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Author Topic:   Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 151 of 451 (468999)
06-02-2008 7:31 PM
Reply to: Message 149 by randman
06-02-2008 7:02 PM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
The biggest problem of nutritional research is the complexity and interrelatedness of human metabolism. It has proven exceedingly difficult to find the underlying metabolic pathways responsible for what we observe with respect to health at a macro level in populations that adhere to modern western diets.
That being said, the failure of the dietary fat hypothesis cannot be denied, because the US essentially carried out an experiment using the American people as guinea pigs who now suffer under the weight of this bad decision (literally ).
--Percy

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 Message 149 by randman, posted 06-02-2008 7:02 PM randman has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 152 by randman, posted 06-03-2008 12:47 AM Percy has replied

randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4898 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 152 of 451 (469020)
06-03-2008 12:47 AM
Reply to: Message 151 by Percy
06-02-2008 7:31 PM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
That being said, the failure of the dietary fat hypothesis cannot be denied, because the US essentially carried out an experiment using the American people as guinea pigs who now suffer under the weight of this bad decision (literally ).
Percy, I hope you receive this in a positive manner but while I agree wholeheartedly with you, it's not really an experiment current science would accept. It can be an impetus to more studies, but imo, the limitations of science prevents it from considering whether the current population had indeed carried out this experiment since there is no scientific verification it is so. It would theoritically be true everyone thinks they cut fat and ate more carbs all the while eating more fat.
Personally, this reminds of where the proof is in the pudding so to speak with developing a relationship with the Lord. Imo, it is eminently reasonable to accept people's personal testimonies of their spiritual experiences as real. That doesn't mean they cannot be interpreted or qualified but the idea they are merely delusions I reject as unreasonable. It's in some sense a real experiment in the life of people.
But it's not a scientific experiment, and neither is the claim concerning Americans adopting a low fat diet. That doesn't make the claim untrue. Science is not the arbiter of truth and is very limited, but just the same....
Edited by randman, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 151 by Percy, posted 06-02-2008 7:31 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 153 by Percy, posted 06-03-2008 7:58 AM randman has not replied
 Message 154 by Percy, posted 06-03-2008 9:27 AM randman has replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 153 of 451 (469041)
06-03-2008 7:58 AM
Reply to: Message 152 by randman
06-03-2008 12:47 AM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
randman writes:
Percy, I hope you receive this in a positive manner but while I agree wholeheartedly with you, it's not really an experiment current science would accept.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly that this isn't a *scientific* experiment. It's being conducted by the government, after all, not scientists. That doesn't make the American public any less guinea pigs.
But the increases in obesity and diabetes across all segments of society during the same period when the dietary fat hypothesis has held sway call it into serious question, and in his book Taubes calls for more research into the carbohydrate hypothesis, which has received insufficient attention because nutritional science believes the culprit has already been identified.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 152 by randman, posted 06-03-2008 12:47 AM randman has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 154 of 451 (469051)
06-03-2008 9:27 AM
Reply to: Message 152 by randman
06-03-2008 12:47 AM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
Here's a short quote from Taubes' 2002 New York Times article, What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, which he wrote while working on his more recent book (access to the article may require a subscription, but it's free). This describes the current state of dietary health research:
Taubes writes:
Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate.
If you've read through the entire thread then you'll recall that I earlier noted that Michael Pollan, another science/health writer and author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, likened the current state of diet/health research to the state of science in 1650.
Here's another quote from Taubes' NYT article that contains a few interesting statistics about the increases in obesity and diabetes:
Taubes writes:
With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of obese Americans 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. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese. That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes and now, for the obvious reason, is not.
Here's another excerpt about the involvement of the US government:
Taubes writes:
The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of "killer diseases" supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become "this greasy killer" in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates.
Those of us over a certain age have no trouble recalling the period when eggs were evil. Then, "Oops, changed our mind, what do you know, there's these things we didn't understand well enough before called LDLs and HDLs, and eggs are good for keeping them in the right ratio. So sorry. You can go back to your eggs now."
So we have a macro-level observation that causing the population to reduce fat intake while encouraging the consumption of refined carbohydrates makes it fatter and more diabetic, but we're having incredible difficulty identifying the causative metabolic pathways within the body.
The macro-level observation of increased levels of obesity and diabetes coincident with increased intake of refined carbohydrates cannot be denied, but the cause/effect relationship at a metabolic level is proving exceedingly difficult to tease out.
What these excerpts also make clear is that Taubes is not claiming he has a cure for obesity, diabetes and heart disease, the so called diseases of western civilization, and neither is he claiming that carbohydrates are their sole cause. What he's saying is that it is carbohydrates and not dietary fat that is most responsible for these diseases of western civilization.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 152 by randman, posted 06-03-2008 12:47 AM randman has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 155 by randman, posted 06-03-2008 9:59 AM Percy has replied

