Big Fat Omissions: Science, logic sorely lacking in pro-Atkins article
By Vance Lehmkuhl


Back in 2002, when The New York Times was still the most respectable American newspaper imaginable, its magazine section ran a piece by Gary Taubes with the headline "What if it's All a Big Fat Lie?" and people around the nation, journalists, scientists, and the everyday public alike, rushed to reconsider their notions of fat and nutrition. In the ensuing year, the Times has seen its credibility torpedoed by twin scandals of bogus reporting, but so far Taubes' 7,700-word pro-Atkins essay - illustrated by a cut of butter-slathered steak - has largely escaped close scrutiny. Indeed, his fat apologia has been picked up by the mainstream press as the operating story, and newstudies, even when inconclusive or negative toward Atkins, are being spun as further proof of the new paradigm.

In "Big Fat Lie," Taubes gleefully trashed decades of nutrition advice from various experts to prove that "Atkins was right all along." Robert Atkins, who died in March of a slip on the ice, was of course the most famous proponent of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, author of the best-selling "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution." The fact that Gary Taubes, an Atkins devotee, was assigned by the Times to write a seemingly objective analysis of the good doctor's theories is just one of many questions raised by "Big Fat Lie."
A close look finds Taubes misquoting, misrepresenting, equivocating and running logical loop-the-loops to persuade us that Atkins had the answer, before finally revealing that he's on the diet himself and doesn't really care whether it shortens his life. Doubtless most readers are unaware of the CNN report in which scientists quoted by Taubes backed away from the concepts attributed to them. And few probably saw the Washington Post article citing all the peer-reviewed scientific studies that directly contradict Taubes' "low-fat diets don't work" mantra.

Even on its face, "Big Fat Lie" isn't what it appears. Taubes, the daring iconoclast, "exposes" the fact that fat can be good for you and that low-carb diets can cause weight loss, then tries to put these together to form an endorsement of the healthfulness of Atkins' program. But wait: Nutritionists never said NO fat was healthy; and it's not whether they cause temporary weight loss that concerns people about Atkins-style diets - it's whether they're harmful to your overall, long-term health. In other words, Taubes' great achievement in 7,700 words is to knock down two obvious "straw man" arguments that no one ever made.

What he fails to prove, though, is their converse - that SATURATED fat is good for you, or that Atkins' diet ISN'T dangerous over the long term - exactly where the argument has been all along. So he slams the establishment for vilifying "fats," Taubes means "saturated fats," but when he cites positive health effects of "fats" he cites studies on monounsaturated fats.

Similarly, when he warns of the dangers of "high carb" intake, he means sugar, corn syrup, and some starches, not the fruits, beans, and whole grains that make up such a large part of a healthful, plant-based diet. Now, it's true that the USDA Food Pyramid does probably err in presenting grains as an undifferentiated, eat-all-you-want base for our diet, but Taubes wildly overstates the effect this has had on American eating patterns. In his thinking, we've become more obese because we're eating exactly as the Food Pyramid tells us to, so the pyramid must be completely wrong. He conveniently avoids any mention of how few Americans actually eat according to the guidelines (fewer than a third, according to the Department of Health and Human Services), and ridicules the notion that our food choices may be more influenced by our ad-saturated instant-gratification culture than by the opinions of scientists.
Shortly after this piece appeared, an American Dietetic Association survey showed that most of us get our nutrition advice from commercial television. But in Taubes' world, that's irrelevant: We eat junk food because of USDA "low fat" guidelines. We guzzle soft drinks, he says, because "they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy." That's right: Soft drinks "appear intrinsically healthy!" Have you ever heard ANYONE make a health claim for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Mountain Dew because they're "fat free?" It's no secret that these things are heavily branded sugar water, or that sugar makes you fat. But it's more important to be cool, to be refreshed, to obey your thirst, to get that jolt of caffeine and sugar right now.
Taubes finds it inconceivable "that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity - both socially and physically - is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal." In other words, being obese is so punishing that people who continue to live on fast food must be doing so because they consider it healthy. This disingenuousness underlies much of Taubes' analysis, which seeks to tie a decades-long rise in obesity to recent recommendations to lower our fat intake.
The impact of the food pyramid, which replaced the "Four Food Groups" in 1992, was apparently so great that it caused us to gain weight a full ten years before the pyramid appeared!: "The percentage of obese Americans," Taubes reports, "stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's." Taubes feigns mystification at the fact that during this rise, we've been eating less fat as a percentage of calories. Yet a few sentences later he mentions that we're also eating 400 more calories every day. As it happens, we're NOT eating less fat now, we're eating slightly more - something he never finds room to mention - but we're definitely eating way more food, way more calories - you know, the thing that makes you fat? So what's the best way to avoid excess calories and still get good nutrition? Easy: Nutritious foods that are low in calories - a description that befits most unprocessed plant foods. Remember that gram for gram, fat has twice the calories that carbs do, without providing twice the vitamins.
But that's OK, because Atkins' plan is for you to get vitamins elsewhere - namely, from the Atkins Center, which sells "Atkins" brand vitamins at phenomenal prices. The "Diet-Pak," for instance, containing "a month's supply of all the nutritional support your body needs to survive and thrive during controlled carb weight loss," is on sale for $53.96 (marked down from $63.96). That word "survive" is a little jarring - the implication is, if you want to be sure this diet doesn't kill you, fork over $640 a year (assuming that sale price holds) to get the nutrients missing in your "nutrient-dense" food supply. Taubes doesn't bring any of this up, of course, but he tacitly admits that the diet is dependent on vitamin supplements to deliver adequate nutrition. In his prime example of a clinically successful Atkins-style diet, he reports that "the diet was 'lean meat, fish and fowl' supplemented by vitamins and minerals." Note that even the meat is lower-fat. This is a big fat endorsement? There are other interesting omissions in this very long article, not least the many non-vitamin-related health liabilities associated with a high-animal-protein diet (see sidebar). Nor does Taubes seem to want to discuss the charge that Atkins-style diets cause constipation. After all, what's a little discomfort here and there when you're improving your health through the power of saturated fat?
As if weak logic, straw-man arguments, and careful selection of factoids was not enough to drive his point home, Taubes apparently stooped to misrepresenting his sources and to denying the existence of data that didn't fit.
Some would be surprised that in his thorough examination of the relationship of high- or low-carb diets to heart disease, Taubes conveniently forgot to consider the peer-reviewed successes of, say, Dean Ornish, but it's much more than that: his summary of what science has found out about these issues is so skewed as to border on outright fraud.
Scripps Howard columnist Michael Fumento quotes Stanford University cardiologist Dr. John Farquhar as saying "I was greatly offended by how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins Diet. I'm sorry I ever talked to him."
And, CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen (7/8/02) spoke to three of the Harvard researchers spotlighted in Taubes' piece - the ones representing a major shift in thinking about Atkins - and heard from them that Taubes had misrepresented their positions on the matter of fats vs. carbs. They all explained that there are good fats and bad fats, and good carbs and bad carbs, making the categorical distinctions that Taubes had worked so hard to elide. And "...cheeseburgers, pork chops, butter and bacon," Cohen says, "the folks who I talked to said: 'You know what? We don't like that kind of fat. We don't think that's good for people."
One Harvard researcher Taubes cited is Walter Willett, who has long been a critic of the prevalence of starchy grains in USDA recommendations, among other things. Taubes seems to elicit phrases from Willett supporting his cheeseburger-based regimen. Yet Willett told Time Magazine (12/24/90): "The less red meat, the better. At most, it should be eaten only occasionally. And it may be maximally effective not to eat red meat at all."
Has Willett changed his viewpoint, or has he been misrepresented? If we're to believe the Washington Post, it's the latter. In "Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts" (8/27/02), Sally Squires spoke to Willett regarding Taubes' remarkable advice to "eat lard straight out of the can" to "reduce your risk of heart disease."
Willett recalled speaking to Taubes about lard, but stressed that "I don't think that lard is part of a healthy diet." Instead, he told Squires, the idea is to "'replace unhealthy fats with healthy fats,' such as those found in fish, nuts, olives and avocados." After explaining at some length why those fats, unlike lard, have a positive impact on your cholesterol, Willett added: "And I have gone over this a number of times with Gary, but he barely mentioned it in the article."
That's not the only discrepancy Squires found in Taubes' reporting. As the author contends throughout "Big Fat Lie" that low-fat diets have proven to be "dismal failures," Squires found dozens of peer-reviewed studies that proved exactly the opposite and asked Taubes why he ignored these reams of data - especially when they came from his own sources. A researcher named Arne Astrup, for instance, whom Taubes interviewed for a half-hour, said he provided Taubes with "all the evidence suggesting that low-fat diets are the best documented diets and was extremely surprised to see that he didn't use any of that information in his article."
Taubes' excuses for these omissions - ranging from an opinion that one prominent scientist "didn't strike me as a scientist," to an assessment that another didn't cause quite enough weight loss, to his own "gut feeling" that the head of one peer-reviewed study "made the data up," to a breezy dismissal of the entire science of epidemiology - come off as comically bogus. Squires may have been giving Taubes a taste of his own selective-quote medicine, especially by concluding her article with his quote "I know, I sound like if somebody finds something I believe in, then I don't question it."
Well, yeah, that's just it. Taubes launches his "Big Fat Lie" broadside by explicitly linking the conventional, low-fat wisdom to religious zealotry. In his introductory paragraphs, he stresses this is something "we've been told with almost religious certainty ... and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty." But after a careful examination of the article's construction and its history (at least according to the other people involved in it), it becomes clear that Taubes, an Atkins disciple, is projecting his own zealotry onto those he disagrees with.
While some manipulations in his writing seem very carefully calculated - e.g., waiting until the next-to-last paragraph to include three major bombshells (that he is on the diet himself, that overconsumption of saturated fat can indeed shorten lifespan, and that "Atkins had suffered with heart troubles of his own") - it would seem that Taubes was not exactly trying to deceive his readers. Instead, he just wants us to believe as fervently as he does; his judgement of what's relevant and what's not, what's logical and what's not, is somewhat skewed by his faith in the animal-fat credo.
All in all, the article is not without some merit: It encouraged more discussion of the role of different fats, and the possibility that different levels of fat and carbs may work differently for different people. Since "Big Fat Lie" appeared, some studies have confirmed, once again, that Atkins-style diets can indeed cause weight loss, and without any short-term health effects. On the other hand, a massive Stanford University survey of low-carb trials confirmed that the key to the diet's success is simple calorie restriction rather than any "magical" metabolic process. And, in one of the "success story" studies (New England Journal of Medicine, May 2003), people on the low-carb program gained twice as much weight back after a year than did the low-fat participants, leading the Washington Post to call the "long-term benefits negligible." And in June, another New York Times writer, Jason Epstein, penned a public apology to readers for his earlier Atkins evangelizing.
Who knows? Maybe a new scientific study will indeed find the perfect combination of body type and fat/protein mix to validate Atkins' theories. On the other hand, maybe the answer will be: It worked for some people because, like Taubes, they really, truly believed it would.


