more Taubes stuff

Jackie Patti wrote:
Davis blogged about him today.

Bernstein mentioned him on his teleconference last night.

I still haven't finished the book myself yet...


It is a slow read, isn't it?

I find that I have to go back often and reread chapters and sections,
just because I can't remember all of the new stuff I am being exposed to.

I haven't worked this hard on a book for a very long time.

My experience was encountering information and references that required
giving up a number of "self evident truths" that have been passed around.

Have you had the same experience, or had you been current enough on this
research that you had avoided these kinds of "self evident truths"?

Davis blogged about him today.

Bernstein mentioned him on his teleconference last night.

I still haven't finished the book myself yet...

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

"Jim" wrote in message ...
Jackie Patti wrote:
Davis blogged about him today.

Bernstein mentioned him on his teleconference last night.

I still haven't finished the book myself yet...


It is a slow read, isn't it?

I find that I have to go back often and reread chapters and sections,
just because I can't remember all of the new stuff I am being exposed to.

I haven't worked this hard on a book for a very long time.

My experience was encountering information and references that required
giving up a number of "self evident truths" that have been passed around.

Have you had the same experience, or had you been current enough on this
research that you had avoided these kinds of "self evident truths"?

This was my experience reading the book as well. Stick with it, it just gets
better and better right to the end.

Alan

Jim wrote:

Have you had the same experience, or had you been current enough on this
research that you had avoided these kinds of "self evident truths"?

For the most part, I am finding most of the arguments familiar from much
low-carb reading over the course of more than a decade at it. On the
other hand, he puts it all together in an interesting way, so I'm
finding it an enjoyable read.

There have also been a few tidbits that I was not aware of, or had never
thought about properly. For example, the bit about all monosaccharides
contributing to glycation of proteins - it had never occured to me
before that fructose would contribute to making the HbA1c not directly
related to blood glucose readings.

All-in-all, I'd say it's definetly worth reading.

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:08:03 -0500, Jackie Patti wrote:

Davis blogged about him today.

Bernstein mentioned him on his teleconference last night.

I still haven't finished the book myself yet...

'Davis'? Would you mind pointing to Davis?

Jean Genie wrote:
On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:08:03 -0500, Jackie Patti wrote:

Davis blogged about him today.

Bernstein mentioned him on his teleconference last night.

I still haven't finished the book myself yet...

'Davis'? Would you mind pointing to Davis?

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

I had to powerhouse my way through Taubes today as it's due back at the
library and can't be renewed as there's a waiting list for it cause they
only got 5 copies.

I was very impressed at his ability to cover the Kreb's cycle,
lipolysis, etc and manage to translate it to laymen's language. My
college biochemistry textbook was easily twice as thick as this and
didn't have to "translate" for laymen. Course, it had a lot more
details, but... the thing is no one remembers all that stuff anyways.
Most you remember is stuff like the Kreb's cycle produces ATP in the
mitochondria... and Taubes manages to cover all the bits one actually
remembers. It might be somewhat tough reading for some laymen, but he
does manage to make the basic metabolism of carbohydrate and fat pretty
accessible for non-chemists (he has much less on the metabolism of
protein though).

He doesn't just discuss insulin and I'm not sure why people come away
from the book thinking that. He makes a big deal out of the importance
of the hypothalamus-pituitary axis in regulating both appetite and fat
storage. He discusses the importance of the sex hormones with regards
to fat storage also. He provides a summary of the hormones known to
regulate fat storage as of 1965 includes: epinephrine, norepinephrine,
ACTH, glucagon, TSH, melanocyte-stimulating hormone, vasopressin and
growth hormone as well as insulin. That being said, he doesn't address
adrenal hormones beyond epinephrine and norepinephrine hardly at all.
He discusses some experiments with rats with their adrenals surgically
removed, but it's basically about aldosterone (though he doesn't refer
to the hormone by name). Not a word about cortisol anywhere.