randman 
Suspended Member (Idle past 4898 days)
Posts: 6367
Joined: 05-26-2005


Message 155 of 451 (469052)
06-03-2008 9:59 AM
Reply to: Message 154 by Percy
06-03-2008 9:27 AM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
I remember when they said eggs were bad and also that margerine was better than butter. Never believed mainstream science for a minute on that although I do think you can eat too much fat if you eat too many carbs, and by that, I have found the combinations of food to be very important. If I cut my carbs down, the fat doesn't bother me, but if I eat fatty meals along with carbs, it does.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 154 by Percy, posted 06-03-2008 9:27 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 156 by Percy, posted 06-03-2008 10:56 AM randman has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 156 of 451 (469055)
06-03-2008 10:56 AM
Reply to: Message 155 by randman
06-03-2008 9:59 AM


Re: Incorrect Assertions
randman writes:
I remember when they said eggs were bad and also that margerine was better than butter.
The butter/margarine issue is a situation similar to eggs. This has been described not by Taubes but by the aforementioned Michael Pollan, who notes that given what we know today, margarine is bad for you and butter is good for you. Sorry, I don't recall the details.
Never believed mainstream science for a minute on that although I do think you can eat too much fat if you eat too many carbs, and by that, I have found the combinations of food to be very important.
Pollan has a name for the practice of choosing foods by their nutritional content—he calls it nutritionism. I guess you stick "ism" on the end of anything and it sounds evil, but he has a point. While not true until I started this diet, I now buy food based upon the nutrition label. Anything that has more than 15 grams of carbohydrates per serving is disallowed, and I'm trying to stay below 70 grams of carbohydrates daily.
If I cut my carbs down, the fat doesn't bother me, but if I eat fatty meals along with carbs, it does.
The worst possible combination is high carbs with high fat. A nice greasy pork fried rice is ideal for gaining weight.
--Percy

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 Message 155 by randman, posted 06-03-2008 9:59 AM randman has not replied

molbiogirl
Member (Idle past 2641 days)
Posts: 1909
From: MO
Joined: 06-06-2007


(1)
Message 157 of 451 (469221)
06-04-2008 3:30 PM
Reply to: Message 148 by Percy
06-02-2008 5:13 PM


