OregonRose
Sun, Feb-17-08, 10:34
Thanks to LessLiz for mentioning that she saw this on a recent trip:
http://www.delta-sky.com/2008_02/starbooks/
Cutting Through the Fat
A month after New Year’s and you’re still trying to shed those pounds you resolved to lose. Maybe, one science writer suggests, the solution isn’t cutting your fat intake.
GARY TAUBES has a lot in common with the child who exclaimed that the emperor was wearing no clothes. The author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (Knopf, $27.95) refutes a half-century of nutritional dogma—that calories in equals calories out—and challenges public health officials to re-examine how we gain and how we lose weight.
After reviewing 150 years of nutritional science and interviewing more than 600 scientists and doctors over a five-year period, Taubes concludes that fat in our food isn’t the main culprit that makes us fat—or raises cholesterol. The key, he says, is in the interaction of carbohydrates and insulin. “I wouldn’t want people to assume that the conclusions in the book are true beyond a reasonable doubt,” he tells Sky. “I believe they’re likely true, considering all the evidence.”
Taubes concludes that fat in our food isn’t the main culprit that makes us fat.SKY: What’s the most controversial and important aspect of the book?
GARY TAUBES: I’d say it’s the conclusions about how we think about weight and obesity. For the last 60 years, obesity experts have insisted on treating the human body like it’s a machine, some kind of thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference—calories in minus calories out—ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the matter. Thus, everything we read about obesity says it’s a disorder of overeating, and we’re constantly told that the only way to lose weight—or at least not get fatter—is to eat less and exercise more. I point out the simple fact that obesity is fundamentally a disorder of excess fat accumulation, and so the important thing is not how much we eat or exercise, but how our bodies regulate fat accumulation.
SKY: Elaborate, please.
GT: As it turns out, the hormone insulin is primarily responsible for making us accumulate fat in our fat tissue—something that has been known since the early 1960s—and we secrete insulin in response to the carbohydrates in our diet. If you simply look at the underlying biology—ignoring the thermodynamics for the moment, which is a given—you come to the conclusion that it has to be carbohydrates that make us fat. And if carbohydrates make us fat, then the only way to be lean—at least for those of us predisposed to get fat—is not to eat them.
SKY: Americans, as is their wont, are still struggling with New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. What would you have them resolve to do or not to do?
GT: I’d tell them to give up—or certainly go easy on—the foods that their parents or grandparents believed were fattening: bread, pasta, potatoes, pastries, rice, beer, soda, etc. I would say that this should be the case only with those of us who have a weight problem, but it’s quite likely that the same things that make us fat are also the nutritional causes of the common chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes and cancer. If that’s the case, and here I’m not being that controversial, then it’s likely that these foods are doing us harm even if we happen to be the lucky lean ones. Another factor, particularly with teenagers, is that they may be relatively immune to the fattening effects of these carbohydrates now, but not so in 10 or 20 years. By then, it may be considerably harder to do something about it.
SKY: If people don’t have the advantage of having read your book, your main premise could almost be seen as a conspiracy theory. Was there, in fact, anything resembling a conspiracy or an agenda involved?
GT: No. Just a lot of medical doctors and nutritionists poorly trained in what it takes to do good science. These people believed that they knew what the answers were before they did the rigorous experiments needed to find out. Worse, they believed that they had an obligation to tell the public and spread the word before they did the research. And once they did the studies, and they didn’t get the results they expected, they ignored them.
SKY: Generally, scientists are the ones who prompt major shifts in the way we view research. Do you see an increased need for science writers to interpret the plethora of conflicting data coming down the pike?
GT: There’s always the question of who to believe. I do think journalists have to learn to think critically about nutrition research. Political reporters, war correspondents, business reporters, even sports reporters are expected to be skeptical of their sources, not just parrot the establishment line. But in nutrition and health reporting, you have these reporters who consider it their obligation to faithfully report what the researchers and the government agencies tell them, without stopping to question whether the information being passed along—or, for that matter, the latest study published in some high-profile journal—is based on good science.
SKY: How do you respond to anyone who feels angry at the medical and scientific community—and angry about depriving themselves of foods that it now seems are more healthful than those they ate? Or to the frustration usually expressed by “They keep changing their minds,” or “Why worry? ‘They’ say it’s all bad for you”?
