The Sweet Lowdown About Weight Gain

Blaming the Refined Carbs Of Sugar and Starch
By SCOTT GOTTLIEB
October 6, 2007; Page W8

Good Calories, Bad Calories
By Gary Taubes
Knopf, 601 pages, $27.95


Diet research is a field where, alas, hucksters often pass for experts, government findings rely on weak "association studies" and theory trumps rigorous investigation. For decades, diet "researchers" have issued a uniform message: The fattening of America is the result of consuming too much food and exercising too little. The increase in obesity, goes the thinking, has brought with it a rise in diabetes. And the cholesterol-laden fatty foods that go hand in pudgy hand with obesity are, of course, the cause of heart disease.

Science magazine correspondent Gary Taubes is a dissenter from this orthodoxy. In "Good Calories, Bad Calories," he proposes that obesity is not related to the quantity of calories we consume, or to how many calories we burn, but to the quality of calories. The bad ones, he says, come from refined carbohydrates found in starchy food and sweets.

As Mr. Taubes points out, before fatty foods became a culinary pariah in the 1960s, it used to be common knowledge that carbohydrates were the source of weight gain -- he notes that even Tolstoy took a moment to pass along some sage diet advice in "Anna Karenina" when he had Count Vronsky skip starches and sweets as he slimmed down for the novel's crucial horse race. But in recent decades, Mr. Taubes writes, "it was the butter rather than the bread, the sour cream on the baked potato that put on the pounds." A fat-free, carb-heavy diet was regarded not only as a healthy regimen but also as a route to losing weight. "This was one of the more remarkable conceptual shifts in the history of public health," Mr. Taubes writes.


Mr. Taubes, the author of "Nobel Dreams" (1986) and "Bad Science" (1993), has a gift for turning complex scientific principles into engaging narrative. He makes a fascinating case that refined carbs have a deleterious effect on our health, weight and well-being. Sugars -- especially high-fructose corn syrup -- are particularly harmful, he says, probably because the combination of fructose and glucose overloads the liver with carbohydrates and elevates the body's levels of insulin, the hormone that governs fat accumulation. The more refined the carb, the more fat-storing insulin we secrete, often in surges after especially carb-rich meals. But the danger from refined carbs is not just that they cause weight gain; Mr. Taubes suspects that they are the dietary cause of heart disease, diabetes and perhaps cancer.

When "diet scientists" blame fat consumption for ill health effects, they too often depend on mere correlation. Yes, diagnoses of heart disease rose at a time when carbohydrate consumption apparently decreased and total fat consumption increased. But this isn't evidence, just anecdote, and it passed for too long as dogma, Mr. Taubes says, even when undermined by hard evidence. If observational science is going to influence thinking, he suggests, then consider this change in the American diet: The level of annual per-person sugar consumption has undergone a spectacular increase, from less than 100 pounds in the 1920s to our current 150 pounds.

"In effect, Americans replaced a good portion of the whole grains they ate in the nineteenth century with refined carbohydrates," Mr. Taubes writes. Even as late as 1989, the National Academy of Sciences' 700-page "Diet and Health" report made little attempt to differentiate between refined carbohydrates and unrefined or complex carbohydrates, such as those found in fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The "Low Fat" theory even influenced the government's familiar "food pyramid," both the 1992 original and the 2005 revision, thus gaining a federal imprimatur.

Even if it sounds plausible that a diet laden with highly processed carbs is, at least in part, a cause of obesity, and perhaps diabetes, it remains just a theory, one still resisted by many mainstream diet researchers. Whatever recognition the carb theory has received in recent years owes as much to Mr. Taubes as to anyone. In 2001, he wrote a much-discussed article for the New York Times Magazine called "What If It's All a Big Fat Lie?" His book is a kind of extended treatment of that article, with more research and reporting. (Just last week, in New York magazine, Mr. Taubes went after another cliché of the healthy-living corps by asserting that exercise doesn't help us lose weight; it actually can cause weight gain by making us hungrier.)


Be advised: "Good Calories, Bad Calories" isn't a diet book, although it may change your eating habits. Instead, it's a highly readable treatise on the origins of modern theories about food and health. It is also an engaging portrait of the cast of researchers involved in developing the study of diet -- however incomplete it remains. Mr. Taubes doesn't make the mistake of asserting that low-fat diets don't have merit. He says simply that fat avoidance shouldn't come at the cost of ignoring other promising ideas about diet and illness.

Diet is such a broad and elusive subject that no single approach should prevail to the exclusion of all others, yet as Mr. Taubes observes, plenty of scientists remain wedded to pet theories and work tirelessly to advance them. Such a parochial approach is a danger in any scientific field. Atle Selberg, the winner of the 1950 Fields Medal in Mathematics, once remarked that "a person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right." This, according to Mr. Taubes, has unfortunately characterized the history of diet science, causing us to cling to old thinking -- and to become a nation devoted to fat-free muffins even as we try to squeeze into ever-tighter airline seats.

Dr. Gottlieb, a physician and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was until recently a senior official at the Food and Drug Administration.

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Absolutely true... my mother ALWAYS said, dieting means skipping pototoes, breads, and sugars...

Why the heck can't people see that we're under the influence of consumerism and getting fatter because of it?

I have a clear memory when the low fat craze started thinking, really? fat makes you fat? oh, ok.' It did seem to make sense, but LUCKILY my mother was older and wiser and said, no, starch and sugar makes you fat; theyre not natural.
She was an Atkins dieter when the book first came out and we went on it together.

Ask anyone in their 70s or 80s how people used to 'slim'.

Oh yesss!! Thank you!!

Good god... someone who is skeptical worked for the FDA?

I'm not that old, but I do remember as a child in the late 60's and early 70's that the "diet plate" in restaurants was a hamburger patty with cottage cheese.

Yeah, its like all those ex CIA and the retired Generals-- they have become talking heads now on the news round tables