Carbs are the SOLE cause of cancer and Alzheimer's
Taubes may give himself a little wiggle room with his "most likely" in his epilogue, but, in his Sugar Shock interview, he states UNEQUIVOCALLY that non-Western folks (who eat a traditional diet) do not get cancer and that the reason for this is the lack of refined starches/sugars.
Let’s take a closer look at that claim.
Paleo-Oncology: The role of ancient remains in the study of cancer
Edward C. Halperin
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 47.1 (2004) 1-14
Dinosaurs.
A 70-million-year-old dinosaur bone from Transylvania in the British Museum contains a periosteal osteogenic sarcoma.
Non human primates.
A number of case reports, small series, and large autopsy series describe cancer in nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, cynomolgus monkeys, marmosets, baboons, rhesus monkeys, African green monkeys, and a variety of other macaques.
The malignancies described include non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, nephroblastoma (Wilms' tumor), plasmocytoma, pituitary adenoma, ovarian carcinoma, large bowel adenocarcinoma, and mammary carcinoma (Amyx et al. 1982; Baskerville et al. 1984; Baskin et al. 1982; Bennett, Beluhan, and Welsh 1982; Betton 1984; Blanchard and Watson 1988; Crews, Kerber, and Feinman 1967; Gleiser et al. 1984; Hubbard et al. 1984, 1985; Seibold and Wolf 1973).
Our ancestors.
Perhaps the earliest example of malignant tumor in a hominid is the Kanam mandibular fragment from East Africa, which was recovered by Louis Leakey in 1932 and probably belongs to a hominid that lived in the Lower/Middle Pleistocene era, 500,000 to one million years ago (Aufderheide and Rodriguez-Martin 1998; Strathapoulos 1975).
The ancient Greeks.
One such description is that by Herodotus who mentions that Queen Atossa (Persian) "had a tumor on her breast that burst open and was slowly spreading". In addition, the Greek Hippocratic school physician described "a woman had a karkinoma (cancer) developed in the breast"
Other ancients societies.
Other examples of possible osteogenic sarcomas in antiquity include a Fifth Dynasty Egyptian femur and humeri, a Neolithic skeleton from Italy, a Swiss Iron Age skeleton with a humeral tumor, a femur from a Saxon grave, a fifth-century CE femur from a Visigoth in Spain, and an extensive tumor of a pre-Columbian Peruvian skull (Aufderheide and Rodriguez-Martin 1998; Brothwell 1967; Micozzi 1991).
Cases of multiple myeloma have been described in both a Pyrenees and a Danish late Neolithic skull, a Hungarian 10th- to 11th-century grave site, a British medieval skull, and in New World pre-Columbian specimens (Brothwell 1967; Deeley 1983). A few ancient cases of Ewing's sarcoma have also been reported (Aufderheide and Rodriguez-Martin 1998).
Gerszten and Allison (1988) reported a cheek rhabdomyosarcoma in a 12- to 18-month-old male mummy from northern Chile (300-600 CE). Several Peruvian Incan mummies, some estimated to be 2,400 years old, show cutaneous malignant melanoma with widespread bony metastases (Urteaga and Pack 1966).
You know how it is. Those damn ancient Peruvians and their carbo loading.
Alzheimer's, of course, cannot be traced thru the fossil record.
But let's take a closer look at his evidence for Alzheimer's.
Pages 152, 204-5, 223, 453.
Hey. Whaddayouknow. Not a thing about non-Western folks and Alzheimer's. The best he can do is point to immigrant Japanese and Africans.
Yet he feels comfortable stating, without hesitation, that non-Western folks "do not get demented".
Taubes not only trashes the science that he quotemines, he lies in his interviews.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 148 by Percy, posted 06-02-2008 5:13 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 158 by bluescat48, posted 06-04-2008 3:52 PM molbiogirl has replied

bluescat48
Member (Idle past 4189 days)
Posts: 2347
From: United States
Joined: 10-06-2007


Message 158 of 451 (469228)
06-04-2008 3:52 PM
Reply to: Message 157 by molbiogirl
06-04-2008 3:30 PM


Re: Carbs are the SOLE cause of cancer and Alzheimer's
BRAVO!!!! Excellent post

There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002
Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

This message is a reply to:
 Message 157 by molbiogirl, posted 06-04-2008 3:30 PM molbiogirl has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 159 by Percy, posted 06-04-2008 6:20 PM bluescat48 has not replied
 Message 161 by molbiogirl, posted 06-05-2008 4:22 AM bluescat48 has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 159 of 451 (469243)
06-04-2008 6:20 PM
Reply to: Message 158 by bluescat48
06-04-2008 3:52 PM