GT: On some level it’s unavoidable. I ate a low-fat diet through the 1990s, exercised an hour a day—I lived near the beach in L.A., so that was doable—and I gained weight. I believed the same recommendations. And, believe me, I was plenty frustrated when I found these recommendations were built on the thinnest of evidence. These authorities like to argue that the message to the public has to be simple and it has to be unanimous, otherwise we’ll all get confused and we won’t take their advice. But simple, unanimous and wrong is not good enough. The problem with basing public health recommendations on bad science, as was the case here, is that eventually the science will improve—the evidence will get clearer—and then you’re stuck confusing the public because the message changes. A better reason to be frustrated is because these people didn’t do good science to begin with, and they should have known better.
SKY: What would be a vehicle or methodology for establishing a reliable source of scientific information for the public?
GT: If I had my druthers, I’d have the public health authorities institute something more akin to the legal system to decide what we know is so and what we don’t. They’d get a jury made up of 12 exceedingly good scientists, none of whom have worked in the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease. Teams of competing experts would present the evidence for or against a particular belief—say, the healthfulness of low-fat diets, or whether salt causes hypertension. The jury would be able to cross-examine witnesses—i.e., those researchers who believed their studies provided some useful evidence. And then maybe the jury would deliberate for as long as it took to give an answer. If they didn’t believe some particular piece of advice was justified, but they couldn’t say it wasn’t, they’d suggest what experiments had to be done to know for sure. The key would be that the experts would be unbiased and good scientists.
SKY: We’ve read that you yourself now eat a low-carbohydrate diet, and a number of interviewers have asked you what you eat for breakfast, etc. But as foodies, we want to know something different: If you were on death row—and health officials who are upset by your book just might see to it!—and had to choose one final meal before your march to the chopping block, what would it be?
GT: Well, even before I changed my diet, I might have said the same thing: the seared foie gras from the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan for an appetizer; the porterhouse steak (rare to medium rare) from Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn for the main course, maybe some creamed spinach to go with it. Dessert would be a tough one. I used to have a sweet tooth; I don’t any more. But if death was to come quickly, I might opt for the warm cranberry and pear bread pudding with crčme anglaise from Hal’s in Venice, California. Always one of my favorites. Then maybe a cigar.
SKY: How successful have you been at convincing people that you’re not advocating the Atkins diet?
GT: I’m not not advocating the Atkins diet. The point is, the book is not a diet book. It’s a revisionist history and science of the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease research. As such, I end up concluding that diet doctors like Atkins probably got it right. What makes us fat are the foods our parents—or grandparents, depending on how old we are—believed were fattening—bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, pastries, sweets, sodas, beer, etc. In a word, carbohydrates. And all Atkins was saying was that the key to being thin was to remove these fattening carbs from your diet. Then you’re left eating a diet of mostly protein and fat, and that’s a healthy diet. And I conclude that Atkins and his predecessors, of which there were many, were probably more right than the public health authorities we’ve been hearing from ever since.
SKY: According to the evidence that suggests that a low-carb diet will help one lose weight, how do you explain the success of something like the Rice Diet, which has been around for 60 years, or vegetarianism—how many fat vegetarians/vegans do you see walking around?
GT: Unfortunately the world is full of fat vegetarians and vegans. They may be leaner on average than meat-eaters, but they’re not all lean. One of the key issues I raise in the book is that there are two factors at play in a diet: not just the quantity of carbohydrates, but the quality. Sugar, for instance, and high-fructose corn syrup—effectively the same thing as far as the body is concerned—might be particularly noxious when it comes to weight gain, heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. So a vegetarian who eats little sugar, doesn’t drink a lot of sodas, and stays away from processed foods of the kind that tend to have sugars hidden in them is as likely as not to be healthy and lean. This would also explain why Asians who ate a lot of rice seemed to be healthy and lean. First, they’ve been eating it for maybe a couple of thousand years, so they’ve had time to adapt to it. And second, until recently, they ate exceedingly little sugar.
SKY: What about the so-called French paradox? In a low-carb universe, there is no paradox in eating butter, cheeses and pâté and remaining thin. But the French also consume white bread—baguettes—and pastries, which are just as much a part of their culinary tradition as the other foods, yet the French don’t tend to gain weight.
GT: And the same answer applies. The French historically have eaten considerably less sugar than the Americans or the British. They still consume considerably less sugar than we do. Again, you have to look at both the quality and quantity of the carbohydrates. These kinds of national comparisons can be very misleading. The only way to know for sure is to do what’s called a randomized controlled trial, so you know exactly what you’re testing and you don’t get confused by other factors that you haven’t taken into account.
SKY: We’ve all heard the old axiom “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But apples, like other fruits, contain one of the villains in your book—sugar, or fructose; should we therefore avoid fruits, eat them sparingly or choose ones with a low glycemic load?