I'm not sure why people come away from the book thinking he says not to
exercise. Rather, he points out that fat storage is related to calories
in and calories out pretty directly. He simply points out there's some
confusion about what is the cause and what is the effect - which
variables are independent in that equation. He also points out that
exercise is not the entirety of "calories out" as basal metabolism is
also effected. He seems to believe that excess fat storage causes a
reduction in both basal metabolism and the natural desire to exercise -
lean people burn calories at a higher rate even when sleeping and
naturally enjoy moving more. But nowhere does he say that exercise is
not good.

I think this is the best and most thorough low-carb book I've ever read.
Lots of information I've run across in many different places is all
organized here, as well as a few studies I wasn't familair with. Beats
the heck out of Protein Power, which is no longer my favorite low-carb
book now that GCBC is available. In between finishing reading it and
returning it to the library, I ordered a copy from Amazon as it's a good
reference book that should sit on my desk next to Bernstein and my book
of food counts.

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

Jackie Patti wrote:

I think this is the best and most thorough low-carb book I've ever read.
Lots of information I've run across in many different places is all
organized here, as well as a few studies I wasn't familair with. Beats
the heck out of Protein Power, which is no longer my favorite low-carb
book now that GCBC is available. In between finishing reading it and
returning it to the library, I ordered a copy from Amazon as it's a good
reference book that should sit on my desk next to Bernstein and my book
of food counts.


Did you ever read Lyle McDonald's book, "The Ketogenic
Diet - A Complete Guide for the Dieter and Practitioner"?

--
Rudy - Remove the Z from my address to respond.

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
-Emiliano Zapata

Check out the a.s.d.l-c FAQ at:
http://www.grossweb.com/asdlc/faq.htm

RRzVRR wrote:
Jackie Patti wrote:

I think this is the best and most thorough low-carb book I've ever
read. Lots of information I've run across in many different places is
all organized here, as well as a few studies I wasn't familair with.
Beats the heck out of Protein Power, which is no longer my favorite
low-carb book now that GCBC is available. In between finishing
reading it and returning it to the library, I ordered a copy from
Amazon as it's a good reference book that should sit on my desk next
to Bernstein and my book of food counts.


Did you ever read Lyle McDonald's book, "The Ketogenic
Diet - A Complete Guide for the Dieter and Practitioner"?


I just read a small extract from Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Ketogenic-Diet...3656453&sr=8-2

It looks very interesting, but after reading Taubes to the end, I am
ready to read a couple of relaxing novels before embarking on anything
medically heavy again.

Thanks for the tip.

Since this was off the beaten path, I thought some might
find the exchange between Taubes the NYT Book reviewer
Kolata interesting.

My thought was that Kolata won't acknowledge the concept of
human behavior (and/or addiction) effecting dieting... let
alone how that behavior (and/or addiction) would be hard to
overcome if it receives a constant bombardment of messages
from the educational, media & medical communities
encouraging the addiction.


=================
October 7, 2007

Gina Kolata is a medical reporter for The Times and the
author of ''Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss
and the Myths and Realities of Dieting.'

GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES

Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does
not accept conventional wisdom. In ''Good Calories, Bad
Calories,'' he says what he wants is a fair hearing and
rigorous testing for ideas that might seem shocking.

His thesis, first introduced in a much-debated article in
The New York Times Magazine in 2002 challenging the low-fat
diet orthodoxy, is that nutrition and public health research
and policy have been driven by poor science and a sort of
pigheaded insistence on failed hypotheses. As a result,
people are confused and misinformed about the relationship
between what they eat and their risk of growing fat. He
expands that thesis in the new book, arguing that the same
confused reasoning and poor science has led to
misconceptions about the relation between diet and heart
disease, high blood pressure, cancer, dementia, diabetes
and, again, obesity. When it comes to determining the ideal
diet, he says, we have to ''confront the strong possibility
that much of what we've come to believe is wrong.'' The best
diet, he argues, is one loaded with protein and fat but very
low in carbohydrates.