Vance Lehmkuhl is a writer and political cartoonist for the Philadephia City Paper. A collection of his vegetarian cartoons is published as a book, "The Joy of Soy." Vance is featured as a speaker and entertainer at Vegetarian Summerfest.

There is an old saying: "If you can't do it, teach it." Taubes takes is one step further: "If you can't do it, write about it." The book is horrible science and will undoubtedly lead to the death of many people. It is the equivolent of "journalistic terrorism".
Dr. Sidney Freedman

I bought this book last January and read it twice. I'd read The Omnivore's Dilemma the year
before and together, these two amazing books created a paradigm shift in my thinking. It's
now seven months later. I've lost 41 pounds and am still loosing every week. I didn't need a
diet, just common sense. I'm a woman who has been obese most of her life and tried every
diet out there. After reading this book, I said to myself, I'll try it. It was my last resort. I decided
that if this didn't work, I just be fat. I refused to starve myself anymore on all the diets out there.
I'm 58 . Here's are the results after seven months. Eating this way I'm never voraciously hungry.
I don't think about food all the time. And miracle of miracles, I can actually tell when I'm full.
I haven't exercised once. I'm still just over two hundred pounds, but am beginning to feel like I have
the ability to exercise, which I didn't before. I went to my doctor after eating this way -- few carbs,
lots of meat, fish, poultry, butter, cream, good fats, salads, some fruits (mostly berries) and vegetables -- and my cholesterol had dropped almost into the normal range. (290 to 210.) My triglicerides which
were off the scale had dropped to normal. My doctor was thrilled and told me to go home and keep eating low fat, high carb. She doesn't get it and I didn't bother explaining it to her. But, next time I go -- in November -- I'll bring her this book and give it to her. I would think my experience would go a long way toward getting her to read it. Finally, I've found something that makes sense to my life. I couldn't have
done it without Pollan's and Taube's wonderful research.

Finally someone just points out the facts without bias with extreme caution. He is constantly searching for good science, which most people have no idea how is executed. He simply points out the flaws of the research in the past and how it should be done in the future. He never goes into a specific diet but does implicate refined carbohydrates as primary suspects for diseases of civilization.

There are too few writers today who have the skill, insight and keen eye to take on the food-industrial complex. Gary Taubes has done this. One of the most valuable aspects of the book is Taubes' meticulous unraveling of the tangles of university researchers, industry research grants and journalists who create, promote and police weak information. Carbohydrates are cheap, taste good, and come from sources that on the surface fit cultural constructions of nature (waving grain, fresh-picked corn, etc). Industry favors carbohydrates for their easy portability, ability to provide instant gratification, and their maleability. History will make the idea that humans can grow thin and righteous eating pasta and fat free fruit snacks look like the hoax that it. The reliance on powerful, exalted experts enfeebles too many academic pursuits. It takes courage to look beyond the cult of personality and nutritional pop culture that valorizes the innocent, pastoral world of starches and sugars while demonizing protein and fat. How did a loaf of bread ever become the symbol for all that is good about the Earth and nature? Taubes' book exposes the machinery of current food mythology. This book is an example of careful, diligent research and writing in the fine muckraking tradition. I read the book from cover to cover, almost in one sitting.

Read the whole book, loved it. Not overweight myself or high cholesterol, but I am interested in the food I eat. The nation is getting heavier becasue of the quality and quantity of the food we eat. Refined white flour and sugar have to be bad for you, his research seems right on. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a big factor in type 2 diabetes, don't you agree? I recommended cutting out carbs to 3 friends- all male, slightly heavy and their weight dropped and cholesterol went from the 220's to the 180's. Great amateur-science results. For the women, recommended it to 2 women and weight didn't change at all over the same time period of 2-4 weeks. I wonder what the difference is.

The book was good. However, Amazon.com doubled my order and sent me two copies and even though I got credit on the cost of the second book I returned, I had to pay the shipping on the second copy both ways. I believe the order process could be improved.

I simply could not digest all this quote 'wonderful research'!
It was like eating at a smorgasboard and ending up feeling unsatified not knowing what you had tasted.
I was anticipating some direct information such as
A. these are the good carbs
B. these are the bad.
I am giving my copy to my Dr. to digest and perhaps he can in turn give me the A & B information.

In 2002 Gary Taubes wrote an cover article for the New York Times Sunday magazine entitled "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?" It caused an uproar among doctors and nutritionists everywhere for it stated the exact opposite of what Americans have been told--that it's not dietary fat that raises our cholesterol and causes obesity, heart diseases and type 2 diabetes, but the refined carbohydrates that have replaced fat in our diets since the 1970s. Five years later, Taubes expanded his eye-opening article to book length, and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is a fascinating look into how the American public--indeed, the world--has been sold a nutritional bill of goods dictated by politics and personality that is literally killing us.

Taubes, a scientific journalist (not a doctor or anyone shilling a diet plan despite insistence from other reviewers) lays out the interesting history of how a low-fat high-carb diet got to be the consensus cure-all for obesity and heart disease in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The opening of the book sets the tone--six days before Dr. Ancel Keys, the foremost advocate of the "fat causes heart disease" idea appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961, then-President Dwight Eisenhower was being lied to by his doctor about his cholesterol levels, which had skyrocketed after a heart attack despite following the exact regimen Keys was pushing. Taubes goes into very fine detail regarding the science involved in the role diet plays in health, and notes quite astutely that doctors as a rule are not scientists. It's astonishing how some ideas took root after only one study because they were sanctioned by the "right" organizations, while numerous studies showing an opposite effect were ignored because they didn't have the right connections. While Dr. Robert Atkins is the most famous--or notorious, depending on one's view--proponent of the low-carb diet today, the idea that keeping carbs low was optimal for both weight control and health has been around since the nineteenth century. However, an small but influential corps of doctors, whose studies were funded by such health-food purveyors as General Mills and Frito-Lay, got no less than the United States Congress drinking the high-carb Kool-Aid in the early seventies--to the detriment of us all.