GT: Apples and other fruits have very little fructose compared to sodas. A typical apple might be a few percent fructose. A soda or a fruit juice is 50 or 55 percent fructose. You’d have to eat about 10 medium-size apples every day to get the same amount of fructose as the average American now consumes. And if you did, what else would you be eating? It also takes considerably longer to eat an apple than to drink the equivalent amount of calories or sugar in liquid form. One critical factor seems to be how quickly we digest the carbohydrates, and so how quickly we respond by secreting insulin.
SKY: Exercise: You tell us that it doesn’t do much in terms of weight loss. However, a recent scientific experiment has shown that among two groups of mice that were put on identical diets, the group that was subjected to gentle vibrations for 15 minutes a day had about 30 percent less body fat after 15 weeks, compared with the group that was not subjected to vibrations. The theory is that stem cells in bone marrow start to produce more bone to protect the body from jiggling. The researchers are planning a similar experiment on humans, though they’re quick to point out that while vibrations/jiggling/exercise may increase bone mass, none of these things will make fat cells simply go away. Do you have any thoughts on this study or its findings?
GT: Easiest thing to keep in mind in this business is that humans are not rats. It’s relatively easy to cure cancer in rats, for instance. I had one researcher tell me that if you can’t cure cancer in rats, you shouldn’t be doing cancer research. It’s that easy. The fact that vibrating rats lose weight tells us precious little about humans.
SKY: Given the research you’ve done on nutrition and fat and the systems in our bodies that regulate fat, determine its distribution, etc., do you think that the body mass index is an effective tool or an inaccurate one for determining a healthy weight?
GT: Body mass index is the kind of number that helps researchers when they do large population studies. It’s got problems, but it’s as good as any other standardized measure. When it comes to individuals, most of us know if we’re fat or not. We don’t need yet another number to tell us. Maybe our belt size or our dress size has gone up considerably in the last few decades. And if we can’t tell whether we’re fat—or maybe fatter than we used to be—by looking in the mirror or getting on the scale or buying clothes, then I don’t know if having yet another number to go by is going to make any difference.
—David Bailey and Nancy Oakley
FOR AN EXCERPT FROM GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, SEE “STAR PAGES” : http://www.delta-sky.com/2008_02/starpages/ .
http://www.delta-sky.com/2008_02/starbooks/
Cutting Through the Fat
A month after New Year’s and you’re still trying to shed those pounds you resolved to lose. Maybe, one science writer suggests, the solution isn’t cutting your fat intake.
GARY TAUBES has a lot in common with the child who exclaimed that the emperor was wearing no clothes. The author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (Knopf, $27.95) refutes a half-century of nutritional dogma—that calories in equals calories out—and challenges public health officials to re-examine how we gain and how we lose weight.
After reviewing 150 years of nutritional science and interviewing more than 600 scientists and doctors over a five-year period, Taubes concludes that fat in our food isn’t the main culprit that makes us fat—or raises cholesterol. The key, he says, is in the interaction of carbohydrates and insulin. “I wouldn’t want people to assume that the conclusions in the book are true beyond a reasonable doubt,” he tells Sky. “I believe they’re likely true, considering all the evidence.”
Taubes concludes that fat in our food isn’t the main culprit that makes us fat.SKY: What’s the most controversial and important aspect of the book?
GARY TAUBES: I’d say it’s the conclusions about how we think about weight and obesity. For the last 60 years, obesity experts have insisted on treating the human body like it’s a machine, some kind of thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference—calories in minus calories out—ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the matter. Thus, everything we read about obesity says it’s a disorder of overeating, and we’re constantly told that the only way to lose weight—or at least not get fatter—is to eat less and exercise more. I point out the simple fact that obesity is fundamentally a disorder of excess fat accumulation, and so the important thing is not how much we eat or exercise, but how our bodies regulate fat accumulation.
SKY: Elaborate, please.
GT: As it turns out, the hormone insulin is primarily responsible for making us accumulate fat in our fat tissue—something that has been known since the early 1960s—and we secrete insulin in response to the carbohydrates in our diet. If you simply look at the underlying biology—ignoring the thermodynamics for the moment, which is a given—you come to the conclusion that it has to be carbohydrates that make us fat. And if carbohydrates make us fat, then the only way to be lean—at least for those of us predisposed to get fat—is not to eat them.
SKY: Americans, as is their wont, are still struggling with New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. What would you have them resolve to do or not to do?