Re: Carbs are the SOLE cause of cancer and Alzheimer's
bluescat48 writes:
BRAVO!!!! Excellent post
What am I missing?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 158 by bluescat48, posted 06-04-2008 3:52 PM bluescat48 has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 160 of 451 (469256)
06-04-2008 8:28 PM


Taubes' Message
Molbiogirl has Taubes' book in her possession and has no excuse for the misrepresentations she is making. This is from the prologue to Good Calories, Bad Calories, page xxvii:
Taubes writes:
The reason for this book is straightforward: despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount. "There is always an easy solution to every human problem," H. L. Mencken once said—"neat, plausible, and wrong." It is quite possible, despite all our faith to the contrary, that these concepts are such neat, plausible, and wrong solutions. Moreover, it's also quite possible that the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets we've been told to eat for the past thirty years are not only making us heavier but contributing to other chronic diseases as well.
When Taubes talks about carbohydrates causing obesity, diabetes and heart disease he is talking in the context of the diseases of western civilization. His meaning is never that carbohydrates are *the* cause of these diseases, but that they, and not dietary fat, are the primary cause of elevated levels of these diseases in western civilization.
--Percy

molbiogirl
Member (Idle past 2641 days)
Posts: 1909
From: MO
Joined: 06-06-2007


Message 161 of 451 (469334)
06-05-2008 4:22 AM
Reply to: Message 158 by bluescat48
06-04-2008 3:52 PM


Re: Carbs are the SOLE cause of cancer and Alzheimer's
Thank you, Bluescat.
Taubes is such a charlatan.
Actions speak louder than words.
He can waffle all he likes in his book, but when he speaks to the general public, Taubes lies like a mofo. Who's going to call him on it? The Sugar Shock audience?
Earlier in this thread, Percy posted this lecture as a fine example of Taubes' thinking. And, interestingly, Taubes begins his lecture with his non-Western schtick.
Here are some snippets to illustrate just how shockingly bad his reasoning is.
5:59.
One of the arguments against the hypothesis I am going to present to you is that it is too simple therefore it must be wrong and my counter argument is why is obesity research exempt from Occam’s razor - if you have a simple hypothesis that explains your observations why not go for it? So here’s the pseudoscience of obesity as I see it.
(Taubes quotes a scientist and shows a graph.)
7:54
So this implies a corollary to the overeating hypothesis. Prosperity makes us fat. One way this is phrased is by Kelly Brown (?) who is the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity - he calls it the toxic environment theory that encourages overeating and physical inactivity. Basically we are so wealthy and there is so much junk food around that we don’t have to hunt down wooly mammoths anymore. You know, we don’t have to work for our food so we don’t have to expend enough energy.
(Taubes quotes Kelly.)
(Taubes quotes WHO stats.)
9:52
These people are saying it’s (overeating and sedentary lifestyle + obesity) happening simultaneously so it must be cause and effect - and no it musn’t be cause and effect. So let’s see what’s really happening. One of the things I did in my research and one of the things you do in science is you look for observations, you look for phenomena that the hypothesis can’t explain . and this is what I call the Fat Louisa Paradox.
Taubes explains that, over 150 years ago, Native Americans (the Pima) were prosperous and thin -- and that when they lost their land and were herded onto reservations (and thus became abjectly poor) they got fat.
Taubes then goes on to claim that prosperity CAN’T be the cause of obesity because the Pima were prosperous and they were skinny! (13:12)
Like the physicist said, that’s so wrong it’s not even wrong.
He compares -- with a straight face, mind you! -- 21st century American prosperity with mid 19th century (1846) Pima prosperity. (11:22)
It gets even worse after that.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 158 by bluescat48, posted 06-04-2008 3:52 PM bluescat48 has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 162 of 451 (469358)
06-05-2008 8:33 AM