This is not an easy, breezy read, but Taubes is able to make even the most esoteric terms and theories readable and understandable. The bibliography for the book is well over sixty pages, and Taubes conducted hundreds of interviews as well, all impeccably cited. If nothing else, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" will get you thinking about the absolute power organizations like the American Medical Association wield--even when they're completely off the mark.

I highly recommend this book to anybody who eats. I teach biochemistry. I have grown children I have fed and I have struggled a bit with my weight over the years and my bad 'hemoglobin AIC' values shocked me out of my complacency a few years ago. I sat and read the entire book in 2 days and had to resist starting to re-read it because I told my co-workers (I teach at a college) about it. They asked me to return it to the library so they could start reading it. If you find this book difficult, read 'Cliff-Notes' reviews about it, because what Taubes says is critical and paradigm changing. It is spectacularly well researched and assembled. I couldn't put it down, but I am a science-phile so again, if you find it dry or incomprehensible, get someone to explain it to you. It might just positively improve and change your life. And if you are a parent feeding children, you must know about the tenets of this tome.

The information in this book is very interesting and confirms what I've long suspected about the marketing of healthy eating guidelines by special interest groups. I highly recommend this book along with one written eight years ago by a Santa Barbara endocrinologist which recommends the dietary guidelines supported by the scientific studies cited in "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It's good to see the science behind her recommendations.
The Schwarzbein Principle: The Truth About Losing Weight, Being Healthy, and Feeling Younger

A very well written book by an outstanding journalist committed to the practice of good science. I can't say enough good things about this book. Yes, it's a slow read. There is a lot of information to digest, so to speak, but it is worth it. I just finished reading it a second time.
Gary Taubes deserves thanks for having the courage to write about a subject that, knowing the supporters of the conventional wisdom, has probably caused him to now be labeled a quack. Taubes is no quack and I can't imagine a finer writer/researcher to put your trust in. I encourage you to buy and read this book.

Good Calories, Bad calories is a very tough read. It is full of facts and data. Buy and read this book if you are really interested in the topic.

I have heard criticisms that he is biased in this reporting. That's probably true. However, his point is that what he presents is an alternative hypothesis to the US government-sanctioned low fat approach. There is a lot to support the hypothesis and it has not been disproven as in normal scientific method.

The low fat hypothesis also has a lot of support, but there have not been definitive tests of it either.

This is not a diet book. It is not proof that low-carb is good or high fat is bad. It lays out an alternative hypothesis along with a history of how the low fat hypothesis came to be accepted.

I will say that this book has changed my life and how I think about diet in general. I changed my own diet and for the first time in years, my blood pressure is normal, triglycerides are down, and I have energy. Oh, and I have lost 15% of my body weight without losing strength. (Implication is that it is mostly fat.)

You don't need to read this book to affect your life, but if you're interested in the science, this is an amazing piece of work.

Loved the book. I plan on implementing this information into my lifestyle and hoping the endometreosis will clear. Considering all the alternatives...

The author states the strong possebility that much of what we've become to believe is wrong about a healthy diet. Much of the conventional wisdom cannot be scientifically/empirically proved. For example, obesity is not necessarily caused by eating too much or that exercise is a means of preventing obesity. Traub is a true empirist. He challanges almost every hypothesis on 'what is a healthy diet?' with the best chapter being 'THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY'; the nonsese of 'a calorie is a calorie' and that the laws of thermodynamics is founded in the misinterpretation of the thermodynamic law, and not the law itself.

ENERGY BALANCE = CALORIE IN - CALORIE OUT; we simply do not understand cause and effect of the energy balance (left/right side of the equation) and the three variables in the energy balance equation - energy storage, energy intake, and energy expenditure.

The book is not written for the casual 'healthy diet' reader. Reading about the countless research outcomes in the history of diet research made my head spin. Taub researched in detail about scientist analyses on diets, hunger, sugar, fiber, insulin, cholestrin etc some hundreds years back in findings. While reading the book I was longing for the Epilogue getting some 'clear' answers ... I was disappointed by the lack of results. This is certainly not Taub's fault. I concluded that we simply got no idea about what exactly constitutes a 'healthy diet' - maybe this lesson alone was worth reading the book.

We all believe that we are adept at thinking critically, but how often do we really question our underlying assumptions? I heard Gary Taubes interviewed on NPR and thought that although he made several good points, he was basically an "Atkins Diet wacko." I started this book believing that I would quickly spot the obvious holes in his logic. After reading about 50 pages I realized that I agreed with virtually everything he had written. I searched the web to see if anyone had done a reasoned rebuttal. Everything I found fell into one of two categories: condescending--"I'm sure he means well, but he is just plain wrong"--with no documentation or evidence to back up their assertions; OR vitriolic--anger spewing, personal attacks that, once again, didn't offer any evidence that Gary Taubes was wrong.

Scientific history is replete with examples of the conventional wisdom being just plain wrong. Is it so astonishing that we could go so far astray for 60 years? After reading this book I believe that is the case.

Some people have complained that it was difficult to wade through all the information on the diet studies. I agree that it was densely packed with information and slow going in parts. I also understand why the author had to provide the level of documentation that he did: I, for one, wouldn't have accepted that my beloved COMPLEX carbohydrate grains could be a problem without all of the detail provided.

This is not a diet book, but it can point to a different definition of what constitutes a healthy diet. As Gary Taubes points out, the research still needs to be done.

This book lost me in serveral areas. In the beginning, Taubes talks about cholesterol and sites examples where having a high cholesterol did not evolve into heart disease. What he misses here is that he only looked at total cholesterol in the beginning of his book. Anyone who knows anything about nutrition knows that it is ratios that count, not totals.

Secondly, he loses me when he says that fibre does not help with weight as he recounts studies that show that. What he doesn't tell you about the studies is that the fibre was not increased that much. When you compare the fibre increase in studies to what we should really be eating for fibre it is a nothing increase and therefore, of course would show no benefit.

After reading it and finding his errors, I don't believe anything he says. I would like a real doctor to talk to me...hello Dr. Ornish

If you have ever tried to lose weight or just eat healthy, you must read this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. This book changed my thinking about food, health, nutrition and exercise. I didn't realize how much of what doctors said that I just believed. I didn't realize that what they recommend is based on little proven evidence. Or how much contradictory evidence is just ignored.

This isn't a diet book. It's a book about the history of nutritional advice. Our understanding of food and obesity, how it's come about and how it's changed over the past century. I'll be writing more in future posts but here's what I've definitely taken away:

1. A calorie is not a calorie. A lot of other factors matter like what kind of calorie, what kind of person, metabolism, exercise, external environmental factors, ...
2. Calories in does not always equal calories out. Or we are not measuring all the calories in and out correctly.
3. Dietary fat does not make you fat. Fat is not necessarily better or worse than protein or carbs. It's not necessarily equal either!
4. Many of our current doctors are 100% convinced of what they know and not really willing to consider radical shifts in thinking. Like they continue to recommend eating less calories and exercising to lose weight when it's obviously not working for many people. (Do you really lack the will power?)

I definitely recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories. You can read a good excerpt written by the author, Gary Taubes, on ABC News.

What I found most fascinating in this very thick and technical book was how the personalities wielding the "science" made the difference in where we, as a nation, ended-up today. It was almost "riveting" to read about how one scientist could get a huge audience with a weak theory and no evidence, while another scientist with a decent theory and plenty of evidence couldn't get anyone of any prominence to even comment. It made me wonder about a lot of what we take for scientific "truth" today. Hanging on to your pet theory to reduce cognitive dissonance is, I'm sure, as popular today in all science as it was shown by Taubes to be in the last hundred plus years of nutrition science.