Taubes spent five years working on the book, which runs to
more than 450 pages. The bibliography alone goes on for more
than 60 pages. He also says he interviewed more than 600
doctors, researchers and administrators, though he adds that
''the appearance of their names in the text ... does not
imply that they agree with all or even part of the thesis
set forth in this book.'' Taubes does not bow to the current
fashion for narrative nonfiction, instead building his
argument case by case, considering the relationship between
dietary fat and heart disease, carbohydrates and disease,
diet and obesity. As a result, the book can be hard to read,
tedious in many places and repetitious.

Yet much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening to those
who have not closely followed the science, or lack of
science, in this area. (Disclosu At one point he
approvingly cites my articles on the lack of evidence that a
high-fiber diet protects against colon cancer.) For example,
he tells the amazing story of how the idea of a connection
between dietary fat, cholesterol and heart disease got going
and took on a life of its own, despite the minimal
connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol
for most people. He does not mince words. ''From the
inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s,
those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease
accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to
support their belief. These myths are still passed on
faithfully to the present day.'' The story is similar for
salt and high blood pressure, and for dietary fiber and cancer.

In fact, Taubes convincingly shows that much of what is
believed about nutrition and health is based on the
flimsiest science. To cite one minor example, there's the
notion that a tiny bit of extra food, 50 or 100 calories a
day -- a few bites of a hamburger, say -- can gradually make
you fat, and that eating a tiny bit less each day, or doing
something as simple as walking a mile, can make the weight
slowly disappear. This idea is based on a hypothesis put
forth in a single scientific paper, published in 2003. And
even then it was qualified, Taubes reports, by the statement
that it was ''theoretical and involves several assumptions''
and that it ''remains to be empirically tested.''
Nonetheless, it has now become the basis for an official
federal recommendation for obesity prevention.

But the problem with a book like this one, which goes on and
on in great detail about experiments new and old in areas
ranging from heart disease to cancer to diabetes, is that it
can be hard to know what has been left out. For example,
Taubes argues at length that people get fat because
carbohydrates in their diet drive up the insulin level in
the blood, which in turn encourages the storage of fat. His
conclusion: all calories are not alike. A calorie of fat is
much less fattening than a calorie of sugar.

It's known, though, that the body is not so easily fooled.
Taubes ignores what diabetes researchers say is a body of
published papers documenting a complex system of metabolic
controls that, in the end, assure that a calorie is a
calorie is a calorie. He also ignores definitive studies
done in the 1950s and '60s by Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller
University and Rudolph Leibel of Columbia, which tested
whether calories from different sources have different
effects. The investigators hospitalized their subjects and
gave them controlled diets in which the carbohydrate content
varied from zero to 85 percent, and the fat content varied
inversely from 85 percent to zero. Protein was held steady
at 15 percent. They asked how many calories of what kind
were needed to maintain the subjects' weight. As it turned
out, the composition of the diet made no difference.

As I read Taubes's book, I kept wondering how he would deal
with an obvious question. If low-carbohydrate diets are so
wonderful, why is anyone fat? Most people who struggle with
their weight have tried these diets and nearly all have
regained everything they lost, as they do with other diets.
What is the problem?

On Page 446, he finally tells us. Carbohydrates, he says,
are addictive, and we've all gotten hooked. Those who try to
break the habit start to crave them, just as an alcoholic
craves a drink or a smoker craves a cigarette. But, he adds,
if they are addictive, that ''implies that the addiction can
be overcome with sufficient time, effort and motivation.''

