Gary Taubes

This book has impacted me profoundly. I had been gradually making the move to the idea that carbs were causing the bulk of my problems around weight gain and energy management but this book really tipped the scales for me. His arguments are compelling and, frankly, undeniable in the face of the research he provides to back up his case. Public health advocates in this country got it wrong and they've done us a tremendous disservice by continuing to villanize fat while treating sugar/refined show more carbs as benign. show less

In GC, BC, Taubes proposes that there is no real empirical evidence to support what government health authorities and other “experts” say is truth and that a lot of contradictory evidence has been deliberately ignored. In a nutshell, there are no studies that meet rigorous scientific parameters that prove either side of the carbohydrate/fat hypothesis. That’s right; no studies. The ones we have are flawed, rigged or just plain unscientific (ie The China Study which is an observational show more study done by a non-scientist, so does not meet the requirements). The ones we need are too difficult to control properly and will never be done for that reason and because it doesn’t make financial sense to do them. Who do you think sponsors these studies, altruists? Nope. General Mills. Monsanto. Big Pharma. Coca Cola. Proctor and Gamble. Kraft Food. Mars (manufacturer of M&M, Snickers and other candy bars). How much money do you think those companies would continue to make if it was PROVEN their products make us sick? How much money do you think these companies would continue to make if it was proven diet could eliminate the need for them (statins, blood pressure meds, insulin)? How much more money do you think the researchers would continue to receive if they proved such things?

As I have said before, I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, but I do have scientific curiosity and a bit of knowledge about how the experimentation process should go.

Make an observation
Form hypothesis
Design testing protocols using controls, double-blinds and repetition
Measure results against hypothesis
If evidence/results does support your idea, yay for you, go on with line of inquiry
If evidence/results does not support your idea, yay for you, find out what they do support
Form new hypothesis
See second step

Too bad none of the researchers in today’s upper echelon of health/nutrition “experts” seem to know these basic facts (and they’re certainly not the first - people have been ignoring scientific strictures for decades in pursuit of their own glory). They seem to all either parrot poorly done/totally rigged/nonexistent studies, or they are so blinded by what they WANT to see that they make excuse after excuse about evidence that doesn’t support what they want to see. It’s truly staggering and made me very angry while reading this book. Taubes makes a point NOT to call any of these willfully ignorant/corrupt people scientists because frankly, they’re not.

At the end of this very scientifically dense book Taubes sums up well by saying that there is enough evidence to contradict everything we “know” about saturated fat, sugar, refined carbohydrates and how we get fat to warrant serious investigation, but that absolutely no one will take it on. Why not? No money in it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - there is no money in healthy people. No drug money. No cheap food money. No mono-agriculture money. No shipping money. No saving on government pension money (because if your population never reaches retirement age, you don’t have to pay). No diet advice treadmill of things that don’t work money. No money. It pays to keep your population sick, overweight, deluded, dependent and ultimately dead. It makes me sick to think about, but seriously I think it’s true. Big corps want us sick because it keeps us shelling out the money. Government wants to keep big corps happy so they don’t do anything to stop them. I know it’s fashionable now to blame everything on those two entities, but they control policy and public opinion to such an extent that it’s hard not to draw the conclusion.

I can’t help but liken it to crime investigation. We have jailed saturated fat without trial. The first line of inquiry in any criminal investigation is find out who benefits, but no one dares do so. The cops and prosecutors have turned up exculpatory evidence and buried it so that they could ensure a guilty verdict. The real criminal (refined carbohydrates) has been allowed to go free and kill more people with the full the full blessing of the police, the courts and the law-makers. Private investigators with the same exculpatory evidence are slandered, silenced, beaten up and ridiculed. Cops who try to buck the system are paid off or given the same treatment as the private cops. The press has been suckered or bought. Falsely accused saturated fat is still in jail. The people who benefited from the original crime are still making out like bandits and the victims just keep piling up. What’s to be done? Do your own investigation. Be critical of news reports, bloggers, documentaries and other media sources just spouting the same old conventional wisdom that got us here. I cannot wait for Denise Minger’s upcoming book, currently titled Death by Food Pyramid, because she’s going to school us on how to read reports and study data to suss out what’s truth, what’s assumption and what’s just bad science.

Anyway...who should read this book? Everyone. But not everyone can because it is pretty dry, scientifically dense and lacks a definitive call to action. Maybe his follow-up book Why We Get Fat is a better starting point, but for those who like lots of facts and investigative language, I highly recommend reading it. At least it will get you thinking and that’s the important result.

Read more: http://thebookmarque.blogspot.com/2012/07/good-calories-bad-calories-by-gary.htm... show less

A frankly terrifying study of the true causes of all "Western Diseases". Mr. Taubes makes the unpopular yet persuasive argument that sugar might very well be the primary cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gout, Alzheimer's and cancer. He makes the analogy that sugar is to these diseases as cigarettes are to smoking.

We all know sugar is bad for us, but the question is: How much is too much?

What I appreciated most about this book was the comprehensiveness of Taubes’ assessment. He leverages multiple historical findings, complete with questioning about why modern researchers ignore some of the same. The arguments in this book also leverage biochemistry, empirical research, and basic logic. If lowering carbs isn’t a universal solution, there’s at least enough here to make the reader want to take a step in that direction and to expect medical researchers to do so as well.