Read an Excerpt: 'Good Calories, Bad Calories'. What if everything you think you know about diet and exercise, even disease, turned out to be wrong? And it's causing a storm of controversy- - think saturated fats are bad for you? Think exercise will slim you down? At least that's what Gary Taubes thinks - - he says he's reviewed the research and interviewed over 6. I have spent five years on the research for and writing of this book alone. To a great extent, the conclusions I've reached are as much a product of the age we live in as they are my own skeptical inquiry.
Just ten years ago, the research for this book would have taken the better part of a lifetime. It was only with the development of the Internet, of search engines and the comprehensive databases of the Library of Medicine, the Institute for Scientific Information, research libraries, and secondhand- book stores worldwide now accessible online that I was able, with reasonable facility, to locate and procure virtually any written source, whether published a century ago or last week, and to track down and contact clinical investigators and public- health officials, even those long retired. In writing the book, I have tried to let the science and the evidence speak for themselves. When I began my research, I had no idea that I would come to believe that obesity is not caused by eating too much, or that exercise is not a means of prevention. Nor did I believe that diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's could possibly be caused by the consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugars. I had no idea that I would find the quality of the research on nutrition, obesity, and chronic disease to be so inadequate; that so much of the conventional wisdom would be founded on so little substantial evidence; and that, once it was, the researchers and the public- health authorities who funded the research would no longer see any reason to challenge this conventional wisdom and so to test its. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostasis. The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well- being. Through their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar, refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes. They are the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and the other chronic diseases of civilization. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long- term weight loss; it leads to hunger. Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance. Fat synthesis and storage exceed the mobilization of fat from the adipose tissue and its subsequent oxidation. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this balance. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes tries to bury the idea that a low-fat diet promotes weight. Title: Good Calories Bad Gary Taubes Author: Sabrina Eberhart Subject: good calories bad gary taubes Keywords: Read Online good calories bad gary taubes, good calories bad gary taubes PDF, Download good calories bad gary. Buy Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders. Gary Taubes Good Calories Bad Calories Pdf CreatorWhen insulin levels are elevated. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. The fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity. For the past half century, our conceptions of the interaction between diet and chronic disease have inevitably focused on the fat content. Any deviation from some ideal low- fat or low- saturated- fat diet has been considered dangerous until long- term, randomized control trials might demonstrate otherwise. Because a diet restricted in carbohydrates is by definition relatively fat- rich, it has therefore been presumed to be unhealthy until proved otherwise. This is why the American Diabetes Association even recommends against the use of carbohydrate- restricted diets for the management of Type 2 diabetes. How do we know they're safe for long- term consumption? Evolution should be our best guide for what constitutes a healthy diet. It takes time for a population or a species to adapt to any new factor in its environment; the longer we've been eating a particular food as a species, and the closer that food is to its natural state, the less harm it is likely to do. This is an underlying assumption of all public- health recommendations about the nature of a healthy diet. It's what the British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose meant when he wrote his seminal 1. If nothing else, whatever constituted the typical Paleolithic hunter- gatherer diet, the type and quantity of fat consumed assuredly changed with season, latitude, and the coming and going of ice ages. This is the problem with recommending that we consume oils in any quantity. Did we evolve to eat olive oil, for example, or linseed oil? And maybe a few thousand years is sufficient time to adapt to a new food but a few hundred is not. If so, then olive oil could conceivably be harmless or even beneficial when consumed in comparatively large quantities by the descendants of Mediterranean populations, who have been consuming it for millennia, but not to Scandinavians or Asians, for whom such an oil is new to the diet. This makes the science even more complicated than it already is, but these are serious considerations that should be taken into account when discussing a healthy diet. The most dramatic alterations in human diets in the past two million years, unequivocally, are (1) the transition from carbohydrate- poor to carbohydrate- rich diets that came with the invention of agriculture. Why would a diet that excludes these foods specifically be expected to do anything other than return us to ? Most nutritionists still insist that a diet requires 1. But what the brain uses and what it requires are two different things. Without carbohydrates in the diet, as we discussed earlier (see page 3. Since a carbohydrate- restricted diet, unrestricted in calories, will, by definition, include considerable fat and protein, there will be no shortage of fuel for the brain. Indeed, this is likely to be the fuel mixture that our brains evolved to use, and our brains seem to run more efficiently on this fuel mixture than they do on glucose alone. But the IOM report also acknowledges that the brain will be fine without these carbohydrates, because it runs perfectly well on ketone bodies, glycerol, and the protein- derived glucose.). Whether a carbohydrate- restricted diet is deficient in essential vitamins and minerals is another issue. As we also discussed (see page 3. And the evidence suggests that the vitamin C content of meat products is more than sufficient for health, as long as the diet is indeed carbohydraterestricted, with none of the refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars that would raise blood sugar and insulin levels and so increase our need to obtain vitamin C from the diet. Moreover, though it may indeed be uniquely beneficial to live on meat and only meat, as Vilhjalmur Stefannson argued in the 1. A calorie- restricted diet that cuts all calories by a third, as John Yudkin noted, will also cut essential nutrients by a third. A diet that prohibits sugar, flour, potatoes, and beer, but allows eating to satiety meat, cheese, eggs, and green vegetables will still include the essential nutrients, whether or not it leads to a decrease in calories consumed. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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