Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

I'm a researcher by trade. Not a medical researcher, but an analyst nonetheless and I have been waiting for a very long time for this kind of work to come out. This isn't advocacy whatsoever. It's a look at what everyone says, and what the science says, and the politics that led us to ignore the science. The research level is staggering and evidence so overwhelming that portions of the book are downright infuriating. I personally found reading the one-star reviews here interesting because there is not a single, negative review here that remotely suggests the reviewer actually read the material. On to my own rating, here's what I think you should know when considering this purchase: This is unlike any book you've ever read on the subject of diets. It is not a diet book. It is not a lifestyle book. It is not an advocacy book. It is a look at the science that has been ignored as our country has rolled toward the low-fat religion and what the consequences of this have been. It is a look at how and why overwhelming science and evidence was ignored. Society has needed someone to do what Taubes did here -- to strip away what is popular, to dig into claims and recommendations, and see what the EVIDENCE shows us for claims on both sides of the diet argument. It will give you clarity where there has never been any, while explaining why it has been absent. If you are looking for a book that lays out a diet plan and recipes and sample meals and such, this is not for you. This is a work of scientific journalism, not a diet plan. On a final note, it is noteworthy that there have been no real rebuttals to this work whatsoever from the "experts" and "authorities" who have, because of politics and money and cowardice, advocated dietary guidelines that have driven our society into our miserable states of health and obesity. That silence is shame.

This book is without a doubt the most all inclusive, exhaustively researched book on dietary issues that exists. I read it front to back and am now re-reading it with my pink marker. You have to have a real interest in the subject to wade through all the information, it's not light reading. However, what is presented is mind blowing yet I had a sense of "I knew this all along." What really amazed AND disgusted me was the extent of sloppy and often bad science that has existed over the years with regard to weight gain, the influence of politics and media in misleading the public, often quite deliberately, other times just due to weak intellect. Taubes discusses it all, and the evidence is pretty plain. He footnotes everything, all the studies, the conferences, he names all the names. The back of the book has 44 pages of footnoted references, followed by a 66 page bibliography. Taubes is an impressive researcher, and as he said at one point, prior to the internet and its ability to facilitate research, this particular book would have been a lifetime of work to assemble. Four years ago, suffering from a sprained shoulder and broken rib from a ski fall, and therefore unable to exercise for a time, I embarked on the Atkins diet to lose that proverbial last 20 lbs which seemingly would not budge despite fairly careful eating and a strenuous 6-day a week exercise regime. To my amazement, on the Atkins diet the weight fell off effortlessly and I felt marvelous. A few years later, I realized that I was both gluten and casein sensitive and the lack of grains, sugar, fruit and dairy in the Atkins induction diet explained why I felt so wonderful. It was obvious those omitted foods influenced whether I gained or lost weight. After reading this book, I now understand the full extent of why that weight came off so easily and quickly, how effortlessly I reached my ideal weight, and why I came to realize I hadn't known what it felt like to food GOOD all the time. Looking back at my childhood in the 50's and 60's, this was a time in which not I, not my family, not anyone I knew, none of my schooolmates were at all overweight and you just didn't see very many hugely obese people anywhere. The grossly bloated and obsese people you see so commonly today were a total rarity at that time. The cause of so much of today's overweight is fairly obvious to pinpoint, and you have only to take a walk thru your local supermarket, pay attention to the products of the fast food restaurants (can you find anything that isn't fried/breaded/carb loaded??), and look at the typical diet everyone today tends to eat: grains grains grains at every meal, high carbs at every meal, loads of sugar and high fructose corn syrup (in virtually everything processed), and relatively less protein, very few vegetables (no, french fries don't count as a vegetable!), not much fat and not enough fruit. We are overloading ourselves with pure junk food from morning to night, most

This book is an impressive review of the science and the politics behind our ideas about good nutrition and healthy diets. Taubes took 5 years to write this, and says it wouldn't have been possible without the ready access to original resources that the Internet makes possible. It does indeed have an incredible amount of information about the subject. One of the sad and infuriating themes of this book is that much of the currently accepted wisdom about healthy diets has a political basis, that recommendations were made and marketed before the science was solid, or in many cases before the science was even done. The people pushing their ideas strongly believed that they were doing the right thing, that their recommendations would save lives and wouldn't hurt anyone. Unfortunately, as the science gets better and better, it looks like they were wrong -- they may have helped a small percentage of people, but at the expense of greatly increased risk of diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer for large numbers of us. Taubes opens his book by reminding us of the "diseases of Western civilization", that diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and cancer were relatively unknown in the third world until they adopted a more Western diet. Albert Schweitzer didn't treat many cases with these problems when he started practicing in Africa, but at the end of his service was seeing a lot of them, as local diets changed during his practice. One hypothesis for why a typical Western diet is so unhealthy is that we eat a high level of refined carbohydrates: sugars, white flour, polished white rice. Taubes does an excellent job of supporting this hypothesis. The basic model is that refined carbohydrates are absorbed very quickly by the gut and result in large blood sugar (glucose) spikes that require large insulin surges to keep blood sugar in a healthy range. Over time, many people develop metabolic problems and are not able to cope with these repeated glucose surges and keep their blood sugar under control. As average blood sugar and insulin level levels go up, they cause a cascade of increasing metabolic problems, leading to higher weight or obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, inflamation, and increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer, and dementia. Taubes looks at a number of other explanations for "Western diseases". * Cholesterol and saturated fat. This theory was championed by Dr Ancel Keys, who succeeding in turning it into dogma. The idea was that people with extremely high total cholesterol (265 and up) had higher risks of heart attacks, so lower cholesterol must be good for everyone, even though only a very small percentage of people have total cholesterol over 265. Eating saturated fat increases total cholesterol, so it must be bad. Eating polyunsaturated fat reduces total cholesterol so it must be good. Eating less saturated fat means that you need to make up the calories that were coming from it, so you needed to eat more po