What I thought about, but wasn't mentioned in the book, was that carbs have a long shelf life, good for an era when the Soviets were pointing nukes at us (and we were convinced that they might just push the button). Another thought that occurred to me that helped explain the cascade of ideas toward the "low fat" chasm is that lots of people, not just vegetarians, think it's sort of gross to eat animals. So not only did we have supposed "scientists" with their pet theories, we also had a lot of people that "wanted to believe" because it made them feel safer or less like a beast. We are where we are. We can only hope that more people accept the research Taubes presented, and act accordingly.

A book this detailed and controversial is difficult to review without writing another book in the process. Since many reviews have already covered much of the content and conclusions, I'll try to say things that aren't already in the list of 156 reviews so far (that I recall). (...which is not easy.)

This book is a review of science. That the science happens to be about nutrition is primary only if that is your actual interest. People interested in the nature of science and its process, politics and pitfalls, should find this fascinating even if they never gave a thought to why fat seems so much easier to gain than to lose (particularly in the larger amounts), or to why the "diseases of civilization" (diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer, schizophrenia, cancer, etc.) are skyrocketing.

There are several critically important topics in nutrition and related areas that could have been added to this, but I suspect a 2000 page book would have been difficult to sell. It's obvious he had to choose a focus and a linear path through a gigantic topic.

As part of the fact that it is a science review and not a novel or diet book, there are a few important considerations.

1. It is a review of science; it is not science itself except in the form of intelligent inquiry and review; it is not "research". Taubes is not a formal researcher, though he is science-trained and specializes in investigating and writing about science. In short, this is OLD research, not NEW research: it's just that it's research many people probably either don't know about or learned about rather differently.

2. Aside from a small 'final conclusions' bit, there isn't really anything to argue about in terms of 'disagreeing with Taubes' in this; rather, people would have to argue with the actual research reviewed. Readers could complain about what is included or excluded ('too much' some say, 'not enough' say others), that's about it. Even if one disagrees with Taubes's overview-conclusions, the degree of careful detail combined with the linear-layout and the courage to present a truly alternative view on highly politicized issues (some of his ideas left me stunned, they were so new to me!), is worthy of respect.

3. This book is just slightly like a nutritional version of 'Forbidden Science' (about Archeology), and I translate the point of it rather like this: "For those formally educated, here's the stuff you probably didn't learn, or didn't learn in this way for sure, and of what you did learn, here's a new look at some of the assumed cornerstones of belief-system edifices. And for those not formally educated, here's a trail through history and science to start with: here's what's accepted then and now, and here's an alternative path to consider." What readers want to do with all that is entirely up to them. The most important thing is getting the information into the larger world to be at least considered and brought to light finally or differently in some cases; what part of all this turns out to be right, or wrong, or misunderstood, or differently understood, in the end is less the issue here than just finally beginning some kind of dialogue on these important points.

4. I doubt the Final Answer[tm] of nutrition is yet at hand, and so I'm sure there must be plenty of areas to further explore and in the end, it might not all agree with the general framework Taubes ended up with (or, it might--I don't know). It's a review of so many different studies and related areas, that it is highly unlikely any single work could be perfect or perfectly complete on all that -- it would have to be 10x its length, at least, and be written from a century in the future. The important thing is that the book became available at all, because it is the first thing courageous enough to "question authority" to this degree, detailed enough to provide a jumping-off point for legitimate medical people to re-evaluate some old ideas on their own, and yet readable enough to provide an entry gateway to at least a small portion of the layman public.

5. This is an educational book, but it is not entry-level except for very good readers with some understanding of basic science. This is no dumbed-down textbook; this actually requires some decent cognitive skills. I found it fascinating, but although I can read about 800 pages in a day if I have all the daylight hours, it took me a full week to wade through it in long evenings after work. (This might have gone faster, did I not have to keep stopping to rant and rave to a friend about things in the content!) If you are not a strong reader, I do not recommend it unless you have a year to work on it.

6. The book is very dense in information, and this is its strong point and its purpose. That means if you're not into the topics of science or nutrition etc., it's either going to put you to sleep or fry your brain. I loved it: the world has more than enough simple diet books for laymen. What we really needed was a book that combined science detail with readability, and science history with the commercial present, for an understanding of how we got to where we are, and what that means to science, to nutrition, to health, and to our future, both as individuals and as a species.

7. On the problem side, the publisher's presentation makes this seem like a "diet book". This is not a paint-by-number eating plan. If you want a book about what to eat and when and how to count it, there are many, but this isn't one of those. It's also not a "pleasant afternoon reading," unless you're a fairly serious intellectual. That is sure to disappoint many who are unlikely to be willing to get through it. (Some people are simply better with other forms of learning than dense text, and this really IS "dense text".) It is a good thing this book is not exactly for the masses, though, since I think if we could take all this information and distill it into sound-bytes that the public would easily understand, there might be lynch mobs arriving at some health agency doorways.

**
I feel that nobody in the field of medicine could write this book: they'd be ruined for the degree of questioning the party line/ status quo, and if they were researchers they wouldn't get funding from any of the all-pervasive sources (generally, the food industries killing us and the pharmaceutical industries not-curing but eternally-treating us), and the problem is, a person educated in that system is highly unlikely to break out of the mold to find this road to begin with, unless they are really exceptionally independent thinkers. Gary's position as a science writer, and the years he put into studying this, combined with him having no major vested interests in the conclusions (such as some of the more consumer-book authors of lowcarb diet plans), is the perfect combination. It's too 'heavy' to ever make him much money I bet (too small an audience), nowhere near worth the hours and years he put into it, but I hope that he doesn't regret the work, because I'm sure many people are genuinely grateful for the book -- I am.

**
I'm from a family of huge women. Women who basically diet constantly for 20, 30, 40 years and they're still fat. I was fairly athletic until my mid-20s, when two years of a very intense, work+school+commute, sleep deprived, high stress, not eating daily except mega-carbs right before sleep, resulted in a massive rapid weight gain. Later when traditional dieting didn't work at all for me, I simply gave up, not willing to be neurotic daily about something my family made seem unsolvable. (OK, I nearly shot myself over it in all honesty, but once I got over myself, I moved on.)

About 15 years later (now huge), I was hospitalized for untreated asthma infections. While there I had a heart-rate reaction to days of steroids plus pain and a situation, and that got me assigned a cardiologist (though I had no heart condition). When I got out of the hospital and visited him, he wrote me a prescription to the Protein Power Life Plan book by the Drs. Eades.

Helluva drug: I've kept off over 125lbs for 18 months now, and medical symptoms (acid reflux, complexion problems, severe asthma, allergies, unexplained rashes, chronic exhaustion, brain-fog, bloating, etc.) all vanished within weeks of making an effort to ditch most carbs and increase protein and fat and add some supplements (no exercise involved).

In fairness, this can't all be attributed to lowcarb, because getting off gluten (solely by accident to begin) is a good chunk of the symptom resolution. I am exercising more now that I can finally move enough to do some of it. (I can mow my lawn, weed it, rake it, shovel soil for the garden. As of September 18 2006 when I went on lowcarb, I couldn't even stand for 60 seconds without screaming back pain, couldn't walk around a store. The changes in my life are radical.)

But my respect for Taubes's book is not because of my experience; rather, it's because he finally gave me a way to help my brain's intellectual understanding connect with my body's experiential reality. I really needed to understand some of this which seemed very confusing as it contradicted all the tenets of "pop science". I am no expert on anything, and I was cynical about "lowcarb" at first, but the results have been good enough to change my life, and my future, and make me seriously interested in the subject. I may never be thin, but at least I've learned enough to head off destruction.

Reading about why poor science, social good-ol-boys and political peer pressure has resulted in the train wreck of modern nutrition/healthcare, realizing that nearly 20 years of my life were basically trashed as a result of believing the government's advice, made me a little homicidal for awhile, but I recovered. Now, I'd just like to see some decent, intelligent dialogue and research happening thanks to this guy's gutsy exploration and road map to another view. I'm guessing not too much will happen and he'll have to get old and die before the larger world recognizes just how important this book is (was) at this time.

If you are interested in these subjects and you read very well, this book is the boss. No matter what you believe or don't about nutrition, this book is worth a read.