GT: I’d tell them to give up—or certainly go easy on—the foods that their parents or grandparents believed were fattening: bread, pasta, potatoes, pastries, rice, beer, soda, etc. I would say that this should be the case only with those of us who have a weight problem, but it’s quite likely that the same things that make us fat are also the nutritional causes of the common chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes and cancer. If that’s the case, and here I’m not being that controversial, then it’s likely that these foods are doing us harm even if we happen to be the lucky lean ones. Another factor, particularly with teenagers, is that they may be relatively immune to the fattening effects of these carbohydrates now, but not so in 10 or 20 years. By then, it may be considerably harder to do something about it.
SKY: If people don’t have the advantage of having read your book, your main premise could almost be seen as a conspiracy theory. Was there, in fact, anything resembling a conspiracy or an agenda involved?
GT: No. Just a lot of medical doctors and nutritionists poorly trained in what it takes to do good science. These people believed that they knew what the answers were before they did the rigorous experiments needed to find out. Worse, they believed that they had an obligation to tell the public and spread the word before they did the research. And once they did the studies, and they didn’t get the results they expected, they ignored them.
SKY: Generally, scientists are the ones who prompt major shifts in the way we view research. Do you see an increased need for science writers to interpret the plethora of conflicting data coming down the pike?
GT: There’s always the question of who to believe. I do think journalists have to learn to think critically about nutrition research. Political reporters, war correspondents, business reporters, even sports reporters are expected to be skeptical of their sources, not just parrot the establishment line. But in nutrition and health reporting, you have these reporters who consider it their obligation to faithfully report what the researchers and the government agencies tell them, without stopping to question whether the information being passed along—or, for that matter, the latest study published in some high-profile journal—is based on good science.
SKY: How do you respond to anyone who feels angry at the medical and scientific community—and angry about depriving themselves of foods that it now seems are more healthful than those they ate? Or to the frustration usually expressed by “They keep changing their minds,” or “Why worry? ‘They’ say it’s all bad for you”?
GT: On some level it’s unavoidable. I ate a low-fat diet through the 1990s, exercised an hour a day—I lived near the beach in L.A., so that was doable—and I gained weight. I believed the same recommendations. And, believe me, I was plenty frustrated when I found these recommendations were built on the thinnest of evidence. These authorities like to argue that the message to the public has to be simple and it has to be unanimous, otherwise we’ll all get confused and we won’t take their advice. But simple, unanimous and wrong is not good enough. The problem with basing public health recommendations on bad science, as was the case here, is that eventually the science will improve—the evidence will get clearer—and then you’re stuck confusing the public because the message changes. A better reason to be frustrated is because these people didn’t do good science to begin with, and they should have known better.
SKY: What would be a vehicle or methodology for establishing a reliable source of scientific information for the public?
GT: If I had my druthers, I’d have the public health authorities institute something more akin to the legal system to decide what we know is so and what we don’t. They’d get a jury made up of 12 exceedingly good scientists, none of whom have worked in the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease. Teams of competing experts would present the evidence for or against a particular belief—say, the healthfulness of low-fat diets, or whether salt causes hypertension. The jury would be able to cross-examine witnesses—i.e., those researchers who believed their studies provided some useful evidence. And then maybe the jury would deliberate for as long as it took to give an answer. If they didn’t believe some particular piece of advice was justified, but they couldn’t say it wasn’t, they’d suggest what experiments had to be done to know for sure. The key would be that the experts would be unbiased and good scientists.
SKY: We’ve read that you yourself now eat a low-carbohydrate diet, and a number of interviewers have asked you what you eat for breakfast, etc. But as foodies, we want to know something different: If you were on death row—and health officials who are upset by your book just might see to it!—and had to choose one final meal before your march to the chopping block, what would it be?
GT: Well, even before I changed my diet, I might have said the same thing: the seared foie gras from the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan for an appetizer; the porterhouse steak (rare to medium rare) from Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn for the main course, maybe some creamed spinach to go with it. Dessert would be a tough one. I used to have a sweet tooth; I don’t any more. But if death was to come quickly, I might opt for the warm cranberry and pear bread pudding with crčme anglaise from Hal’s in Venice, California. Always one of my favorites. Then maybe a cigar.
SKY: How successful have you been at convincing people that you’re not advocating the Atkins diet?