The Pima Indians: What Taubes Really Says
In his lecture at the University of California, Berkeley on November 27, 2007, titled The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care, Gary Taubes uses the Pima Indians as one of his examples, in this case to make the point that it is the composition of diet and not prosperity, with its coincident overeating and sedentary lifestyles, that is responsible for general obesity in a population.
About the Pima in 1846 Taubes says in this lecture:
Taubes writes:
They were perhaps the most affluent native American tribe in America. They hunted and fished, they got fish and clams from the Gila River, they hunted widely from the fields, they raised their own crops.
But the Pima lived on a primary east/west trade route, and when the gold rush began in earnest in the 1850s the Pima's fortunes took a turn for the worse. Eventually they were moved to a government reservation, their diet consisting primarily of government rations, which Taubes thinks means that as much as 50% of their calories came from carbohydrate sources like sugar and flour.
Taubes traces the fortunes of the Pima tribe in order to eliminate the possibility of a genetic component. As he asks in his lecture:
Taubes writes:
So here's an example, here's an observation, about the prosperity, overeating hypothesis. Why would they be lean when they have an abundance of food, and fat when they're so poor that the only way they can survive is to get government rations from the US government?
At no point does Taubes draw any direct comparison between the nature of the prosperity of the pre-1850 Pima with modern 21st century prosperity, and especially not at 11:22 of the lecture as Molbiogirl claims, which is where Taubes says this:
Taubes at 11:22 writes:
And the Pima at the time, interestingly enough, had gone from being extraordinarily prosperous to extraordinarily impoverished. Now remember that our hypothesis is that prosperity causes obesity, but in 1846 a battalion went through Pima territories...etc...
He simply never makes the comparison with modern prosperity that Molbiogirl claims he did. He is making the point that prosperity doesn't necessarily correlate with obesity, and that poverty does not necessarily correlate with leanness, and he does this to support his position that it is the composition of the diet that is the most significant factor, specifically the proportion of carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates.
--Percy

Replies to this message:
 Message 163 by bluegenes, posted 06-05-2008 12:36 PM Percy has replied
 Message 164 by PaulK, posted 06-05-2008 1:48 PM Percy has replied

bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2476 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 163 of 451 (469399)
06-05-2008 12:36 PM
Reply to: Message 162 by Percy
06-05-2008 8:33 AM


Re: The Pima Indians: What Taubes Really Says
Percy writes:
He is making the point that prosperity doesn't necessarily correlate with obesity, and that poverty does not necessarily correlate with leanness
Here in the U.K. at the moment, obesity seems to be more likely the lower down the socio-economic scale people are.
I think the main problem for the Pima might have been that they stopped hunting, fishing and farming, all good exercise, but kept on eating. I mention this because what strikes foreigners about Americans is that you've stopped walking from A to B, but you keep on eating.
Humans evolved walking, and probably walking a lot. It's something we should do. What does Taubes say about exercise?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 162 by Percy, posted 06-05-2008 8:33 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 165 by Percy, posted 06-05-2008 2:06 PM bluegenes has not replied

PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 164 of 451 (469411)
06-05-2008 1:48 PM
Reply to: Message 162 by Percy
06-05-2008 8:33 AM


Re: The Pima Indians: What Taubes Really Says
I've resisted the temptation to comment up to now, seeing flaws on both sides.
But surely the comparison is implicit in Taubes' point. Obviously he is bringing up the Pima tribe as a counter to the assertion that modern prosperity is a cause of obesity.
This article makes some interesting points:
The Pima Indians maintained much of their traditional way of life and economy until the late 19th century, when their water supply was diverted by American farmers settling upstream,
In the 1890s, the traditional Pima Indian diet consisted of only about 15 percent fat and was high in starch and fiber, but currently almost 40 percent of the calories in the Pima diet is derived from fat. As the typical American diet became more available on the reservation after the war, people became more overweight.
...Out of 35 Mexican Pimas studied, only three had diabetes and the population as a whole was not overweight, according to Ravussin....
"We've learned from this study of the Mexican Pimas that if the Pima Indians of Arizona could return to some of their traditions, including a high degree of physical activity and a diet with less fat and more starch, we might be able to reduce the rate, and surely the severity, of unhealthy weight in most of the population," Ravussin says.
Of course the point about prosperity is that it permits a sedentary life and a high-calorie diet. If the Pima were unable to hunt or farm, instead relying on handouts of lard, sugar and flour it is entirely possible that they would have a sedentary life and if the handouts were generous enough their diet could easily be high in calories.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 162 by Percy, posted 06-05-2008 8:33 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 166 by Percy, posted 06-05-2008 3:56 PM PaulK has replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 165 of 451 (469417)
06-05-2008 2:06 PM
Reply to: Message 163 by bluegenes
06-05-2008 12:36 PM


