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Gary Taubes: The Inanity of Overeating

55 points by cwan 16y ago

fleitz 16y ago
I think the medical establishment would be overjoyed if people on average were putting on only 1 pound per year. The obesity "epidemic" is about 50-100 pounds of extra weight. Bariatric wards are filled with those hundreds of pounds overweight not 20.
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roadnottaken 16y ago
Boy it took him a long time to NOT get to the point... I want my 10 minutes back.
- deleted 16y ago
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- rkalla 16y ago
  Noticed that as well; about half way through he introduces the thermo-dynamics issue and the implied (but useless) truth-ly-ness of fat people eating more than non-fat people, then spends the entire remainder of the article stating, re-stating and re-phrasing that same point again and again and again with different analogies, examples and mock conversations. It was about 2 paragraphs away from the end (before the last mock conversation) that I realized he was baiting for his book OR doesn't have a conclusion strong enough to share. I absolutely could be wrong, but I can't stand being lead around by my chin with arm-waving tomfoolery and flashing lights just to find out there is nothing there. If he had made his compelling point, or at least hinted at it more than the very last comment -- "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear" -- I would have been more interested. I don't know that what I quoted there was even the correct "hook" at his book premise as it starts "when we get fat..." talking about AFTER someone is already fat, when the premise of his book is "why we get fat" which is the before... the cause. I am interested enough to want to pick his book up, but also annoyed enough to take my sweet time doing it in case it's hollow. ---- EDIT ---- I was critical above of Gary's blog post so I did some more reading to see if I would be interested in his book and his ultimate point being made. I found this review on Amazon that completely sold me on it: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0307272702&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_per... While I haven't read the book yet (downloading on iPad now) and proposition that Gary is making (according to this reviewer) is fascinating to me and jives with the way I feel at times. Gary talks about how sugars and the insulin response feed your fat and your fat itself takes on a self-sustaining role in your body, not the passive storage-mechanism we understand it to be.
  - roadnottaken 16y ago
    Agreed. In stark contrast, I appreciate Michael Pollan's pithiness: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." It's not that complicated, folks.
    - jdminhbg 16y ago
      No offense, but that's complete bullshit, and the sort of tautological reasoning he's mocking. Of course you should eat "not too much" -- eating "too much" is too much!
      - Vivtek 16y ago
        The key word in that quote is "food", though; the "not too much" is an afterthought.
        mike_organon 16y ago
        It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be criticized?
        Vivtek 16y ago
        Not if the criticism is a blanket "this is total bullshit".
- ibejoeb 16y ago
  I agree with you. I thought I must have missed something, and I'm pretty sure it was the very last line: "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat..." I think that's probably what he intends to elaborate on.
- mike_organon 16y ago
  His point is that one of the major health problems in the US and elsewhere is blamed (almost universally by the media, government, medical and weight loss industries) on an idea which is simply wrong and is misleading people to even worse health. A detailed argument can't be made through tweets.
klbarry 16y ago
This is a fascinating article that uses logic really well. Of course, he doesn't go into the answers to the question he poses: "Why do people overeat?" I suppose you have to buy the book to figure that out.
- tptacek 16y ago
  He definitely has a hypothesis about that (read _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for more details --- or, Google [ucsf fructose] and watch that video again).
  - fingerprinter 16y ago
    +1 for fructose video. Awesome watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
tptacek 16y ago
Worth mentioning, maybe, because I was surprised by this factoid when I learned it: Gary Taubes is not one of the 10,487 "nutrition experts" hawking diet books; his best-known book, _Good Calories, Bad Calories_, is a serious pop-sci look at the scientific controversies behind nutrition; prior to writing it, Taubes was already a science writer of no small repute. Interesting to see him take the "laws of thermodynamics" meme head on.
- dsdfsdf 16y ago
  This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people who don't know how to dissect an argument.
  - Eliezer 16y ago
    Well, it's good to see that Taubes also gets people just makin' up this sort of stuff about him, even though his credentials aren't in doubt; and that it's not just me.
  - rkalla 16y ago
    Was it hard writing this comment while waving your arms so wildly about? How about some of your own facts/links/corrections showing where he "clearly doesn't know what he's talking about".
  - billswift 16y ago
    I have read several of Gary Taubes books, including Good Calories, Bad Calories that he mentioned and his earlier book (massive tome, might be better) Bad Science on the cold fusion debacle. He might tend to get a little carried away with enthusiasm for his subject at times, but they have all been both fascinating reading and well documented.
fingerprinter 16y ago