I'm sorry, but I'm not convinced.
===============
October 28, 2007

In her review of “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Oct. 7),
Gina Kolata dismisses a central thesis of my book — that
weight gain is determined by the hormonal regulation of fat
tissue and not by calories-in-minus-calories-out — by
claiming that I ignore “definitive studies,” which she then
proceeds to seriously misrepresent. Rudolph Leibel and Jules
Hirsch did not, as Kolata says, do the studies in the “1950s
and ’60s,” when Leibel would have still been making his way
from grade school through medical school. Rather, the study
— singular — published in 1992, was a reanalysis of data
gathered (on only 16 subjects) originally by Edward Ahrens
of Rockefeller University. Ahrens was not studying weight
regulation, ironically, but the ability of carbohydrates to
elevate triglyceride levels and so increase heart disease
risk. The Leibel-Hirsch paper itself argues against the use
of the term “definitive” to describe it — i.e., it is rife
with caveats. Among them, that Ahrens’s subjects could have
gained 15 pounds a year from a unique fattening effect of
carbohydrates — 150 pounds of excess fat in a decade — and
Leibel and Hirsch’s analysis would have been unable to
detect it. Moreover, only one of Ahrens’s subjects was
obese, which means, as Leibel and Hirsch explain, that
“similar results might not have been obtained in a group of
obese individuals or lean individuals susceptible to
obesity.” Since the hypothesis I discuss in “Good Calories,
Bad Calories” is intended to explain the cause of obesity in
precisely these individuals, it is odd to undercut my
credibility by accusing me of leaving out a study that did
not actually address that issue.

Kolata also evokes the authority of “diabetes researchers”
who allegedly say that all we need to know about fattening
is that “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.” What makes
this particularly curious is that diabetes researchers, more
so than those in any other medical discipline, are
intimately aware of the radically different effect of
proteins, carbohydrates and fats on insulin secretion and so
on the progression and symptoms of diabetes. They’re also
all too aware that insulin makes diabetics fat. As James
Rosenzweig, director of the office of disease management at
the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, phrased it, using the
technical terminology, weight gain on insulin therapy can
“result from the direct lipogenic effects of insulin on
adipose tissue, independent of food intake.” Put simply,
insulin causes us to accumulate fat in our fat tissue (what
Rosenzweig means by “lipogenic”) regardless of whether we
consume more calories. The question Kolata does not address
is why this would be accepted as a cause of fattening in
diabetics, but rejected as a potential cause of fattening in
the rest of us. And since insulin is secreted primarily in
response to the carbohydrates in our diet, why would we
dismiss with such alacrity, as Kolata does, the notion that
carbohydrates may be the fundamental cause of weight gain
and obesity?

At a time when obesity and diabetes are now considered to be
epidemic in America, it seems peculiar that Kolata would not
be willing to examine more rigorously any reasonable
alternative hypotheses for the continuing epidemics, rather
than dismiss them with this kind of faux science that my
book makes clear is too often found in the work of both
researchers in the field and, regrettably, journalists who
cover it regularly.

Gary Taubes
=========================================

Gina Kolata replies:

Jules Hirsch, who in fact says he did do the study, said he
and Rudolph Leibel published the data in 1992 precisely to
counteract arguments like those made by Gary Taubes. And
while the study was initiated to answer another question, it
also addressed the question of whether calories from
carbohydrates and calories from fats are different in terms
of their calorie-for-calorie contribution to body weight.
Taubes says in his book that calories from carbohydrates are
intrinsically more fattening, so this is a central question.
The authors conclude: “Variations in fat intake from 0
percent to 70 percent of total energy under conditions of
equal energy intake produced no significant changes in body
weight over periods of observations averaging 33 days.” In
other words, a calorie was a calorie was a calorie.

As Taubes amply documents in his book, low-carbohydrate
diets have been popularized periodically since the 19th
century. Best-selling book after best-selling book promoted
them. Yet if they work so well, why are so many people still
searching for an effective way to lose weight?

Taubes says the reason people fail on low-carbohydrate diets
is that they have not overcome their addiction to
carbohydrates. But that begs the question, and Taubes
provides no scientific evidence to back up that claim.



--
Rudy - Remove the Z from my address to respond.

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
-Emiliano Zapata

Check out the a.s.d.l-c FAQ at:
http://www.grossweb.com/asdlc/faq.htm