This book is an outstanding review of how we have come to believe low fat must be the sine qua non of a healthy diet. Taubes shows that the clinical evidence for this is non-existant and, in fact, the clinical evidence shows that the diet generally considered healthy, that is, a low fat, high carbohydrate diet rich in processed wheat and other processed foods is responsible for many deseases of present-day life, including diabetes and cardiovascular deseases and possibly cancer.
Taubes gleaned this information by carefully reviewing the tests that have been carried out and especially reviewing the conclusions drawn from them. In those cases where the evidence did not support the conventional wisdom (i.e. that fat is bad.) the tests were simply ignored. For instance, there was one important study involving some ninty thousand nurses. In this study the nurses were given check-ups periodically and any deseases or deaths were noted. They were also asked to keep track of their diets but not to modify them. It was expected that those that ate a fattier diet would have more breast cancers but the results showed that those who ate more fat had fewer breast cancers. This DATA was dismissed since it did not fit the preconcieved theory which said that fat should cause more cancers.
The book is full of such examples. I think it should be mandatory reading for every physician, especially cardiologists.
John R. Sellars, Ph.D.

I am the author of a new book entitled GENOCIDE;HOW YOUR DOCTOR'S DIETARY IGNORANCE WILL KILL YOU. I am a family physician with over ten years experience introducing a low carbohydrate, more fat, more cholesterol, more protein diet into my patient's lives. Through this dietary approach I have cured type 2 diabetics, treated people with high blood pressure with little or no need for meds, seen tons of weight lost and the list goes on and on. I have also read Taubes' book and I know Taubes' is correct.

Unfortunately most physicians will never read this book and if they do they will dismiss it as an opinion, not based in fact. This book examines actual dietary clinical trials and reveals the contradictory results of those trials. For some reason, the scientific method is not followed in dietary clinical trials. The scientific method should be: I have an idea (theory, supposition, opinion, hypothesis whatever you want to call it), I perform an experiment to either prove or disprove my idea; if I prove my theory-great-look how smart I am. But if the results do not prove my idea, I am supposed to re-evaluate my initial idea, not call the experiment flawed or the results inconclusive.
The reason the dietary clinical trials appear contradictory is because the researchers in these trials start off with a conclusion--not an idea-- perform an experiment, and when the results of the experiment do not support what the researchers already 'think' they know; they now call the experimental design flawed or the results inconclusive, which is generally not the case.

I have literally treated thousands upon thousands of my patients with low carb diets over the last decade. I love when the labs come back with higher HDLs, lower triglycerides and normal blood sugars. I love teasing my patients and ask if they are eating more fat and cholesterol. When they say yes, I ask them "Well, if you are eating more fat and cholesterol, then why did your fat level drop and why did your HDL rise, and why did you lose weight?" I always get a smile back, because my patients know what I am getting at. And what I'm getting at is the fact--and I mean FACT, that low cholesterol, low fat diets DO NOT WORK to any degree to help people stay off or reduce their medications.
This book should be required reading in all medical and undergraduate colleges. If physicians actually understood the correct way to tell their patients to eat--many disease processes would become extinct--instead of the human race.

Allow me to end my post with the three biggest dietary myths in America;
MYTH # 1
Eating fat makes us fat. FALSE. The truth is that eating fat does not make us fat, unless we're eating too many carbohydrates along with that fat.
MYTH #2
Eating cholesterol containing foods causes heart disease. FALSE. There has never been any study which has shown, convincingly, that eating cholesterol containing foods causes heart disease; and we can thank Mr. Taubes awesome book on underscoring this fact.
MYTH #3
Probably the biggest dietary myth out there is that the calorie actually means something in human nutrition. FALSE. The calorie means nothing in human nutrition.

Genocide: How Your Doctor's Dietary Ignorance Will Kill You!!!!

This is the worst diet book I have ever read. It is more like a Master's Thesis on diets that don't work. I have read 2/3rds of it and don't know yet what he thinks does work. I do not plan to finish the book, I would be bored to death and still not know what to eat.

This is one of the most compelling nonfiction books that I've read in a long time. I had little interest in this subject beforehand, and if anything, I had a bias against the low-carb way of eating (as a distance runner and a child of the 70s and 80s, and I was pretty bought in to the low fat/ high carb dogma). I started to leaf through the book while waiting in line at a bookstore, and I could not put it down. It is a fascinating read, and although it clashed with my previously-held world view, by the end, I was utterly convinced by Taubes' research, and his clear and critical thinking. Although the book is quite lengthy, the writing is clear and accessible, and it never seemed ponderous. (I actually saw the thoroughness as a strength). By the end, I was pretty angry about the "healthy eating" dogma that we have all been exposed to for decades (and if I were overweight or diabetic, I imagine that I would be furious). Although I didn't buy the book with the intention of applying the information to my own life, I decided to cut way back on carbs after reading it. I have lost a little weight with very little effort, and have never felt better.

I'm not a nutritionist, scientist or journalist. I am just someone who wants do what I need to be healthy. I stumbled across an article a few months ago in an airline magazine, and thought the book looked interesting.

I think it would be difficult maintaining objectivity in writing such a book, but I feel he did a superb job. The author kept his opinion out of the book and simply evaluated the science and logic that has lead to the dietary guidelines our government promotes today. I can only imagine the frustration of those scientists who dared to challenge and conventional wisdom and were shunned or ridiculed, as Yudkins was with his hypothesis on sugar.

"Once the "truth" has been declared, even if it's based on incomplete evidence, the overwhelming tendency is to interpret all future observations in support of that preconception. Those who KNOW what the answer is lack the motivation to continue looking for it."
This quote from Chp 22 sums up nicely the problem with the research into healthy diets. It is a continuing theme throughout the book. Some reviewers have mentioned infuriation at what has happened with the science over the last 100 years of nutritional science. I am happy I am not the only one. Have years of eating what the government says to be a healthy diet put me at risk for diabetes or heart disease? The implications of this book are mind boggling. Have government recommendations been unintentionally shortening lives?

This is definitely a life changing book. By changing my diet based on the book's science, I have lost weight, not felt hungry and have a ton of energy to burn. I go to the gym, not to lose weight, but because I feel like being active. I recommend this book to everyone. The most important book I have ever read.

Gary Taubes may have done a thorough, balanced, careful job of reviewing the research literature. I really don't know. But what I do know is there are at least a few glaring errors--such as referring to studies done during the "German occupation of Sweden during World War II." There was no German occupation of Sweden, so how can I really be sure he isn't pulling other "facts" out of the air? Read with caution.

I think a lot of his information is correct but one thing missing I think is the impact of caffeine on diet. People don't like to talk about caffeine because they are addicted to it and know all about or will soon discover its nightmare withdrawal period that can last for months. Lack of energy, depression, initial headaches and constipation. Sign of a potent drug indeed. Not to mention that it is in so many products (many marketed to teens) and, with the exception of people having offspring, is considered safe.

My own experience after abstaining from caffeine for a few months is effortless weightloss. You simply eat less because you are not stressed and getting hungry from the blood sugar tap-ins that caffeine causes. You eat less of everything including the fat inducing carbs.

Caffeine is an apetite stimulant in the long run, especially for sweets and grains - kind of like the way exercise is but much worse because there is no benefit of movement.

A commercial page that references studies:

[...]

Of course people love their coffee. Smokers love their cigarettes and crack addicts got to have their crack. It is addiction to a blood sugar/hormone increasing toxin - pure and simple.

Gary Taubes book could be a corner stone book that begins a discussion of other theories and possibilities for nutrition. Medicine needs to look at other options than just the current theories. Medicine should strongly consider the integrative medicine principal - Good medicine is based on good science; it is inquiry-driven and "Open to new paradigms". - This means considering other options and tools of healing than the convention ones we have all used in the past.

I personally spent some time talking with Gary Taubes at Dr Andrew Weil's Nutrition Conference. He is an interesting man who has written a book with a purpose - this purpose may not be just for the individual to notice. I personally feel that medicine as an art and should notice the new information and think differently. This may be a book that starts that shift.

However I am also encouraging you to explore the APO E Gene Diet by Pamela McDonald: A Breakthrough in Changing Cholesterol, Weight, Heart and Alzheimer's Using the Body's Own Genes
APO E Gene Diet book provides a powerful integrative medicine approach for the patient seeking an optimal integrative medicine diet and program that challenging conventional wisdom - it includes a step by step SOLUTION for the patient - Pamela is a graduate of the university of Arizona program in integrative medicine. Integrative medicine - It's what patients want.

