Hi all,
Dieting has been a major topic of conversation around the box lately and per my request, Scott Booher, one of our recent additions to the family has written up a nice article on a text that you aspiring dietitians might consider picking up. So, please find Scott’s thoughts on Good Calories, Bad Calories below. As always, feel free (in fact, I encourage you) to comment on Scott’s review in the comments page.
With New Year’s resolutions came a goal of learning a bit more about food and nutrition, and I’ve recently put away several books on the subject: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Eating Animals, and most recently Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is maybe the most heavily researched book on the science of nutrition to come along in decades. The book weighs in at 600 pages including notes. Rather than invent yet another pop diet or theory on the science of nutrition, Gary, a correspondent for Science magazine, methodically analyzes every nutrition and obesity study he could get his hands on spanning the last hundred years (he says that without the Internet the book would have taken him the majority of his career to put together). Here’s a summary of what he finds, and it isn’t pretty folks:
The conventional wisdom around food and nutrition has been driven by a small number of well-intentioned individuals who, unfortunately, came up with an initial thesis and then, through selective use of data and discarding any studies that disagreed, have introduced completely inaccurate myths into public policy and the American diet. In fact, Gary states that because of the methods used to come to these conclusions, “it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals…its simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years…can reasonably be described as science.” Here are a few of the myths eviscerated throughout the book, one detailed study at a time:
Myth 1: Fat causes heart disease and obesity. There is little real evidence that this is the case. There are however dozens of well-run studies (ignored) that show entire populations living on high-fat diets, but with a fraction of the heart disease and obesity that we have on todays western (high-carb) diet. Fat simply isn’t the bogeyman we have been lead to believe it is. Instead, it is likely that a high-carbohydrate diet is driving much of the rise in western diseases, including heart disease and cancers.
Myth 2: Obesity is either caused by a lack of willpower in eating too much, or a lack of activity (sloth). The real data instead points to a hormonal problem caused by carbohydrates signaling the body to pack away fat and not burn stored energy as it is designed to do, creating a vicious cycle wherein the body keeps calling for more calories while continuing to pack on the fat. The more refined the carbohydrates, the greater the negative effect on your health, with sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup at the top of the list. (An aside from another book: next time you drive past the Iowa corn fields think about the fact that very little of what you see will ever be eaten as ‘corn’. It will instead be manipulated into dozens of different molecules for highly-processed foods).
Myth 3: A calorie is a calorie, it doesn’t matter what the makeup of your meals are, and the law of thermodynamics (calories in vs. calories out) is the final determinate of human weight. The reality is that carbohydrates have a huge hormonal effect on the body, and our human evolution hasn’t caught up with the recent advent of large-scale agriculture and consumption of these heavily processed foods. Carbohydrates really are different than the other macro-nutrients, and our bodies are telling us this in rapidly-climbing obesity rates. And yet, we continue to be told that a large part of a healthy diet should be grains and other carbohydrates.
I found myself getting progressively angrier while reading this book. Consider that up to today, the American Diabetes Association is still saying that the biggest risk factor for type-2 diabetes is simply eating too much, and further considers a carbohydrate-restricted diet to be potentially dangerous. The American Heart Association allows its name to be plastered all over highly processed carbohydrate cereals if they agree to add a bit of fiber to the box. Really an eye-opening read folks.
So, I’m having a lot of fun incorporating this new information into my diet – hmmm, love the smell of bacon in the morning….
Please post thoughts, questions, ideas, or concerns to “comments”.