GT: I’m not not advocating the Atkins diet. The point is, the book is not a diet book. It’s a revisionist history and science of the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease research. As such, I end up concluding that diet doctors like Atkins probably got it right. What makes us fat are the foods our parents—or grandparents, depending on how old we are—believed were fattening—bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, pastries, sweets, sodas, beer, etc. In a word, carbohydrates. And all Atkins was saying was that the key to being thin was to remove these fattening carbs from your diet. Then you’re left eating a diet of mostly protein and fat, and that’s a healthy diet. And I conclude that Atkins and his predecessors, of which there were many, were probably more right than the public health authorities we’ve been hearing from ever since.
SKY: According to the evidence that suggests that a low-carb diet will help one lose weight, how do you explain the success of something like the Rice Diet, which has been around for 60 years, or vegetarianism—how many fat vegetarians/vegans do you see walking around?
GT: Unfortunately the world is full of fat vegetarians and vegans. They may be leaner on average than meat-eaters, but they’re not all lean. One of the key issues I raise in the book is that there are two factors at play in a diet: not just the quantity of carbohydrates, but the quality. Sugar, for instance, and high-fructose corn syrup—effectively the same thing as far as the body is concerned—might be particularly noxious when it comes to weight gain, heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. So a vegetarian who eats little sugar, doesn’t drink a lot of sodas, and stays away from processed foods of the kind that tend to have sugars hidden in them is as likely as not to be healthy and lean. This would also explain why Asians who ate a lot of rice seemed to be healthy and lean. First, they’ve been eating it for maybe a couple of thousand years, so they’ve had time to adapt to it. And second, until recently, they ate exceedingly little sugar.
SKY: What about the so-called French paradox? In a low-carb universe, there is no paradox in eating butter, cheeses and pâté and remaining thin. But the French also consume white bread—baguettes—and pastries, which are just as much a part of their culinary tradition as the other foods, yet the French don’t tend to gain weight.
GT: And the same answer applies. The French historically have eaten considerably less sugar than the Americans or the British. They still consume considerably less sugar than we do. Again, you have to look at both the quality and quantity of the carbohydrates. These kinds of national comparisons can be very misleading. The only way to know for sure is to do what’s called a randomized controlled trial, so you know exactly what you’re testing and you don’t get confused by other factors that you haven’t taken into account.
SKY: We’ve all heard the old axiom “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But apples, like other fruits, contain one of the villains in your book—sugar, or fructose; should we therefore avoid fruits, eat them sparingly or choose ones with a low glycemic load?
GT: Apples and other fruits have very little fructose compared to sodas. A typical apple might be a few percent fructose. A soda or a fruit juice is 50 or 55 percent fructose. You’d have to eat about 10 medium-size apples every day to get the same amount of fructose as the average American now consumes. And if you did, what else would you be eating? It also takes considerably longer to eat an apple than to drink the equivalent amount of calories or sugar in liquid form. One critical factor seems to be how quickly we digest the carbohydrates, and so how quickly we respond by secreting insulin.
SKY: Exercise: You tell us that it doesn’t do much in terms of weight loss. However, a recent scientific experiment has shown that among two groups of mice that were put on identical diets, the group that was subjected to gentle vibrations for 15 minutes a day had about 30 percent less body fat after 15 weeks, compared with the group that was not subjected to vibrations. The theory is that stem cells in bone marrow start to produce more bone to protect the body from jiggling. The researchers are planning a similar experiment on humans, though they’re quick to point out that while vibrations/jiggling/exercise may increase bone mass, none of these things will make fat cells simply go away. Do you have any thoughts on this study or its findings?
GT: Easiest thing to keep in mind in this business is that humans are not rats. It’s relatively easy to cure cancer in rats, for instance. I had one researcher tell me that if you can’t cure cancer in rats, you shouldn’t be doing cancer research. It’s that easy. The fact that vibrating rats lose weight tells us precious little about humans.
SKY: Given the research you’ve done on nutrition and fat and the systems in our bodies that regulate fat, determine its distribution, etc., do you think that the body mass index is an effective tool or an inaccurate one for determining a healthy weight?
GT: Body mass index is the kind of number that helps researchers when they do large population studies. It’s got problems, but it’s as good as any other standardized measure. When it comes to individuals, most of us know if we’re fat or not. We don’t need yet another number to tell us. Maybe our belt size or our dress size has gone up considerably in the last few decades. And if we can’t tell whether we’re fat—or maybe fatter than we used to be—by looking in the mirror or getting on the scale or buying clothes, then I don’t know if having yet another number to go by is going to make any difference.
—David Bailey and Nancy Oakley
FOR AN EXCERPT FROM GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, SEE “STAR PAGES” : http://www.delta-sky.com/2008_02/starpages/ .