Re: The Pima Indians: What Taubes Really Says
bluegenes writes:
Here in the U.K. at the moment, obesity seems to be more likely the lower down the socio-economic scale people are.
Same here, and Taubes explains in his book that this counterintuitive phenomenon comes about because the cheapest calories come from high carbohydrate sources.
I think the main problem for the Pima might have been that they stopped hunting, fishing and farming, all good exercise, but kept on eating. I mention this because what strikes foreigners about Americans is that you've stopped walking from A to B, but you keep on eating.
Researchers exploring these issues about a century ago (Taubes mentions their names in his lecture) included that hypothesis among their alternatives, but they were unsatisfied with it because other Indian tribes that had been sedentary for centuries, e.g. Pueblo Indians, had never been fat and as long as they stayed off reservations remained unfat.
Humans evolved walking, and probably walking a lot. It's something we should do. What does Taubes say about exercise?
He says that it's not a zero sum game. If you exercise more you'll be hungry if you don't eat more. If you eat less then you'll be able to exercise less due to lack of energy. Young people don't experience this much because they have such huge reserves of energy and recover from exertion very quickly, but as you grow older it takes less and less exercise to reach your limits, and how much you've eaten in the past 24 hours has a significant effect upon endurance for the older athlete. If you're an active adult (meaning rigorous exercise) and have been dieting, an increasingly likely possibility as you grow older, then you'll run out of energy more quickly and will have to stop.
What Taubes' says the "calorie is a calorie is a calorie" crowd leaves out of the equation is that exercise and food intake are not independent variables. Each feeds back and has an effect upon the other.
In addition, hormones and other factors both related and unrelated to hormones that we're still working to uncover, have much more to do with fat uptake by adipose tissue (fat tissue) than does what you eat and how much you exercise. For example, if you have elevated insulin levels in the bloodstream then this will encourage the uptake of fatty acids by adipose tissue, making them unavailable for energy use by the muscles. Once the muscles have used up their supply of glucose, usually in 10 to 15 minutes, then they tire quickly if they cannot draw upon other sources of energy like fatty acids, and if insulin levels are elevated then those fatty acids will be unavailable and you'll tire quickly. Elevated insulin levels is one possible cause (among many) for exercise intolerance.
Taubes key argument is that during the past 30 years during which the dietary fat hypothesis (this is the hypothesis that intake of unfavorable forms of dietary fat is responsible for the diseases of western civilization, which are obesity, diabetes and heart disease) has held sway within nutritional circles, and during which there has been increasing emphasis by both health authorities (the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, personal physicians, etc.) and the food industry (low fat foods are now ubiquitous in grocery stores and restaurants), the American public has gotten fatter and more diabetic, and the incidence rate of heart disease has not diminished.
Based upon this observation, and supported by many others but this is the most profound observation, Taubes argues that the dietary fat hypothesis is clearly wrong, and in his book he makes the point based upon references to the scientific literature that the dietary fat hypothesis was never validated by the research, and that the research actually provides better support for the carbohydrate hypothesis.
As I noted in a recent message, bread and pasta are the foundation of the food pyramid, its broadest level, yet these are just the foods that were never part of any human diet until the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. We can't live without protein and fat in our diet, but we can get by just fine without carbohydrates.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : "dietary hypothesis" => "dietary fat hypothesis"

This message is a reply to:
 Message 163 by bluegenes, posted 06-05-2008 12:36 PM bluegenes has not replied

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