Original Cin

Last time, I talked about the idea that increasing carbohydrate consumption is a huge force behind increasing obesity. The jury, in all honesty, is still out, and Taubes says as much.  General philosophies that you can’t prove a negative be damned, I think we can be pretty sure at this point that low-fat diets don’t work for a lot of people.

So, let’s suppose it’s true that high carbohydrate diets cause obesity and diabetes, which cause heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s and other serious health problems. What are we to make of the role of the U.S. government in all this? And of other national governments around the world? Farm subsidies no longer appear as mere foolish economic protectionism, but as a policy that, quite frankly, kills people. Add to this the fact that nutritional labels are organized around the low-fat viewpoint: fats are listed first, saturated fat at the top, right after calories, and grouped with other things to supposedly minimize, such as cholesterol and sodium; carbs and protein are relegated to the bottom — thank goodness they’re listed at all! Also, government funding paid to disseminate the low-fat message, and for the questionable research behind it. Food pyramid, anyone? The fact that the message may have been right for some doesn’t excuse that it seems to have been deadly for others.

Now, it’s important to note — I’m not saying any of this was intentional. Rather, people with good intentions and a lot of power bent a few rules of good conduct. That is what makes Good Calories, Bad Calories especially frightening. It seems to be a made-for-a-textbook example of how concentrated power can go awry.

I think it’d be useful to step back for a minute, and talk about the logic of what Taubes says in Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s nothing shocking or amazing, but there are a few small insights. (more…)

I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes a few days ago. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on my goal to lose weight just by doing so (it’s the light blue square in my goal grid), although only time will tell. It’s a marvelous book with political, scientific, and health freedom issues that go far beyond those that Taubes immediately brings up, and I am stunned.

Calories convincingly makes the case that a misunderstanding of statistics regarding heart disease at the turn of century, as well as a flawed understanding of what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, essentially caused an ill-founded crusade against dietary fat. Combined with the fact that fat is roughly twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbohydrates, this led to many health officials recommending low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. This puts a recent NutritionData blog entry into perspective (the entire post is worth reading, slowly, and carefully,  although it makes a lot more sense with details from Taubes):

The prevailing wisdom that meat and saturated fat are unhealthy is based on the same sort of inconclusive, circumstantial evidence as the studies I’ve noted here.  But if we really want to get to the truth, we’re going to need to consider ALL the (flawed) evidence, not just that which supports our point of view. – Monica Reinagel, More evidence that saturated fat has been falsely accused?

The bulk of the evidence on diet is inconclusive and circumstantial because, Taubes points out, the research is just not conducted in a competent manner:

…institutionalized vigilance… is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.” – Calories, 451

Indeed; calories is full of examples of questionable assumptions, poor choices of animal models (rabbits!?), and a general lack of clear thought. This book is just as much a book about the history of science (?) as it is about nutrition, and it puts contemporary events such as the rise of evidence-based medicine in perspective. (When I ran across it in the text, I found the Cochrane Collaboration website already in my bookmarks).

Fast forwarding past the history lesson that justifiably takes hundreds of pages in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the best information we have on metabolism at this point suggests that insulin promotes the storage of energy as fat, and that the intake of carbohydrates causes a big increase in blood insulin levels. Neither point should be terribly surprising to anyone that’s ever been around diabetic family members on insulin. Taubes describes this as fat cells pulling in calories, making fewer available for everything else, and increasing appetite — this model “assumes that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables” (358).

Calories is simply too much to talk about all at once, and I’ll continue writing about this for a few days at least.