Calories, fat or carbohydrates? Why diets work (when they do)

http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydrates/

by kareemm • 16 years ago

97 53 16 years ago

garytaubes.com

rfugger• 16 years ago

Cached copy: http://www.garytaubes.com.nyud.net/2010/12/calories-fat-or-c...

latch3• 16 years ago

Eat better and exercise more.

alanfalcon• 16 years ago

According to the article, just eat fewer carbs (and/or higher quality carbs) because even if they don't realize they're doing it, the people who "eat better" or "exercise more" also cut carbs which is what truly leads to the weight loss they experience.

I don't agree with the premise, for one thing there's a line or two about the science of metabolism as it relates to carbs and naught else to actually support the theory in the article, but alas the point of the article wasn't to prove, rather it was to disprove the methods of comparing diets typically used. That part it did well.

Dove• 16 years ago

That is overstating the thesis. The article is saying only that it is possible carb restriction is the sole cause of weight loss. While the writing suggests that the author believes that, the explicit point is that until we control for all variables, we can't know.

noarchy3• 16 years ago

This. I don't understand how people can ignore how sedentary society has become when discussing the obesity problem.

You can easily get away with eating a lot of carbs; being physically active not only allows it, but often requires it.

wycats7• 16 years ago

Taubes actually addresses this point very carefully in both Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. He cites quite a few cases of communities with high rates of obesity, and varying rates of nourishment and sedentary behavior.

One very interesting result is that some of the communities lived in incredible poverty and with significant physical exertion.

I'd recommend that you read the book (Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It) and see whether he addresses your concern. Far from ignoring our sedentary society, Taubes makes a strong case for other factors.

josephgrossberg2• 16 years ago

Yes, but what is "better"? And what is the best way to make both life changes enduring? (E.g. if someone is constantly hungry, their change in diet is probably not sustainable.)

latch3• 16 years ago

I'm a layman, but I'm highly skeptical at the amount and complexity of information in this field with respect to your average person (which is not the same as scientific and medical research into the subject of nutrition, chemistry, etc.)

What's better? 5 servings of fruits and vegetable. Unrefined, whole foods. Water. Legumes and grains. Fish.

Combine such a "diet" with 1 hour of light exercise (for example walking) a day and I bet most people would be considerably healthier (all the better if they can do aerobic exercise a couple times a week, say on the weekend). Most impressive this is also normally a cheaper way to eat and doesn't have to taste bad.

masomenos• 16 years ago

Haven't read the new book, but Taubes' previous work 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' makes a strong case that there's shockingly little experimental evidence in favor of the conventional wisdom that "eating better" means a low fat, low calorie diet.

dkarl5• 16 years ago

There's a difference between how people interested in public health read this research and how people such as us who are interested in our own individual health read it. People interested in public health wonder, "What happens when you tell people to follow diet X?" That's what studies like this test.

People like us wonder, "What happens when an individual actually follows diet X?" Questions like this are never studied at all, because it's difficult and expensive. Almost everybody lies about their level of compliance, and when people aren't actually lying, they're still underreporting because most people remember eating less than they actually do.

Those facts about underreporting are not controversial. I don't know where the misrepresentation happens, whether in the science itself or in the science journalism, but the studies most people read about in the newspaper or on the web are not about diet from an individual point of view. They don't study what happens when somebody actually follows a certain diet. That would require keeping people in an institutional setting and controlling or monitoring their food intake around the clock. That's really expensive, and if you're interested in improving public health, it isn't useful to know what the results of following a particular diet are, because you don't have control over what people eat. You only have influence over the public health message: what people are told they should eat.

So that's what is studied. The scientific debate over diet is not about what you should eat to improve your health, but what we should tell the public to eat to improve their health. If 50% of people on a low-fat diet stay up all night eating low-fat cookies and big bowls of pasta with low-fat margarine, then from a public health perspective, low-fat diets make you fat.

wycats7• 16 years ago

It's certainly true that dietary studies suffer from problems of underreporting. So it is possible that the the results of most recent studies (summarized well in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low...) all suffer from a reporting bias that leads people consuming low-fat diets to more significantly underreport their consumption than those on low-carb diets.

