Thu, May-05-16, 07:52
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Senior Member
Posts: 15,075
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Plan: mostly milkfat
Stats: 190/152.4/154
BF:
Progress: 104%
Location: Ontario
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an open letter to gary taubes
http://www.bodyforwife.com/an-open-...to-gary-taubes/
Quote:
But rather than just plant the hook in my mouth and let you tow me along, I decided to do just a wee bit more research. Lo and behold, I discovered you were full of shit. You even went so far as to quote sources way out of context to make it seem as though they supported your thesis, when the reality is that they did not. In a follow up investigation (PDF) it was revealed that many of those you interviewed felt betrayed.
For example:
I was greatly offended at how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins diet. Dr. John Farquhar, professor of medicine and of health research policy at Stanford University
The article was incredibly misleading
My quote was correct, but the context suggest that I support eating saturated fat. I was horrified. Dr. Gerald Reaven, a pioneering endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University
He knows how to spin a yarn
What frightens me is that he picks and chooses his facts
If the facts dont fit in with his yarn, he ignores them. Barbara Rolls, professor and chair of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University, speaking of how she was interviewed by you for six hours and sent you piles of research, which you ignored.
I told Taubes several times that red meat is associated with a higher risk of colon and possibly prostate cancer, but he left that out. Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University.
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I'll start with the Gerald Reaven quote. What Gerald Reaven says here is very misleading, because he says that Taubes implied that he supported eating saturated fat. So here's the actual context;
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The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the impact -- potentially lethal, in fact -- of low-fat diets on triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60's, researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population. ''Sometimes we wish it would go away because nobody knows how to deal with it,'' said Robert Silverman, an N.I.H. researcher, at a 1987 N.I.H. conference. ''High protein levels can be bad for the kidneys. High fat is bad for your heart. Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.''
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I don't know how anybody could possibly conclude from this that Taubes was saying that Reaven supported eating saturated fat. Except in the sense of "you have to eat something." Also, researchers don't get to decide what conclusions other people ought to come to, based on their own findings. I think Reaven probably went beyond his own direct research data to form his opinions on saturated fat, Taubes was free to do the same.
As far as the Willett quote goes--the study is about saturated fat, not red meat. Also, if I was going to damn read meat, it wouldn't be based on epidemiology.
I also know what it feels like to ignore huge piles of research from Barbara Rolls of volumetrics fame. It feels just about right.  Calorie density might matter, in some contexts. But you can as easily decrease calorie density by having some of your fat with low density veggies like cabbage, spinach etc. A lot of her stuff just shows that fat added to starchy food doesn't necessarily make that starchy food all that more filling.
As for John Farquhar,
Quote:
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Although this kind of conversion may be happening at the moment to John Farquhar, who is a professor of health research and policy at Stanford University and has worked in this field for more than 40 years. When I interviewed Farquhar in April, he explained why low-fat diets might lead to weight gain and low-carbohydrate diets might lead to weight loss, but he made me promise not to say he believed they did. He attributed the cause of the obesity epidemic to the ''force-feeding of a nation.'' Three weeks later, after reading an article on Endocrinology 101 by David Ludwig in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he sent me an e-mail message asking the not-entirely-rhetorical question, ''Can we get the low-fat proponents to apologize?''
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Quote:
I was greatly offended at how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins diet. Dr. John Farquhar, professor of medicine and of health research policy at Stanford University
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I see no tricking here, Gary says "conversion may be happening," not "has happened." And he makes no claim that Gary's accounting of that email was false, making Gary's supposing here seem pretty reasonable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/m...?pagewanted=all
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