no matter what instructions we get. We stop eating the most fattening carbohydrates, because they are the most obviously wrong foods for weight-loss. We cut down on sodas, beer, fruit juice; get rid of candy bars, desserts, donuts, cinnamon buns. Starches like potatoes, rice, white bread, and pasta are often replaced by green vegetables, salads, or at least whole grains.
Taubes says,
“Even the very low-fat diet made famous by Dean Ornish restricts all refined carbohydrates, including sugar, white rice, and white flour. This alone could explain any benefits that result.”
Taubes continues.
“If we try to cut any significant number of calories from our diet, we’ll be cutting the total amount of carbohydrates we consume as well. This is just arithmetic.
He says
“any time we try to diet by any of the conventional methods, and any time we decide to “eat healthy” as it’s currently defined, we will remove the most fattening carbohydrates from the diet, and if we lose fat, this will almost assuredly be the reason why.”
Taubes - Chapter 14 - Injustice Collecting - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes begins
“If you’re predisposed to get fat and want to be as lean as you can be without compromising your health, you have to restrict carbohydrates and so keep your blood sugar and insulin levels low.
…you don’t lose fat because you cut calories; you lose fat because you cut out the foods that make you fat – the carbohydrates.
If you get down to a weight you like, and then add those foods back into the diet, you’ll get fat again.
That only some people get fat from eating carbohydrates (just as only some get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes) doesn’t change the fact that if you’re one of the ones who do, you’ll only lose fat and keep it off if you avoid these foods.”
Carbohydrates make us fat and keep us fat, and those foods are the ones we’re likely to want the most and would never want to live without.
Taubes says this is no coincidence.
“It’s clear from animal research that the foods animals prefer to eat in excess are those that most quickly supply energy to the cells – easily digestible carbohydrates.”
Another factor is how hungry we are, because the hungrier we are, the better foods taste. Taubes says that insulin works to increase our feelings of hunger, and he provides details of how this works in the body.
“This palatability-by-blood-sugar-and-insulin response is &h...
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