However, that in itself would be a significant finding. If the level of reporting compliance varies widely between different diets, it may also mean that compliance with the diet itself varies. I'd personally be interested in evidence on this point.

Also interestingly, studies using animal models of obesity tend to back up the findings using the (admittedly flawed) studies using human reporting. Taubes' most recent book goes into some detail about findings using rat obesity models (such as experiments involving ovary removal and experiments involving Zucker rats, which are genetically prone to obesity).

One very interesting result from those studies is that rats prone to obesity (for whatever reason) will often die of starvation while retaining some subcutaneous fat. Obese-prone rats also very clearly exhibit sedentary behavior when the food supply is low, and more active behavior when the food supply is high. They also have more fat when given identical amounts of food as lean-prone rats.

In short, while we cannot be certain about the recent experimental results, because of reporting bias, it's hard to believe that the experiments all have no validity, and that animal models of obesity are flawed. Additionally, if there was significant reporting bias, it would likely be the result of compliance problems, which would be extremely relevant to the discussion at hand.

It's one thing believe that the jury is still out on some of this; it's quite another to stick to preexisting beliefs on the grounds that virtually all recent studies have some flaw or other.

dkarl5• 16 years ago

Compliance levels in studies aren't relevant to our individual choice of diet, though, because we can observe our own compliance for ourselves by recording our intake. Observing our own bodies' response to a diet takes a much bigger commitment, so it's nice to have some generalizations from science. For the public health debate, there's no reason to separate the two, but from an individual perspective it is unnatural not to.

It's one thing believe that the jury is still out on some of this; it's quite another to stick to preexisting beliefs on the grounds that virtually all recent studies have some flaw or other.

Interesting that you assume I have some particular opinion :-) I don't necessarily disagree with Taube, though I don't think it signifies much that he can persuasively make a point and disparage those who disagree with him when he's talking to lay people. I'm just tired of seeing studies discussed as if the results reflect what happens when people actually follow some particular diet, when that's not what researchers are really interested in. (I.e., researchers take compliance as part of the phenomenon being studied, but journalists and lay people reading and discussing the results assume that compliance is uniformly good or has been factored out somehow.)

Edit/PS: If you interpret studies as showing what happens when people actually eat a certain diet, then compliance _is_ a flaw -- a really big one! We don't know what people are actually eating, only that on average it's significantly more than they report. And there's no questions researchers would _like_ to know how actual intake relates to weight gain or loss. It's just rather inconvenient and expensive to find out, and it's arguably less important than the public health question of how instruction/exhortation relates to weight gain or loss.

powera• 16 years ago

Another diet article that's very, very long, low on facts, and repetitive on the few facts they have. Are these showing up just because people have New Year's Resolutions?

jerf2• 16 years ago

Another diet blog post. If you want facts, buy the Good Calories, Bad Calories book, or presumably his recent book which I can't recommend either way as I have not read it. If Gary Taubes does not have enough facts, regardless of how you like his interpretation of them, you may give up all hope of ever understanding diet issues yourself now.

So as to avoid a redundant post, I make this point to KirinDave as well. This is not Taubes' argument, it's one particular small point, a marketing teaser. If you really want to dismiss him you're going to have to do a lot better that poking apart one blog post, you've got a book (or two, though I don't know what the overlap is) to dismantle.

wycats7• 16 years ago

I've read both Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. There is significant overlap, and it is most notable in the less technical areas, where he lays out the arguments against the conventional wisdom.

That said (and I say this as a very technical reader), there were aspects of Good Calories, Bad Calories that went over my head because of their presentation and placement in the (very long) book. Why We Get Fat's treatment of LPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipoprotein_lipase) and HSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormone-sensitive_lipase), in particular, were described more clearly in the latest book, and the concepts related to them really make a difference in understanding the larger point.

