Calories, fat or carbohydrates? Why diets work (when they do)

What I find most frustrating about online comments on Taubes work is the amount of people who assume that this is just another crank peddling nonsense.<p>Instead, Taubes has spent the better part of a decade reviewing the state of research and putting forth a compelling, detailed argument in favor of his position, that the high-carbohydrate diets associated with civilization are also the cause of the cluster of diseases known as diseases of civilization.<p>His latest book lays out the argument in a more reader-friendly way than his earlier tome (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but it's hardly junk science, and Taubes is hardly a junk scientist. He has been a very good science journalist for decades, and has won the the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He does his homework.<p>Again, I recommend that those whose gut reaction is to be skeptical of Taubes' thesis read at least his latest book, which addresses, very carefully, virtually all of the common reactions people have in these kinds of online fora. There are certainly areas still open to debate, as Taubes himself says repeatedly in his writing, but they are not about the knee-jerk topics most people think they will be about.<p>If you're curious, feel free to take a look at the wikipedia post summarizing the results of low-carb diet trials at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low-carbohydrate_diets" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low...</a>. You'll find, at the very least, some cognitive dissonance. And that's really what Taubes' writings (in book and blog form) are about.

There's a difference between how people interested in public health read this research and how people such as us who are interested in our own individual health read it. People interested in public health wonder, "What happens when you tell people to follow diet X?" That's what studies like this test.<p>People like us wonder, "What happens when an individual actually follows diet X?" Questions like this are never studied at all, because it's difficult and expensive. Almost everybody lies about their level of compliance, and when people aren't actually lying, they're still underreporting because most people remember eating less than they actually do.<p>Those facts about underreporting are not controversial. I don't know where the misrepresentation happens, whether in the science itself or in the science journalism, but the studies most people read about in the newspaper or on the web are not about diet from an individual point of view. They don't study what happens when somebody actually follows a certain diet. That would require keeping people in an institutional setting and controlling or monitoring their food intake around the clock. That's really expensive, and if you're interested in improving public health, it isn't useful to know what the results of following a particular diet are, because you don't have control over what people eat. You only have influence over the public health message: what people are <i>told</i> they should eat.<p>So that's what is studied. The scientific debate over diet is not about what you should eat to improve your health, but what we should tell the public to eat to improve their health. If 50% of people on a low-fat diet stay up all night eating low-fat cookies and big bowls of pasta with low-fat margarine, then from a public health perspective, low-fat diets make you fat.

I am about finished with "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes. The main idea of the book is that carbs are what makes us fat and causes heart disease - not meat and fat as the medical establishment tells us. I know this same message is all over the place right now, one thing that makes the book unique is that he goes into the history of how the medical establishment came to the current viewpoint. According to Gary Taubes the European medical establishment was figuring out the carb/obesity link back in the 30s. WWII disrupted all that and when the Americans picked the question back up in the late 50s it was fat that was made the villain.<p>He goes into a lot of the biochemistry as well. As I was reading the book I kept coming back to this notion that carbs are pushed down our throats and the main reason why is that they are cheap. Not only cheap but they are easy to transport and store. It made me wonder if the common people of ancient Rome developed some of the health problems that modern people face. After all, they were kept on a state sponsored diet of grain and bread.

So the crux of the argument is:<p>1. In this one particular study, caloric restriction diets were explicitly calorically restricted.<p>2. In this one particular study, low-carbohydrate diets were not explicitly calorically restricted.<p>3. Weight loss was similar for both groups, but we assume that the Atkins fatties were gorging themselves on meat while the other people were not.<p>But, the data from this study was self-reported. To me, this is an immediate red-flag. It's two large waving red-flags for the inference the author is trying to engage in. He's basing a huge article on an assumption which <i>is absent from data.</i> This is anomaly hunting, plain and simple. The author obviously has a preconceived desire to support carb-limiting as the Deep Secret of weight loss, and so any anomaly is cast into evidence for this desire.<p>This is not to say the author is wrong, I'm simply saying his logic doesn't hold and analysis falls apart as a result. It's at least as basic a concept to science as the notion of control that the article leads with: "You cannot draw strong conclusions in an absence of data."<p>P.S., I'm not inclined to believe this good-calories-bad-calories stuff. I lost 100lbs over the course of 13 months, and I didn't do it by carb cutting.

Another diet article that's very, very long, low on facts, and repetitive on the few facts they have. Are these showing up just because people have New Year's Resolutions?

Cached copy: <a href="http://www.garytaubes.com.nyud.net/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydrates/" rel="nofollow">http://www.garytaubes.com.nyud.net/2010/12/calories-fat-or-c...</a>

Eat better and exercise more.

Gary Taubes is so incredibly wrong that it makes me sad.<p>If you want to read some intelligent analysis of dieting/nutrition, I suggest reading Lyle McDonald (<a href="http://www.bodyrecomposition.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.bodyrecomposition.com</a>) and Alan Aragon (<a href="http://www.alanaragonblog.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.alanaragonblog.com</a>).