Although this a tough read in spots it is the most helpful book about nutrition ever published. It cuts through all the dogma, and reviews many little know and well know studies that taken together turn much of current nutritional 'religion' on its head. After you read it you will know more about fat and carbohydrate metabolism than your doctor does, guaranteed.

This is not a new way of thinking but it sure has the science to back it up. Taubes got a little technical but the information is very interesting and I think it is a worthwhile read. In fact, I'd like to see more of the public not only read this, but give the guy a chance and not dismiss his viewpoint!

All I have to say is, Oh my goodness is this a good book or what! For quite a number of years I have been searching for a good book that goes into the deep details, science, and history behind why conventional nutritional 'wisdom' does not work for many people, and how this all effects the human body. Whereas 'experts' and others that jump on the hive mentality bandwagon with them do not really question the mainstream and dig into the research for themselves to know the true facts, Gary Taubes has outdone himself and he most certainly has done an outstanding amount of research into MANY different areas of this. He has made it possible for the average person to get the truth about the type and amount of calories that we eat and how it affects us. This is the best and most favorite book I own.

Gary Taubes has done an outstanding job providing a thorough review of how we've come to the current state of nutrition in the USA. I've read many nutrition and diet books from all viewpoints, and I must say that his position against high-carb diets really resonates with the common threads in the best of them. This book may be the necessary catalyst that pushes mainstream nutritional policy in the right direction. Not only does it make intuitive sense (which can and has been a poor measure in the past) but Taubes provides a seemingly endless set of studies to back up his main points. Moreover, the book is extremely well written. It's not, however, a light or generally humorous read.

This is a wonderful example of honest science journalism.
Taubes actually does real research and writes about it - a rarity in the nutrition world today.
In addition, the infromation in the book has the potential to improve the health of both individuals and the public.
If you are ready to take responsibility for your own health and want to learn some truths about nutrition, this book can help.

This book has been incredibly enlightening while leaving me disillusioned over the many diet books and misinformation I've read or received about weight loss over the decades. I've always been very mindful of my weight and health. I started packing on some pounds in my 40s, and then was diagnosed with breast cancer in my late 40s. I have tried diligently to do various versions of vegetarian or low-fat, high-fiber diets. Even more so after my cancer treatment, and being given a drug to take for 5 years that causes most women to gain quite a bit of weight. Cancer specialists all recommend a low-fat, high-fiber diet, but the combination of that diet, hormonal changes as you age, and estrogen-suppressing drugs completely wreck your waistline. I even trained for and walked in a 3-Day 60 Mile breast cancer fundraising event last fall. Taubes is right - exercise makes you hungry. I managed to lose 10 pounds over 6 months of walking 35-45 miles a week - and most of the walkers I knew didn't lose any. Cancer specialists are always after cancer survivors to lose weight, there are lots of studies showing it reduces the risk of recurrence, but then they advocate the kind of diet that makes it impossible to do anything but gain. I've tried the low-carb approach for a week now and lost 4 pounds already. I was always afraid to do this diet before because I thought it wasn't healthy. I'm thrilled!

Taubes doesn't know what he talks about and what he did with this book is not serious research but cheesy cherry picking.

Taubes claims that carbs/glucose are recognized as the sole responsable
for insulin secretion. The fact that he doesn't seem to know or understand that as soon as we consume 1 gram of protein our insulin goes up because the role of insulin is also to metabolize proteins makes Taubes the most ignorant writer on nutrition ever.

What Taubes claims about insulin increasing fat storage is not only scientifically undemonstrable but also completely illogical and counterproductive to body survival.

There's a reason why the body stores excess calories as fat
and burn that fat where there's not enough dietary calories.
The reason is that this system is perfect and precise and allows
the best survival in whatever situation.

If really lowering one macronutrients (carbohydrates) would
result in less fat storage during excessive caloric consumption and more fat loss during defective caloric consumption, it would be the biggest metabolical flaw of the body and we would not be alive today.

Maybe it doesn't seem clear to our sedentary and glutton generation but the ability of the body to store excess calories as fat is a key of our survival. So is the ability to burn body fat at a steady rate, neither slower or faster occording to how many carbs one eats.

Have you ever wondered why insulin is high after eating proteins
or carbohydrates? Insulin is high because it is supposed to send
the amino acids and the glucose molecules in the cells.

Insulin is not a fat storage hormone !

Insulin is a transporter which either transports nutrients to the cells
or either transport fats to the adipocytes. It can't do both at the same time.

When there are amino acids and/or glucose in the blood insulin is secreted to transport these nutrients to the cells. Once the job is done insulin goes back to normal levels.

If the cells are full (hence an excess of calories) insulin tranports the molecules to the adipocytes where fat is stored.

It's absolutely ignorant and unscientific to believe that insulin can
trigger fat storage per se, even if there's no excess of calories and
that insulin means high storage.

Maybe you don't know that insulin also stores proteins as fat if there's an excess of calories. And maybe you don't know that a protein called ASP store dietary fat as fat if there's an excess of calories.

Dietary fat is glycerol and fatty acids and body fat is glycerol and fatty acid. In other words dietary fat remains the most easy to store as fat for the body and even if you eat nothing but butter, if you eat an excess of calories from butter, you gain weight, period.

The convertion of carbohydrates to fat is a very weak and irrelevant pathway. Under normal condition carbohydrates are never coverted to fat.
Something is needed to trigger such pathway and to increase the efficiency of carbs to fat conversion. This something is "too many calories"

But even if someone accepted the unscientific belief that insulin
triggers fat storage even when calories are normal or low, the whole
idea still would not make any sense.

If you eat carbs and the body instead of burning those calories store them as fat where your body is supposed to get the calories to function? From the stored body fat!

Hence if really insulin would trigger a fat storing mode it would
still promote fat loss by FORCING the body to use the body fat calories
instead of the carb calories as they're being stored and can't be burned.

If instead one believes that the body store carbohydrates calories
as body fat (just because of insulin presence) but doesn't take the
calories from body fat burning, then one must believe that the body
can't get the energy it needs to survive from carbohydrates.

If that scenario were true than having high insulin immediately after eating carbs would kill you in a matter of hours.

Both the ideas are completely ridiculous and the only option is that
indeed INSULIN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BODY FAT AND WEIGHT GAIN.

There are an host of fat storing enzymes, proteins and hormones in the body and their job is to store EXCESS CALORIES as body fat.

If there's no EXCESS CALORIES there's nothing to store. Storing normal calories that are not in excess would either result in almost instant death or in weight loss.

Even without looking at the long term metabolic ward studies that show that there's no difference in weight gain or weight loss when a group
of people consumes a certain amount of calories as high-carb meals
and another group consumes the same amount of calories as high-fat low-carb meals or the studies that show that feeding the same amount of calories to people with chronically high insulin levels has no effect in their fat gain compared to feeding the same amount of calories to people
with low insulin levels; it is simple a matter of logic.

His ideas on exercise are absurd. All studies show that when diet is accompained by exercise even if exercise increases appetite the calories
intake (mediated by this appetite) is still lower than the calories consumed during the exercise. In other words exercise does promote fat loss.

Not to mention that many people lose weight from diet just to find
themselves switching from overweight and fat to skinny and flabby.
The reason is that dieting and losing weight is just a component
of what is needed to become lean, thin and healthy.

Building lean body mass and preventing lead body mass loss while losing fat is even more important than dieting to really take advantage of the fat loss. Many people are dissatisfied with their fat loss because losing fat just allow them to uncover the skinny person below that fat. It's muscles that make people (either men, women or children) lean, firm and toned and remove the flabbiness and sagginess.

Fat-phobia was a nonsense but this carb-phobia is not any different
and almost dumber. Low carb diets work. They work because fat
(for many) is satiating and filling.

People who are lean by nature and never seem to gain fat are
gifted. They're not genetically gifted though! Their gift is an intact
instinct that allows them to know when they're in an energy balance and
to eat accordingly to such instinct.

Many people seem to restore such instinct when they lower their carbs intake and raise their fat intake and it makes sense, since we were never meant to consume 10% fat diets that only by artificially removing the fat from every food on earth can be accomplished.

Also people who have problems with their sugar metabolism become victims of the physiologically raveous hunger. Decreasing carbs, increasing fats and getting a better glycemic control allow them to remove such ravenous unhealthy hunger.

There are good reasons to choose to lower carbs and eat more fats.
The nonsensical, illogical and (if true) counterproductive to survival,
magical effect of low carb diets is not one of them!