Probably the most important thing that I got out of Why We Get Fat is a better technical understanding for one of his core arguments (that the arrow of causation in calories in, calories out may be the reverse of what we expect). Specifically, he clearly describes the mechanism by which fat cells may pull in energy from the bloodstream, resulting in additional hunger and lethargy (ad infinitum). His new treatment of this subject, which starts with animal models of obesity, is extremely helpful and worth the price of the new book, in my opinion.

yummyfajitas4• 16 years ago

Why bother reading the book when the blog is either flawed (as this post is) or dishonest (as the one from yesterday is)?

If the blog is junk science, it's unlikely that the book is better.

johnwatson11218• 16 years ago

I am about finished with "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes. The main idea of the book is that carbs are what makes us fat and causes heart disease - not meat and fat as the medical establishment tells us. I know this same message is all over the place right now, one thing that makes the book unique is that he goes into the history of how the medical establishment came to the current viewpoint. According to Gary Taubes the European medical establishment was figuring out the carb/obesity link back in the 30s. WWII disrupted all that and when the Americans picked the question back up in the late 50s it was fat that was made the villain.

He goes into a lot of the biochemistry as well. As I was reading the book I kept coming back to this notion that carbs are pushed down our throats and the main reason why is that they are cheap. Not only cheap but they are easy to transport and store. It made me wonder if the common people of ancient Rome developed some of the health problems that modern people face. After all, they were kept on a state sponsored diet of grain and bread.

Create• 16 years ago

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717

KirinDave6• 16 years ago

So the crux of the argument is:

1. In this one particular study, caloric restriction diets were explicitly calorically restricted.

2. In this one particular study, low-carbohydrate diets were not explicitly calorically restricted.

3. Weight loss was similar for both groups, but we assume that the Atkins fatties were gorging themselves on meat while the other people were not.

But, the data from this study was self-reported. To me, this is an immediate red-flag. It's two large waving red-flags for the inference the author is trying to engage in. He's basing a huge article on an assumption which is absent from data. This is anomaly hunting, plain and simple. The author obviously has a preconceived desire to support carb-limiting as the Deep Secret of weight loss, and so any anomaly is cast into evidence for this desire.

This is not to say the author is wrong, I'm simply saying his logic doesn't hold and analysis falls apart as a result. It's at least as basic a concept to science as the notion of control that the article leads with: "You cannot draw strong conclusions in an absence of data."

P.S., I'm not inclined to believe this good-calories-bad-calories stuff. I lost 100lbs over the course of 13 months, and I didn't do it by carb cutting.

ryanwaggoner3• 16 years ago

Data from almost all diet studies is self-reported (see comment by dkarl) and inherently unreliable, but it's the best we have. And his argument in this article isn't that carb cutting is the source of the weight loss, just that because we don't isolate the variables, we can't know for sure what the source is.

How did you lose that much weight over 13 months?

josephgrossberg2• 16 years ago

And what was your starting weight? It's a lot more challenging to go from, say, 250 lbs. to 150 lbs. than it is from 350 lbs. to 250 lbs. (not that either is easy).

FWIW, I am down about 80 lbs. from my peak weight of 260+, but it took years, not months.

KirinDave6• 16 years ago

> his argument ... we can't know for sure what the source is

This author's tone and content, in addition to other articles posted, leads me to believe he has a preconceived notion. The text is litered with example of this, like: “And if they’re trying to cut calories, they’ll be removing some number of total carbohydrates as well. And if these people lose fat on these diets, this is a very likely reason why.”

> How did you lose that much weight over 13 months?

Aggressively cut my calories and started going to the gym 5-7 nights a week. My exercise regimen focuses heavily on cardio, but I've gradually been increasing my resistance training. The bulk of the weight was lost in 6 months, about 40 lbs between Feb and July. The rest was a gradually lost before and after.

skunkworks• 16 years ago

Gary Taubes is so incredibly wrong that it makes me sad.

If you want to read some intelligent analysis of dieting/nutrition, I suggest reading Lyle McDonald (http://www.bodyrecomposition.com) and Alan Aragon (http://www.alanaragonblog.com).

kareemm• 16 years ago

why is he wrong?

ryanwaggoner3• 16 years ago

Why are your preferred sources better than someone else's?