Gary Taubes reviews the medical research of the past 50 years to establish that the connections between fat and cholesterol and heart disease have never been proven and that, on the contrary, the case that unrefined carbohydrates are responsible for obesity and the so-called "diseases of civilization" has been made by the very studies that have been used to defend the "fat" hypothesis. His review of the research is exhaustive. He does not claim that exercise does not improve muscle tone and overall health. Rather, he argues that exercise is not a a "cure" for obesity, and may even make some people fatter, because they eat more of the wrong foods after exercising. Taubes writes that the rule to follow is the same one that your mother taught you: starch and sweets make you fat. The solution is to center your diet around protein and non-starchy carbs such as green vegetables and berries, and not to worry about fat so much as unrefined flour, rice and other processed foods. (As one reviewer below points out, "bad" calories may include meat, fish and poultry that has been fed a diet of highly-processed grain. Buy grass-fed, and read labels: much of the canned and prepared food that you buy, including some yogurts, contains sugar and food additives made from corn (corn syrup, citric acid, etc.)) Anecdotally, after reading Taubes's 2002 article in the NYT, I realized that I had started gaining weight -- put on twelve pounds, and gone from a size 6 to an 8 or 10 -- precisely when I had changed my diet in the late 1970s to conform to the "new wisdom" regarding fats and carbohydrates. Exercise -- running and yoga -- had helped me to hold the line at 12 pounds, but could not take off the added weight. My husband, for whom I had assiduously prepared low-fat, high-carb meals for years, was 25 pounds overweight, despite daily exercise. Although I had tried The Zone, and lost weight, I was scared to switch permanently to what my doctor warned me was a dangerous diet. So I'd switched back to low fat/high carb, and back came the 12 pounds. Then, last year, we began cooking with Julia Child's "Art of French Cooking" and, rather than getting fatter, I actually lost -- yes, lost -- weight eating all those butter-sauteed veggies and creamy quiches. When I once again became concerned about eating too much fat, and returned to a low-fat/high carb diet, back came the weight. Finally, 8 weeks ago -- before reading Taube's book -- I decided that low carb (meaning low starch) had proven itself to me twice over, and that I was going to do what worked. So I ate protein (eggs, fish, chicken, dairy), organic greens and other low-starch veggies, and tossed the rice, bread, potatoes, and sugar. I didn't worry about the fat and cholesterol in eggs, swiss cheese, whole-milk yogurt or almonds; that fat kept me full, and I wasn't eating tons of such foods (who could?), just enough to feel satisfied. I have lost 8 pounds since July. I feel great. I am not hungry.

Yes, this book is probably too academic for most citizens but it's worth the effort to try and understand a little more about endocrinology if you want to really be in control of your own health. Hormones rule. If you are a skeptic or still can't let go of "calories in-calories out" and "fat and cholesterol clog arteries and cause heart attacks," do this. Eat a high carbohydrate diet (normal Western diet) for 6 weeks and get your triglycerides checked. Then eat no starch, no sugar, no potatoes, no pasta, no rice, no grains, no bread and no alcohol for 6 weeks. Get your triglycerides tested again. See the difference? There is no debate on EITHER side that triglycerides kill. The debate is how they get there. And by the way, eating that way is surprizingly satisfying and not nearly as hard as most people think it would be! I have had the good fortune of working in a medical clinic where we test lipoproteins, insulin and many other metabolic markers on clients every 3 months. We recommend they avoid starchy and refined carboydrates but do eat many vegetables and protein. They do not use low-fat dairy but whole dairy. Saturated fat is not avoided. It takes a good 6 to 12 months but with this way of eating LDLIIIa+b (the intermediate lipoproteins that can be altered from VLDL to more dense and less lethal), insulin and yes even CHOLESTEROL will go down. It is not fat... it is carbohydrate that drives the metabolic engines to death. What I love about Taubes' book is that he gives the history on why much of this scientific research has not been adopted by nutrition and health policy makers. It is not a 'great conspiracy' but human nature. Egos get involved and facts get distorted. If I hadn't seen hundreds of lipoprotein lab results I wouldn't have believed it either. If I hadn't heard the reports from clients that life without refined carbohydrates isn't really hard to do I wouldn't have believed it either. Taubes is on to something and you need to do your own experiements to test his assumption... Taubes explains the science behind the metabolic discoveries from research about fat metabolism. He explains what happens when food meets hormones. And THAT is what the science of nutrition is really about! Hormones play a key role in metabolism and the manner in which food impacts hormones is what creates disease or health. One area that Taubes did not elaborate on is the effect of feeding refined carbohydrates to the animals we eat. Fatty acids (the `omega' fatty acids) found in plants and animals, are converted to hormone-like substances, called eicosanoids or prostaglandins, by our body. These eicosanoids control many key metabolic functions including inflammation. It has been shown that inflammation is the root cause of most chronic degenerative diseases in humans. Eating animals that are fed grains rather than grass increases omega-6 fatty acid consumption and risk for chronic disease in humans. There are two other insulin considerations to c