Weight gain and fat gain still depend on an energy balance and besides
the studies and evidences proving this, it is also the only logical
way the body could work as any other way would result in metabolically
dangerous messy circumstances.

Carbohydrates and insulin are not evil and without insulin we would be dead. And this is way people on no-carb diets still have as much insulin in their body as any person eating 50% carbs.

If you look at the data from 100 years ago you can see that we ate MORE CARBS and consumed little less calories but were very physical active and daily sedentarity was unknown. Whenever we wanted to reach a place, fix something, spend free time, spend time with friends, play, work ... it involved physical activity.

Only nowadays physical activity is such an option and a person doesn't
get bored or does get things done even without physical activities.
We consume more calories and are very sedentary and this is enough to explain the weight loss incidence of the last years.

This is a very important book. As my father, who developed type 1 diabetes at age 55, said to me when I was embarking on a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, "Any diabetic can tell you that it's carbohydrates that will kill you." I was eventually scared off the Atkins diet by my doctor who said it was ultimately dangerous - even though my blood test results while on the diet could not have been more perfect. With this book, Taubes has given me the knowledge to go back to eating the way that I felt was best for me.

I will warn that anyone reading this book will be angered by learning how a "consensus" of scientists, who based their theories on cherry-picked statistics, felt they could ignore conflicting data, discredit any researcher who opposed them and ultimately persuade the government, with the help of the press, into forcing the public to adopt a diet that has made most of us overweight and unhealthy.

This story eerily parallels the current subject of global warming and I hope that Taubes will eventually want to challenge the conventional wisdom underpinning that as well.

After years about writing about how great whole grains, beans, and starch are, I read this book and have stopped in my tracks...what do I do now? There is not an editor of a health magazine who I know who would allow me to write about what Taubes is saying, although he is so clearly right. And I am not sure I could now bring myself to write another article advocating people replace meat with soy substitutes or fill 2/3 of their plate with whole grains and vegetables. Policy makers, lawyers (some of whom wrote the current food pyramid) and those (magazine editors, chefs, activists) who have strong feelings against the consumption of animal protein have created a crisis in this country that's nearly beyond control - reading Taubes' amazing book made me see this so clearly. His discussion of fiber is especially eye opening. What an amazing piece of research and writing. Thank you Gary Taubes.
Karen Kelly
www.karenkellywriter.com

What a fantastic book. It challenges the hypothesis that we will all be saved from modern day "chronic" disease if we only eat a low fat diet and high carbohydrate diet. The author is very detailed about showing how this hypothesis was been pushed at the American public without the scientific studies to back it up while supported scientific studies refute this hypothesis. The author presents his research in a rather technical manner in order to demonstrate that he is "not making up" his conclusions. Being a diabetic that has learned from 20 years of trial and error with eating habits, I know that the author is correct in indicating that the high carbohydrate diet of this country is the main contributor to heart, stroke, diabetes, obesity and maybe even cancer rates over the last several decades. Having strongly limited my carbohyddrate intake for the last several years, while not worrying about my protein or fat intake, I now have an acceptable cholesterol level, an HDL level to be envied, blood sugar levels in the normal range and no signs of the chronic progressive processes of being a diabetic. "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is a book to challenge anyone interested in learning how our food intake is used by the body and how it contributes to many disease processes. The author is not going to tell you what kind of a diet you should eat. He will leave that decision up to you.

Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories is not a diet book. Instead, the author systematically reviews more than a century of scientific research on the relationship between food, obesity, and disease. His insights are startling--and life changing.

I first learned of Good Calories, Bad Calories when I heard a radio interview of the author in September 2007. The information presented was provocative, and I borrowed a copy of the new book from my local public library. (I had to wait in line for a month to borrow the book.)

Though an avid reader, I needed the entire three weeks allowed by my library to work my way through this substantial book. Good Calories, Bad Calories is rich with scientific detail, well written for a non-scientific readership. Still, it is full of science, however well explained. I am no scientist, and unaccustomed to reading scientific material (it's decades since I had any science classes), so this was not an easy read for me. It was well worth the effort.

I admit I expected diet recommendations. Gary Taubes does not deliver these. Instead, he provides a solid scientific foundation as to the causes of obesity and the so-called diseases of civilization. The blame is laid squarely--and convincingly--on the proliferation of highly refined carbohydrates in the modern diet.

Other reviewers describe Gary Taubes' masterful debunking of the "bad science" common in obesity research. While this is certainly critical to the book's credibility, readers can learn this for themselves. What I would rather offer is my personal testimonial.

I had always dismissed the "Atkins revolution" low carb phenomenon as merely a fad diet. Proselytizing friends sang its praises to me, and I ignored them as if they were crazed cult members. But after reading Taubes' book, for the first time I was convinced. For the first time, I had a sound, scientifically supported explanation for the causes of weight gain--and weight loss.

Once convinced, I found it easy to act on my convictions. I read and re-read the studies Taubes cited on weight gain--showing that weight gain results directly from spikes in insulin levels, which in turn result from the spikes in blood sugar due to the intake of carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates. Just as carefully, I studied the research on weight loss--showing that weight loss results not from the so-called "negative energy balance" of expending more calories than one consumes--a popular myth supported by questionable science--but rather that weight loss occurs reliably when carbohydrates are avoided, regardless of the amount of calories consumed. I also found the research demonstrating the relationship between carbohydrate intake and the "diseases of civilization" (diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, etc.) intriguing. Relying on the principles elucidated in the research, I formulated my own food plan.

Before reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, I was 60 pounds overweight after a 14-year unvarying rising curve of weight gain. One month after returning the book to the library, I dared to step on the scale. Down five pounds. Now, after another three months, down twenty pounds. I see no reason this trend will not continue until I reach a healthy weight. Last month I ordered my own copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories from Amazon.com.

I suppose Gary Taubes did not intend his book to be used as a diet plan. He certainly makes no diet recommendations for his readers. Rather, his book is presented as a cry for more research--and especially more scrupulous research. Nevertheless, I thank Gary Taubes for having the courage to go public, to challenge the media and the medical community, to show them--and all of us--where science went wrong and betrayed us. And to point us back on the right track, to scrupulous, unbiased scientific research--to trade bad science for good science.

I recommend For Today and For The Original Overeaters Anonymous Very Low Carbohydrate Food Plan: Greysheet Recipes. They are beautiful books. I bought "For the Original OA..." because I'm on the very low carb food plan. It has great recipes. I really like the protein and vegetable recipes. I can never think of enough things to do with vegetables. Now I know what other people are cooking. I'm glad to learn more about phone and in person meetings. I never knew where the term "greysheet" came from. I have wanted to learn more about it for a long time.

I wanted to leave a short review of this book from a working scientist's point of view and I hope this helps clear up the confusion caused by the reviewers who gave this book a poor rating. It's a sad fact that (although there are many wonderful exceptions) nutritionists, dietitians and doctors are not (or practically never) trained to the highest levels in the "hard sciences" - physics, mathematics and chemistry. And it is therefore difficult for them to analyze data, compare and understand statistics and critically evaluate a hypothesis to the extent that scientists do on a regular basis. If you need any convincing of this, consider the ubiquity of books proclaiming to teach statistics without maths (and without "tears"!) on this website. In the case of doctors, there is a good reason why they don't examine every fact they are taught - their's is an enormous field of study and the demands of time mean that much is taken on trust from textbooks, professors, etc. But those claiming qualifications in nutrition science or dietetics have absolutely NO excuse for their ignorance.
Gary Taubes, a Harvard educated physicist, has trawled the evidence on diet and health from it's very beginnings, reanalyzed data and examined original sources. His examination of the central ideas in these fields is exemplary and flawless, and I say that as a mathematical scientist myself. It is true: there are people who have given counter arguments and rebuttals to his arguments in this review section. But, to put it simply, they are talking nonsense. For example, the pathetic reference to the "physics law of energy" (which I am assuming intends The First Law of Thermodynamics) is a case in point. This law no more proves that all calories are the same than it shows that lamps enjoy an occasional political debate. Taubes grasp of science far exceeds these conformity addled degenerates. Buy this book, read it and finally understand. I implore you.