When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science. 1. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather than, say, how much you workout or your genetics. 2. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad food. 3. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense. #1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses (genetics). #2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case but we are just now catching up to that science. For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone: 1. Eliminate grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think watermelon) 2. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries) 3. No oils other than coconut or olive 4. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet potato etc) 5. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them. 6. some fruit, but only of the berry/cherry variety 7. minimal diary http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ is a great place to start. #3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36 hours. I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+ years.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy. 10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries. This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I realized that modern fruit is often not the same fruit from 500 years ago. It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for example, used to be small, sour & bitter. I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.
dsdfsdf 16y ago
This article is inane. Just a sample: "Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent." The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.) Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight. It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand. P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat
- karzeem 16y ago
  Why do people get fat?
- nkurz 16y ago
  He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand. That's odd. You would have thought that an undergraduate physics degree (even from a liberal arts institution) and a masters in engineering (OK, that one's from a real school) would have given him at least a basic grasp of the issues. :) His "20 calories a day" explanation is not the argument he is making. Rather, he's pointing out that it's absurd to think that the sole difference between an obese 70 year and his svelte wife is the one sugar cube per day the fat one added to his morning coffee. Are you arguing that it is indeed this simple, and that all we have to do to have a thin and fit population is to drink black coffee? p.s. Why the new account?
warwick 16y ago
"That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t." I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because there are people who are fat), it's a tautology. I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's premise. EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me being needlessly pedantic.
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  It's not that you ate more calories than you burned, it's that you absorbed more calories than you burned. I think it's worth asking why some calories are more likely to be absorbed than others, and why some people are more inclined to absorb more calories than other people.
pamelafox 16y ago
I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat" yesterday(both available on Kindle!). GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the carbohydrate theory. Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :) [I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]
yummyfajitas 16y ago
I'll start with one messed up point in this article: One way to get around this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on end and then we realize we’ve put on five or ten pounds...and then we decide to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it...But then how do animals do it? Easy: most animals have weight which fluctuates significantly depending on food availability. In the wild, many are undernourished. Overeating is a real problem for domesticated animals. http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-obesity-fact-risks/ http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-obesity-fact-risks/ But now I'll argue against his real thesis. Based on other articles on this same topic, I get the impression Gary Taubes is an opponent of the "personal irresponsibility" theory of obesity - see this article for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=taubes&st=cse http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&#... But unfortunately, he proposes to replace it with a much higher entropy theory. Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. Occams Razor suggests he is probably wrong, and from what I've seen, he doesn't even try to address this.
- shadowfox 16y ago
  Just to make sure I understood this correctly. Is your suggestion that low education, low income, obesity are all explained by personal irresponsibility?
- tbrownaw 16y ago
  > Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. I could go pick a bunch of correlated things and ascribe them all to "magic" or "Zeus" or what-have-you, but stuffing all the entropy into a black box like this shouldn't make it count as a "low-entropy theory".
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several correlated things.
DrStalker 16y ago
The article is not helpful in any practical way. It simply gives the core thesis that eating too much doesn't make you fat, and that the author knows some secret that he will reveal in his book once you buy it. Why should I give any more weight to this than any of the thousands of other "buy this diet secret!" books out there?
- DougBTX 16y ago
  The article is not helpful in any practical way. True, but what it does do is explain why the "thermodynamic" explanation, although correct, is not practically useful.
mmaunder 16y ago
Not sure that I trust a thin guy's advice on why people get fat.
- pgbovine 16y ago
  Not sure I trust a human's insights on why animals get X ... (you don't need to have condition X in order to study X)
- antipaganda 16y ago
  Was he always thin?
- snth 16y ago
  Would you trust a fat guy's diet advice?
  - TGJ 16y ago
    Funny, people seem to trust Dr. Phil.
mkn 16y ago
Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called "The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.") He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial) 20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an organism's weight is a feedback mechanism in which the mass of the organism appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term. Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever it is--help us all--taken seriously. I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so obviously wrong right out of the gate.
- WillyF 16y ago
  I don't know the answer, but I presume that 40 lbs of fat requires far fewer calories to maintain than 40 lbs of lean body mass. Does the 11/cal/day/pound rule of thumb apply to fat? Muscle?
  - DrStalker 16y ago
    I have no actual numbers on hand but muscle is a lot denser and needs a lot more energy to maintain; putting on even a small amount of muscle and doing just enough exercise to keep the muscles around helps with weight loss (as well as general fitness)
- defen 16y ago
  I'm not sure how the maintenance expenditure is relevant to his point - the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight. The fact that the baseline changes is an irrelevant detail. Regardless of what the baseline is at any given point, how does the system (meaning the person's body+brain) know when to stop eating?
waterhouse 16y ago
It occurs to me that I haven't seen this question addressed anywhere: Is everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally efficient at extracting energy from food? (Rhetorical question.) To illustrate with an extreme example, lactose is a sugar and carries energy, but some people can digest it (and their bodies will get the full complement of calories from it), and some people can't (it'll get digested by bacteria and they'll get gas and feel unpleasant; I'm pretty sure they don't get calories from it). It is incorrect and stupid to say that an item of food with significant lactose component carries "N calories" without specifying whether the person who eats it can digest lactose. Likewise, with cellulose, I think cows get a lot more energy out of cellulose than humans can. Also, it seems likely to me that people's digestive systems' performance varies with "outside" conditions in the body. For example, I've heard that being pumped full of adrenaline puts digestion on hold; and subjective experience suggests to me that if you eat a lot of food (over a period of, say, a day), your system will send it through pretty quickly, without digesting it fully. I suspect there are a lot of other situations in which one's body doesn't get all N calories from an "N-calorie" item of food. I suppose that if that happens, then the remaining part probably will be digested by bacteria, and one may notice symptoms of... oh, hey, there's a name for this, "indigestion". (Though if the amount of left-over energy is really small, then the symptoms are probably too slight to notice. If 10 or 20 calories a day matters, then this may make things unpredictable.) I suppose one could count the bacteria digesting the food that you didn't as "calories burned", but then that means you may be burning a bunch of calories without doing any physical activity. Does someone more knowledgeable than me know a) whether these things are really significant and b) whether these researchers take them into account?
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I also often wonder about the indigestion issue. A few years ago I moved house and found a fantastic Indian kebab shop a five minute walk away. Most evenings consisted of having a kebab and maybe a couple of cans of beer as well. The morning's indigestion was unpleasant but worth it for the tastiness. The real fun was that I was slowly losing weight on this fantastically unhealthy diet, something that the girls I was living with hated me for after seeing what went in :)
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andrewljohnson 16y ago
I take issue with his statement that there are plenty of animals that have abundant food, which don't get fat. I just don't think that's true. Even for the animals that have plenty of food, they still have to go out and forage/hunt. On the other hand, if you just pile up food in front of animals everyday, they will eat it and get fat. Some examples of this are my parents' dogs, and there are no animals but humans and domestics that have infinite food with no work attached. I think people and animals eat, because that's how we are wired. Any animal gorges itself presented with work-free food. Our body wants as much fuel as it can get at a very basic level. However, I don't think it comes down to "personal responsibility." I think society is successful at instilling logical discipline in many members, and less successful with others. If you are fat, it's probably because your family didn't raise you to have the tools to make good health decisions and follow through with your thoughts. I also think unsatisfied people tend to over-eat, over-smoke, and over-everything else. It takes both luck and hard work to be happy and fit.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  I weight between 135-145 pounds and I'm 6' tall. I'm well past thirty. I eat as much as I can. The only that stops from eating is stomach pain from overeating. Some people may get fat from overeating. But it's hard to generalize here.
  - rue 16y ago
    No, it's very easy to generalize: an overwhelming majority of people will get fat from overeating, some quicker than others. I'd think your condition is somewhere in the single-digit percentages. I've always been fairly lean – 176/70ish (5'9"/155ish in SU) – a "can eat anything" type, but taking an almost 3-month break from cycling while not reducing food consumption has resulted in a gain of about 8kg/17lbs. (Planning to drop to about 68kg by June).
elptacek 16y ago
"We don’t know. It’s complicated." But then there's the thought bubble with the words "Moral failure" in it: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physicians_have_less_respect_for_obese_patients_study_suggests http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physician...

