Culture Watch

GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES

By Gary Taubes, © 2007

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Hardcover: 460 pp (plus another 160 pp of notes and bibliography)

 

The subtitle of this extraordinary book is:

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

And that is exactly what the man does. Taubes is a correspondent for Science magazine and winner of three Science in Society Journalism awards given by the National Association of Science Writers. He has spent seven years doing extensive research into just about everything published about nutrition for at least the last 200 years.

Taubes uses medical statistics and detailed documentation to question whether ingesting fats raises the incidence of human diseases like heart failure and diabetes, and whether having high cholesterol means being at risk for them. His startling conclusion reads: “Dietary fat, whether saturated or not is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease... ” Nor, he says, does eating fat cause high cholesterol.

Instead, he cites our addiction to refined carbohydrates like white flour, sugar, and “easily digested starches” as the incredibly destructive culprits. They effect our secretion of insulin, the chief regulator of fat storage, which in turn interferes with our hormonal balance. He goes on to posit refined carbohydrates as “... the most likely cause of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and the other chronic diseases of civilization.”

Because Taubes is a meticulous scientist, the book is long and at times difficult to read. If you want to cut to the chase, turn to page 454, where he lists his conclusions succinctly. If, like me, you’re a skeptic (having read altogether too many diet books), you should probably go back and slog through the whole tome to examine the author’s evidence and understand his thinking. He has turned in an impressive and scholarly performance

It will be interesting to see the reactions to this just-published book. Remembering the scorn and anger following Dr. Robert Atkins’ diet books, it is hard to imagine that the establishment in either the field of nutrition or commercial food production will sit back and take Taubes’ statements quietly.

— JS

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