Taubes - Chapter 12 - Why I Get Fat and You Don't (or Vice Versa) - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes begins with the question,
“Why does insulin only make some of us fat?”
He says it’s a question of Nature –our genetic pre-disposition, and that the aspects of Diet or Lifestyle don’t trigger this difference.
He says the answer is:
“..Hormones don’t work in a vacuum, and insulin is no exception. The effect of a hormone on any particular tissue or cell depends on a host of factors, both inside and outside cells -- on enzymes, for instance…
This allows hormones to differ in their effect from cell to cell, tissue to tissue, and even at different stages of our development and our lives. “
Insulin is a hormone that determines how fuels are “partitioned” around the body. When thinking about whether fuel will be burned or stored, Picture a fuel gauge like on your car. Except the “F” on the Right, stands for Fat and the “E” on the left sands for Energy.
If the needle on the gauge points to the right – toward the “F”, then insulin puts a larger share of your calories into storage for fat, instead of use for energy by the muscles. If you want to be active, you’ll have to eat more to compensate for this loss of calories into fat.
“The further the needle points to “F”, the more calories stored and the fatter you’ll be. The morbidly obese live on the far end of this side of the gauge.
If the needle points the other way –toward the “E”, the larger share of your calories are burned as fuel. You’ll have plenty of energy for physical activity, and little will be stored as fat. You will be lean and active and you’ll eat in moderation.
What determines the direction in which the needle points? There is more than one factor.
(1) How much insulin you secrete.
(2) How sensitive to insulin your cells are, and how quickly they become insensitive, (insulin resistant).
Taubes - Chapter 11 - Primer on Regulation of Fat - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
In this chapter Taubes talks about the Science issues of how some hormones and enzymes work (issues that weren’t, and still aren’t, controversial) which were worked out between the 1920s and 1980s.
Most of the chapter is about those “Basics” physical concepts that are connected with the issue of Why anyone Gets Fat. There is a small part at the end about the “Implications” of those Basics. Taubes says that fat tissue is more like a wallet than a savings account.
“You’re always putting fat into it, and you’re always taking fat out. You get a tiny bit fatter…during and after each meal, and then you get a tiny bit leaner again…after the meal is digested. And you get leaner still while sleeping.
In an ideal world, one in which you’re not getting any fatter, the calories you store as fat immediately after meals during the day are balanced out over time by the calories you burn as fat after digesting those meals and during the night. “
He says,
“Anything that works to promote the flow of fatty acids into your fat cells, where they can be bundled together into triglycerides, works to store fat, to make you fatter.
Anything that works to break down those triglycerides into their component fatty acids so that the fatty acids can escape from the fat cells works to make you leaner.
There are dozens of hormones and enzymes that play a role in these processes, but one hormone dominates the action. That’s insulin, and this has never been controversial.
We secrete insulin primarily in response to the carbohydrates in our diet, primarily to keep blood sugar under control. But insulin also does other things including, controlling fuel storage in our fat tissue. Because of this, insulin is the “principle regulator of fat metabolism”.
Taubes continues talking in technical terms about various body functions, then says..
"In short, everything insulin does in this context works to increase the fat we store and decrease the fat we burn. Insulin works to make...
Taubes - Chapter 10 - History of Lipophilia - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes begins by talking about how pre-World War II scientists studied genetics and endocrinology and developed the theories that he presents in this book.
He cites 1908 German scientist Von Bergmann who first used the term “lipophilia” which means “love of fat”.
Von Bergmann considered obesity a disorder of fat accumulation, and worked to learn about how fat tissue was regulated.
Von Bergmann said this is different from tissue-to-tissue and person-to-person. Just as some parts of the body tend to grow hair and some don’t, some people are hairier than others; and some people are fatter; and these people fatten easily, and it often seems that there’s nothing they can do about it. Other people are lean and have trouble gaining weight.
Taubes says that in the 1920s Bauer, a genetics and endocrinology scientist, adopted Von Bergmann’s ideas. At that time it was a new idea that genes could give characteristics and a predisposition for diseases to people.