55 points by cwan 16y ago

I think the medical establishment would be overjoyed if people on average were putting on only 1 pound per year. The obesity "epidemic" is about 50-100 pounds of extra weight. Bariatric wards are filled with those hundreds of pounds overweight not 20.

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roadnottaken 16y ago

Boy it took him a long time to NOT get to the point... I want my 10 minutes back.

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rkalla 16y ago
Noticed that as well; about half way through he introduces the thermo-dynamics issue and the implied (but useless) truth-ly-ness of fat people eating more than non-fat people, then spends the entire remainder of the article stating, re-stating and re-phrasing that same point again and again and again with different analogies, examples and mock conversations. It was about 2 paragraphs away from the end (before the last mock conversation) that I realized he was baiting for his book OR doesn't have a conclusion strong enough to share. I absolutely could be wrong, but I can't stand being lead around by my chin with arm-waving tomfoolery and flashing lights just to find out there is nothing there. If he had made his compelling point, or at least hinted at it more than the very last comment -- "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear" -- I would have been more interested. I don't know that what I quoted there was even the correct "hook" at his book premise as it starts "when we get fat..." talking about AFTER someone is already fat, when the premise of his book is "why we get fat" which is the before... the cause. I am interested enough to want to pick his book up, but also annoyed enough to take my sweet time doing it in case it's hollow. ---- EDIT ---- I was critical above of Gary's blog post so I did some more reading to see if I would be interested in his book and his ultimate point being made. I found this review on Amazon that completely sold me on it: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0307272702&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode= http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_per... While I haven't read the book yet (downloading on iPad now) and proposition that Gary is making (according to this reviewer) is fascinating to me and jives with the way I feel at times. Gary talks about how sugars and the insulin response feed your fat and your fat itself takes on a self-sustaining role in your body, not the passive storage-mechanism we understand it to be.
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  Agreed. In stark contrast, I appreciate Michael Pollan's pithiness: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." It's not that complicated, folks.
  - jdminhbg 16y ago
    No offense, but that's complete bullshit, and the sort of tautological reasoning he's mocking. Of course you should eat "not too much" -- eating "too much" is too much!
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      The key word in that quote is "food", though; the "not too much" is an afterthought.
      - mike_organon 16y ago
        It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be criticized?
        Vivtek 16y ago
        Not if the criticism is a blanket "this is total bullshit".
ibejoeb 16y ago
I agree with you. I thought I must have missed something, and I'm pretty sure it was the very last line: "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat..." I think that's probably what he intends to elaborate on.
mike_organon 16y ago
His point is that one of the major health problems in the US and elsewhere is blamed (almost universally by the media, government, medical and weight loss industries) on an idea which is simply wrong and is misleading people to even worse health. A detailed argument can't be made through tweets.

klbarry 16y ago

This is a fascinating article that uses logic really well. Of course, he doesn't go into the answers to the question he poses: "Why do people overeat?" I suppose you have to buy the book to figure that out.

tptacek 16y ago
He definitely has a hypothesis about that (read _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for more details --- or, Google [ucsf fructose] and watch that video again).
- fingerprinter 16y ago
  +1 for fructose video. Awesome watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

tptacek 16y ago

Worth mentioning, maybe, because I was surprised by this factoid when I learned it: Gary Taubes is not one of the 10,487 "nutrition experts" hawking diet books; his best-known book, _Good Calories, Bad Calories_, is a serious pop-sci look at the scientific controversies behind nutrition; prior to writing it, Taubes was already a science writer of no small repute. Interesting to see him take the "laws of thermodynamics" meme head on.

dsdfsdf 16y ago
This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people who don't know how to dissect an argument.
- Eliezer 16y ago
  Well, it's good to see that Taubes also gets people just makin' up this sort of stuff about him, even though his credentials aren't in doubt; and that it's not just me.
- rkalla 16y ago
  Was it hard writing this comment while waving your arms so wildly about? How about some of your own facts/links/corrections showing where he "clearly doesn't know what he's talking about".
- billswift 16y ago
  I have read several of Gary Taubes books, including Good Calories, Bad Calories that he mentioned and his earlier book (massive tome, might be better) Bad Science on the cold fusion debacle. He might tend to get a little carried away with enthusiasm for his subject at times, but they have all been both fascinating reading and well documented.