Not saying that they can't be but you've provided nothing more than hyperbolic hand waving to explain why two other random guys on the Internet are more reliable.

noarchy3• 16 years ago

Taubes may be wrong, but he has a very devoted following that apparently includes HN. It's popular to sell magic bullet ideas, like carb-cutting, and the anti-carb brigades have made an entire industry around this. It is far less popular to tell people that they need to get off their rears, and get active, since they'd rather stay on their rears and find a magic bullet that will let them remain sedentary, and still lose weight.

aantix• 16 years ago

The body is constantly fighting you to maintain current weight. That's why you get really hungry after a hard workout or want to go to sleep after severely cutting your caloric intake. Your body will respond.

You're giving exercise way too much credit.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.ht...

wycats7• 16 years ago

What I find most frustrating about online comments on Taubes work is the amount of people who assume that this is just another crank peddling nonsense.

Instead, Taubes has spent the better part of a decade reviewing the state of research and putting forth a compelling, detailed argument in favor of his position, that the high-carbohydrate diets associated with civilization are also the cause of the cluster of diseases known as diseases of civilization.

His latest book lays out the argument in a more reader-friendly way than his earlier tome (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but it's hardly junk science, and Taubes is hardly a junk scientist. He has been a very good science journalist for decades, and has won the the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He does his homework.

Again, I recommend that those whose gut reaction is to be skeptical of Taubes' thesis read at least his latest book, which addresses, very carefully, virtually all of the common reactions people have in these kinds of online fora. There are certainly areas still open to debate, as Taubes himself says repeatedly in his writing, but they are not about the knee-jerk topics most people think they will be about.

If you're curious, feel free to take a look at the wikipedia post summarizing the results of low-carb diet trials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low.... You'll find, at the very least, some cognitive dissonance. And that's really what Taubes' writings (in book and blog form) are about.

dkarl5• 16 years ago

What I find most frustrating about online comments on Taubes work is the amount of people who assume that this is just another crank peddling nonsense.

I don't think he can complain about that. He takes his case straight to the public, and he uses rhetoric that is likely to be effectively with the public. That's what cranks peddling nonsense do, so by convergent evolution he sounds exactly like them, which makes it much less likely that people will take his ideas seriously enough to find out if he really is a crank.

philwelch• 16 years ago

Well, thoughtful people at least. There's enough people who take actual cranks at face value that it's not, overall, a social maladaptation to do those things.

wycats7• 16 years ago

To be fair, I was the one complaining about it, not him. That said, I don't think it's fair to compare his research, rigorous report of that research, and various academic lectures to be the equivalent of what the snake-oil-salesmen do.

He presents a very strong hypothesis for a very important subject, and his public statements are mostly focused on demonstrating that what most people believe on the subject isn't exactly right. In my mind, the cognitive dissonance that he creates with his blog isn't intended to be the argument. Instead, it's designed to get people past their initial preconception so they might be willing to read the more rigorous version(s) of his argument.

In general, I don't think it's fair to say that an article in the New Yorker, followed by 5 years of literature review, followed by a (dense, by all accounts) report represents the kind of quackery you are cavalierly comparing his work to.

yummyfajitas4• 16 years ago

I assume he is a crank because his blog seems deceptive (at least the one article I read).

In the article that hit the front page yesterday, he discussed a possible scenario (a 30 year old becoming obese by age 50), and devoted 3000 words to the extra "sip of milk/beer" (above maintenance) that this person consumed.

He devoted 0 words to other 7 strips of bacon/day that this person consumed over a hypothetical non-obese 50 year old. I made some graphs which illustrate his fallacy:

http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...

If he wants us to assume he isn't a crank, he shouldn't be deliberately deceptive.

mike_organon3• 16 years ago

Taubes is referring to the 20 grams above maintenance of current weight (difference between red and green lines in your graph), not the grams above what ideal weight would require. The 7 strips of bacon are needed to maintain the excess weight, not to put on more (according to conventional wisdom). His point is that weight control can't be explained by counting calories so precisely for decades - there must be something else going on. He's not being deceptive.

Calories, fat or carbohydrates? Why diets work (when they do)

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