It's utterly amazing how far off we humans have gotten, despite all our incredible technology and research abilities. It's almost criminal how things have gotten out of hand. My father's cholesterol, thanks to Lipitor, has been bought down to barely above 100, and still his doctor prescribes it. Gosh, maybe he can get it down to zero and live forever! And diabetics who are urged to eat whole wheat pasta. Oh, THAT'LL help their blood sugar. Wake up world!

The central thesis of the book is that weight gain is determined by hormonal regulation of fat tissue and not by calories-in-calories-out. The culprits are carbohydrates because they affect insulin levels. Carbohydrate consumption stimulates the production of insulin; fats do not. The importance of this is that, according to Taubes, "Insulin, in short, is the one hormone that serves to coordinate and regulate everything having to do with the storage and use of nutrients and thus the maintenance of homeostasis and, in a word, life."

This is a great book with great research and when thoughtfully considered can alter your health for life.

This book is a revelation! I've suspected for quite a while that what we've been fed by the medical community, government organizations, and the press has been half truths at best. A chance to understand what the data has been saying (and what it has not) all along sheds a lot of light on the whole issue of the "diseases of civilization" as the book calls them. This should be required reading for medical practitioners and all those who believe they are on the right dietary course with their "starvation" eating regimens. Highly Recommended.

This mountainous work shows that the low-fat, high-carb diets recommended for everyone, even diabetics of both kinds, had no real evidence to recommend them. Rather empirical observations, animal tests, and a large number of human trials or observational studies leave no doubt that low-carb, high fat diets can reverse obesity, reverse the symptoms of diabetes, prevent cardiovascular disease and, believe it or not, cancer.

The 485 pages of text are well-referenced (but still with some key citations missing), not by numbered citations, but by a section that allows looking up by page number which citation supports which claim (better than most citation methods); then one can find by author's last name and date the original reference.

In giving quotations of many of Taubes' conclusions, I am leaving out the almost excruciating detail from his literature searching.

Taubes and others found that the value of low-carb diets for reversing obesity was known by observation between 1810-1865 in Vienna, Paris and London. Studies of isolated ethnic groups confirmed this by 1940 and more afterwards. Human and animal trials further confirmed this by 1965, as shown by Taubes, to the point that Richard K. Bernstein, MD, was able to confirm the value of low-carb, high-fat diets in diabetics of both kinds, including himself, in 1965. His book "Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution", latest ed. 2003, was conspicuously missing in Taubes' citations. Toward the very end, in the Epilogue, Taubes lamented the absence of good trials of low-carb diets, especially in diabetics. One good one (of many) that lasted 22 months found that a 20% carb diet was superior to a 55-50% carb diet (the USDA, ADbA, AHA, FDA recommendations) in weight control and several other indicators of health (HbA1c, creatinine, etc.) as in Nielsen JV, Joensson E, Low-carbohydrate diet in type 2 diabetes... Nutr Metab 2006;3:22-26. Also missing. Many other trials claiming little for low-carb in their abstracts and conclusions actually had supporting data for low-carb in the body of each paper.

The mindset of the pseudoscientists who recommended high-carb diets for all after 1965 and to the present time was sought by Taubes. "It's simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the last 50 years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science... they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their work, [but the results do not add up to science as we know it]." (p451)

So Taubes found that carb intake of glucose (or starches that are converted to it) increase the body's production of insulin. Insulin prevents the use of stored fat for energy and makes more fat. He found that Americans really consumed more carb and less fat, as instructed by the diet dictocrats exercising media control, between 1971 and 2000, and became fatter (p233), as should have been an obvious outcome. Taubes also carefully dismissed any dangers of dietary cholesterol.

Another issue is whether obesity has ever been due to overeating as opposed to a genetic defect exacerbated by the availability of cheap carbs. Taubes gave tons of evidence for the genetic plus carbs answer. Studies in test animals supported this as well, and the biochemistry of it is now well-known.

Along the way, Taubes also showed how fructose, especially from high-fructose corn syrup, adds to obesity; how carbs are carcinogenic as well as atherogenic; and how some of the low-fat dogma came from outright fraud, as from Dr. Ancel Keys' 6 then 7 country study.

Taubes has a 10-point summary on p454; not all can be listed here.
"1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart diease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
"4. Through their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar, refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes [should have been Type 2 only]. They are the most likely causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and the other chronic diseases of civilization.
"5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior."

However, this phenomenal work still missed some issues. (1) Grain allergies. From 10-40% of Americans have grain allergies, and this is to whole grains. (2) Whole grains have every bit the glycemic load of refined grains, and often almost as high a glycemic index. (3) Fruit of high sugar or fructose level is not a benefit, as implied. (4) The role of increased leptin as a satiation factor when glucose is eaten, but not when fructose was eaten, was not covered; rather, the role of fructose in generating glycerol phosphate was given. Leptin was mentioned in passing on p xxiii. (5) Fat was invariably said to provide 9 calories per gram. The reality is 5.5-9.1 kcal per gram, with saturated fats at the lower end and the brainlessly recommended (by the AHA, etc.) polyunsatured fats of vegetable oils at 8.5 kcal per gram. Animal fat is quite healthful, while the polys have been shown to be both atherogenic and carcinogenic. (6) It was never clear where the calories eaten in a low-carb, high fat diet went, since they did not lead to obesity. (7) Surely in 485 pp of text a couple could have been devoted to recommending the best fats for a high-fat diet, but I did not see this.

Not that many of you are really going to read the 485 pp of text. For about 200 pages of easy-to-read text, the following books are recommended: (1) Ravnskov U, The Cholesterol Myths, 2000; (2) Allan CB, Lutz W, Life Without Bread, 2000; (3) Ottoboni A, Ottoboni F, The Modern Nutritional Diseases, 2001; (4) Groves B, Natural Health & Weight Loss, 2007.
The 350-pager by Anthony Colpo, The Great Cholesterol Con, 2007, is easy to read and solid. The 400-pager, including recipes, The Protein Power Lifeplan, by Eades MR, Eades MD, 2000, is also realistic about fat.

An eye-opening book. I feel like I've mislead for decades on what constitutes a healthy diet. Since seeing the science behind it, I'm no longer scared of a low carb diet. I'm seeing my health improve and I'm starting my children off on the right foot... no more sugar or flour in this household.

The author backs up all his claim with science. You will be shocked to find out how we have been misled by the FDA and food manufactures. Even well meaning doctors are misled.

While one review said:

"People in many countries have lived on diets consisting of almost 100% starches, rice, potatoes, corn. None of these populations ever had a high incidence of cancer, heart disease, or diabetes."

This person is misinformed and did not understand that there are many other factors - like for example these people are basically starving and can't get anything else to eat. Plus these people get way more exercise that we do. This person does not understand how science relates cause and effect, and just wants to justify staying fat.
Fat does not make you fat! This is just a scientific fact. As for heart disease the evidence is SLIM to NONE at best. And of course fat "cures" diabetes (does not really cure, but if you ate no carbs you would not need insulin.

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is an astonishing book. Mr. Taubes is a well respected science writer, not a scientist himself, but in his work he has to review and evaluate science on a daily basis. In this book he asks questions and provides information about cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among other topics. Taubes does not make conclusions as such but provides thought provoking information about how national health policy probably has erred for more than forty years on just what a good diet contains. This is a must read for anyone, but especially for people who have weight problems, cholesterol problems, and even Type 2 diabetes.

There is little more that can be added to the reviews posted already. This book is on my "must read" list. Read it, then send it to every internist, general practioner, "nutrionist," "dietician," and in particular, Type II Diabetic, that you know. Inundate the offices of the American Diabetes Association with copies. Get the word out. You will be saving lives! I waited for this book for 5 years after reading Gary Taubes's articles in Science and the New York Times. Taubes and Bob Atkins are two of my personal heroes. I appreciate having at hand the science I need to support what my personal experience has already shown, that Type II Diabetes and obesity are the result of a metabolic disorder and a defect in the insulin mechanism of the body, and, in my case, a strong genetic factor. Cut carbs, eat fab, and feel fabulous!

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight, and Disease (Vintage) (or "The Diet Delusion" in the UK) is an amazing book.
It shows how and why scientific data was ignored, ridiculed and diminished, and how a bunch of unverified hypotheses were fed to the public as the holy writ of eating healthy.
A must for anybody who cares for their own health, or is interested in how politic works even outside politics.