fingerprinter 16y ago

When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science. 1. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather than, say, how much you workout or your genetics. 2. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad food. 3. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense. #1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses (genetics). #2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case but we are just now catching up to that science. For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone: 1. Eliminate grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think watermelon) 2. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries) 3. No oils other than coconut or olive 4. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet potato etc) 5. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them. 6. some fruit, but only of the berry/cherry variety 7. minimal diary http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ is a great place to start. #3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36 hours. I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+ years.

sliverstorm 16y ago
That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy. 10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries. This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I realized that modern fruit is often not the same fruit from 500 years ago. It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for example, used to be small, sour & bitter. I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.

dsdfsdf 16y ago

This article is inane. Just a sample: "Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent." The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.) Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight. It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand. P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat

karzeem 16y ago
Why do people get fat?
nkurz 16y ago
He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand. That's odd. You would have thought that an undergraduate physics degree (even from a liberal arts institution) and a masters in engineering (OK, that one's from a real school) would have given him at least a basic grasp of the issues. :) His "20 calories a day" explanation is not the argument he is making. Rather, he's pointing out that it's absurd to think that the sole difference between an obese 70 year and his svelte wife is the one sugar cube per day the fat one added to his morning coffee. Are you arguing that it is indeed this simple, and that all we have to do to have a thin and fit population is to drink black coffee? p.s. Why the new account?

warwick 16y ago

"That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t." I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because there are people who are fat), it's a tautology. I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's premise. EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me being needlessly pedantic.

waterlesscloud 16y ago
It's not that you ate more calories than you burned, it's that you absorbed more calories than you burned. I think it's worth asking why some calories are more likely to be absorbed than others, and why some people are more inclined to absorb more calories than other people.

pamelafox 16y ago

I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat" yesterday(both available on Kindle!). GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the carbohydrate theory. Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :) [I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]

yummyfajitas 16y ago

I'll start with one messed up point in this article: One way to get around this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on end and then we realize we’ve put on five or ten pounds...and then we decide to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it...But then how do animals do it? Easy: most animals have weight which fluctuates significantly depending on food availability. In the wild, many are undernourished. Overeating is a real problem for domesticated animals. http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-obesity-fact-risks/ http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-obesity-fact-risks/ But now I'll argue against his real thesis. Based on other articles on this same topic, I get the impression Gary Taubes is an opponent of the "personal irresponsibility" theory of obesity - see this article for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=taubes&st=cse http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&#... But unfortunately, he proposes to replace it with a much higher entropy theory. Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. Occams Razor suggests he is probably wrong, and from what I've seen, he doesn't even try to address this.

shadowfox 16y ago
Just to make sure I understood this correctly. Is your suggestion that low education, low income, obesity are all explained by personal irresponsibility?
tbrownaw 16y ago
> Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. I could go pick a bunch of correlated things and ascribe them all to "magic" or "Zeus" or what-have-you, but stuffing all the entropy into a black box like this shouldn't make it count as a "low-entropy theory".
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several correlated things.

DrStalker 16y ago

The article is not helpful in any practical way. It simply gives the core thesis that eating too much doesn't make you fat, and that the author knows some secret that he will reveal in his book once you buy it. Why should I give any more weight to this than any of the thousands of other "buy this diet secret!" books out there?

DougBTX 16y ago
The article is not helpful in any practical way. True, but what it does do is explain why the "thermodynamic" explanation, although correct, is not practically useful.

mmaunder 16y ago

Not sure that I trust a thin guy's advice on why people get fat.

pgbovine 16y ago
Not sure I trust a human's insights on why animals get X ... (you don't need to have condition X in order to study X)
antipaganda 16y ago
Was he always thin?
snth 16y ago
Would you trust a fat guy's diet advice?
- TGJ 16y ago
  Funny, people seem to trust Dr. Phil.

mkn 16y ago

Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called "The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.") He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial) 20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an organism's weight is a feedback mechanism in which the mass of the organism appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term. Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever it is--help us all--taken seriously. I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so obviously wrong right out of the gate.