Bauer said that fat tissue in obesity is like malignant tumors….
“In those who are predisposed to grow obese, fat tissue is driven to grow, to expand with fat, and it will accomplish this goal, just as the tumor does, with little concern about what the rest of the body might be doing.
The abnormal…fat loving…tissue seizes on food-stuffs, even in the case of undernutrition… It maintains its stock, and may increase it independent of the requirements of the organism. A sort of anarchy exists; the fat tissue lives for itself and does not fit into the precisely regulated management of the whole organism”
Taubes says that by the late 1930s the concepts of these German Scientists were accepted in Europe and were catching on in the U.S. but within 10 years, because of World War II, they vanished.
Germans and Austrians had founded and done most of the research in nutrition, metabolism, endocrinology, and genetics, which are all the fields relevant to obesity.
Taubes - Chapter 09 - Laws of Adiposity - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes starts out by talking about lab rats that had their ovaries removed, became ravenously hungry, overate and became obese. Then, in a second experiment the researcher took other lab rats, and after this surgery, put them on a strict diet where they couldn’t eat any extra food. These rats got just as fat by becoming completely sedentary. When estrogen was returned, the fat rats became normal weight.
The researcher explained it this way
“The animal does get fat because it overeats It overeats because it’s getting fat. The cause and effect are reversed. Both gluttony and sloth are effects of the drive to get fatter.
They are caused fundamentally by a defect in the regulation of the animal’s fat tissue. The removal of the ovaries literally makes the rat stockpile body fat; the animal either eats more or expends less energy, or both, to compensate”
Taubes talks more about enzymes, and then says that in dealing with Obesity, medical experts have ignored the fat tissue because they’ve decided the problem is Behavioral, and lies in the Brain, not the Body. He says, if medical experts were discussing growth disorder instead of fat disorder the subject would be hormones and enzymes regulatory growth. But when discussing a fat disorder, which is defined by the symptom of abnormal growth of fat tissue, the hormones and enzymes that regulate fat growth are considered irrelevant.
Taubes says… this is the cause of obesity.
“those who get fat do so because of the way their fat happens to be regulated and that a…consequence of this regulation is to cause the eating behavior (gluttony) and the physical inactivity (sloth) that we..assume are the actual causes.”
He states Three Laws of Fat (Adiposity), and gives examples and explanations of how they work.
The First Law Body fat is carefully regulated.
The Second Law Obesity can be caused by a regulatory defect so small that it would be undetectable by any technique yet invented.
The T...
Taubes - Chapter 08 - Head Cases - POSTED ON: Jan 01, 2011
Taubes says calories-in/calories-out is a damaging theory. It reinforces what appears to be obvious, which is:
“Obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth”
He says it is Harmful because… It is partly responsible for the growing number of obese; It directs attention away from the real reasons we get fa;, It reinforces the perception that fat people have no one to blame but themselves.
Instead of making us question our assumptions about calories-in/calories-out..... .
...The fact that eating less FAILS as a CURE for obesity is taken as evidence that fat people are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation and they are blamed for it.
Taubes says
“There has to be a reason… why anyone would eat more calories than he or she expends, particularly since the penalty for doing so is to suffer the physical and emotional cruelties of obesity. There must be a defect involved somewhere; the question is where.”
“The logic of calories-in/calories-out allows only one acceptable answer to this question. The defect cannot lie in the body—in the enzymes and hormones that control how our bodies turn what is eaten into fat— --because this would imply that something other than overeating was fundamentally responsible for making us fat. And that’s not allowed.
So the problem must lie in the brain. And more precisely, in behavior, which makes it an issue of character.
So, both eating too much and exercising too little are Behaviors, not Physiological states, a fact made even more obvious by the use of the…terms -- gluttony and sloth.”
Suggesting as an answer that fat people respond to food restriction just as animals do --that they reduce their energy expenditure while experiencing increased hunger— opens up the possibility that the same physiologic mechanism that drives fat people to hold onto their fat—even when semi-starved— --might be the cause of their obesity in the first place.
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