WillyF 16y ago
I don't know the answer, but I presume that 40 lbs of fat requires far fewer calories to maintain than 40 lbs of lean body mass. Does the 11/cal/day/pound rule of thumb apply to fat? Muscle?
- DrStalker 16y ago
  I have no actual numbers on hand but muscle is a lot denser and needs a lot more energy to maintain; putting on even a small amount of muscle and doing just enough exercise to keep the muscles around helps with weight loss (as well as general fitness)
defen 16y ago
I'm not sure how the maintenance expenditure is relevant to his point - the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight. The fact that the baseline changes is an irrelevant detail. Regardless of what the baseline is at any given point, how does the system (meaning the person's body+brain) know when to stop eating?

waterhouse 16y ago

It occurs to me that I haven't seen this question addressed anywhere: Is everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally efficient at extracting energy from food? (Rhetorical question.) To illustrate with an extreme example, lactose is a sugar and carries energy, but some people can digest it (and their bodies will get the full complement of calories from it), and some people can't (it'll get digested by bacteria and they'll get gas and feel unpleasant; I'm pretty sure they don't get calories from it). It is incorrect and stupid to say that an item of food with significant lactose component carries "N calories" without specifying whether the person who eats it can digest lactose. Likewise, with cellulose, I think cows get a lot more energy out of cellulose than humans can. Also, it seems likely to me that people's digestive systems' performance varies with "outside" conditions in the body. For example, I've heard that being pumped full of adrenaline puts digestion on hold; and subjective experience suggests to me that if you eat a lot of food (over a period of, say, a day), your system will send it through pretty quickly, without digesting it fully. I suspect there are a lot of other situations in which one's body doesn't get all N calories from an "N-calorie" item of food. I suppose that if that happens, then the remaining part probably will be digested by bacteria, and one may notice symptoms of... oh, hey, there's a name for this, "indigestion". (Though if the amount of left-over energy is really small, then the symptoms are probably too slight to notice. If 10 or 20 calories a day matters, then this may make things unpredictable.) I suppose one could count the bacteria digesting the food that you didn't as "calories burned", but then that means you may be burning a bunch of calories without doing any physical activity. Does someone more knowledgeable than me know a) whether these things are really significant and b) whether these researchers take them into account?

mootothemax 16y ago
I also often wonder about the indigestion issue. A few years ago I moved house and found a fantastic Indian kebab shop a five minute walk away. Most evenings consisted of having a kebab and maybe a couple of cans of beer as well. The morning's indigestion was unpleasant but worth it for the tastiness. The real fun was that I was slowly losing weight on this fantastically unhealthy diet, something that the girls I was living with hated me for after seeing what went in :)
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andrewljohnson 16y ago

I take issue with his statement that there are plenty of animals that have abundant food, which don't get fat. I just don't think that's true. Even for the animals that have plenty of food, they still have to go out and forage/hunt. On the other hand, if you just pile up food in front of animals everyday, they will eat it and get fat. Some examples of this are my parents' dogs, and there are no animals but humans and domestics that have infinite food with no work attached. I think people and animals eat, because that's how we are wired. Any animal gorges itself presented with work-free food. Our body wants as much fuel as it can get at a very basic level. However, I don't think it comes down to "personal responsibility." I think society is successful at instilling logical discipline in many members, and less successful with others. If you are fat, it's probably because your family didn't raise you to have the tools to make good health decisions and follow through with your thoughts. I also think unsatisfied people tend to over-eat, over-smoke, and over-everything else. It takes both luck and hard work to be happy and fit.

joe_the_user 16y ago
I weight between 135-145 pounds and I'm 6' tall. I'm well past thirty. I eat as much as I can. The only that stops from eating is stomach pain from overeating. Some people may get fat from overeating. But it's hard to generalize here.
- rue 16y ago
  No, it's very easy to generalize: an overwhelming majority of people will get fat from overeating, some quicker than others. I'd think your condition is somewhere in the single-digit percentages. I've always been fairly lean – 176/70ish (5'9"/155ish in SU) – a "can eat anything" type, but taking an almost 3-month break from cycling while not reducing food consumption has resulted in a gain of about 8kg/17lbs. (Planning to drop to about 68kg by June).

elptacek 16y ago

"We don’t know. It’s complicated." But then there's the thought bubble with the words "Moral failure" in it: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physicians_have_less_respect_for_obese_patients_study_suggests http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physician...