If this is true then why are the vegetarians I know are lean and the people who eat a lot of meat are not?
Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#12If this is true then why are the vegetarians I know are lean and the people who eat a lot of meat are not?
The issue is not if you eat a lot of meat or not, it is if you eat a lot of carbohydrates or not.
I know plenty of fat vegans including a family member who became diabetic and suffered a stroke because of it. Of course your and my experiences are both anecdotal, but I do believe I have heard studies showing that vegetarians do suffer disproportionately of heart disease. I'll try and google it.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#13If this is true then why are the vegetarians I know are lean and the people who eat a lot of meat are not?
It could be that vegetarians are more likely to be health conscious than meat eaters. Someone who is vegetarian (and comes from a meat eating nation) has definitely put some thought into their diet, whereas the meat eater may not have.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#14If this is true then why are the vegetarians I know are lean and the people who eat a lot of meat are not?
It could be that vegetarians are more likely to be health conscious than meat eaters. Someone who is vegetarian (and comes from a meat eating nation) has definitely put some thought into their diet, whereas the meat eater may not have.
This study that Taubes references says that certain groups of vegetarians often identified as being healthier are frequent nut eaters:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479222
Interestingly if I recall correctly he mentions that 7th day adventists (vegetarians) have roughly the same heart disease level as Mormons (meat eaters).
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#15Previously, I never believed the notion that calories in/calories out was wrong - it always seemed too much like "feel good science" to me. Y'know, where a diet says it's not your fault that you're overweight, it's just because of the darn environment around you, so feel good about yourself, etc, etc. I think I was mistaken. There was a thread on here with a video that was just incredibly insightful and it was a big…
It's obviously right by conservation of energy, but it's equivocating the word "in". Food is "in" when you eat it, but calories are "in" when they're digested and metabolized - that's several steps further down the pipeline.
That's part of the issue. Eating slower has been suggested to help losing weight for that reason - it gives your satiety response time to kick in.
The issue with calories in minus calories out is not equivocating the word "in", though. It is that it doesn't provide a useful model of how weight gain works. "Calories in" and "Calories out" are not independent variables, they are managed by the body's various feedback systems. Changing one of them will almost always change the other. Going for a run will make you hungrier, and undereating will lower your energy level and probably make you hungrier as well.
Based on a lecture of his I've seen, I'm convinced that his major hypothesis is God's own truth - that "calories in - calories out" is not a useful model for controlling weight, and that the regulatory systems of the body are what you have to get at to have a real effect on body weight. I am sold on the idea that diet is one way to get at those systems effectively. I'm eager to read his book to find out more about the case he's making.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#16Please ignore my opinion, I only briefly read the notes and I am an ignoramus in nutrition. After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet: less carbs lots of fat. No thanks. Read a little Dr. Fuhrman for a different approach to nutrition: more nutrients, less calories. Greens in other words. More carbs though. Who's right?
After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet Taubes' book is not a diet book, it's a thick book on all the things that are wrong on modern research on nutrition. It explains why the problem is not fats (nor greens), but refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour. Very worth your time, really.
American obsesity can correlated to eating too much salt, sugar and fat.
Fast food makes it cheap and easy to get into a pattern where a significant portion of your daily intake is essentially a combination of sugar (soda, coffee, tea, etc), fat (burgers, fries, tacos, etc) and salt (flavoring, preservatives, etc.)
If we went back to the diet before there was fast-food then we'd have a lot less obesity. People would be eating more whole grains, fruits, veggies, fish and lean meat.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#17Please ignore my opinion, I only briefly read the notes and I am an ignoramus in nutrition. After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet: less carbs lots of fat. No thanks. Read a little Dr. Fuhrman for a different approach to nutrition: more nutrients, less calories. Greens in other words. More carbs though. Who's right?
Taubes book is not a diet, but an extremely thorough review of the last 100 years of research into obesity, heart disease, diabetes etc. I think easily 1/3 of the book consists of references to the scientific literature.
Contrary to popular belief there is lots of research backing up the low carb theory, but they are mainly found in the fields of endocrinology and physiological psychology.
The picture coming out of it as outlined by Taubes is of an extremely complex system.
The endocrinologists have shown that the primary hormone governing obesity is insulin which isn't controversial anymore. It isn't that simple though to avoid foods that physiologically spike insulin.
The Physiological psychologists have shown that insulin can see short spikes in preparation for a meal due to smells and tastes, which is why artificial sweeteners can be problematic sometimes.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#18Sorry for the threadjacking, but any HNers doing caloric restriction? I'm at a normal weight, but a checkup a few months ago revealed a personal-worst blood pressure of 128/75, so I've been on CRON since then. Latest blood pressure is 110/65.
I lost almost 85 lbs with a combination of calorie-restriction + low carb.
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#19If this is true then why are the vegetarians I know are lean and the people who eat a lot of meat are not?
The issue is not if you eat a lot of meat or not, it is if you eat a lot of carbohydrates or not. I know plenty of fat vegans including a family member who became diabetic and suffered a stroke because of it. Of course your and my experiences are both anecdotal, but I do believe I have heard studies showing that vegetarians do suffer disproportionately of heart disease. I'll try and google it.
Followup to that, because vegetarians eat things that are less dense in some vital nutrients, a good health-aware vegetarian will discover they need to stay away from the high-carb veggies like potatoes because they also have no nutrient value to speak of, and filling up on potatoes means you're not filling up on things high in iron (for example).
(Yes, part of the reason some vegetarians are vegetarians is because plants can be more rich in nutrients, but it is not automatically balanced, and some vital nutrients are more challenging to get than others.)
In that case, a vegetarian ends up eating a not-excessively-large portion of carbs naturally.
A bad vegetarian who assumes if it's not meat it must be healthy can still get in trouble, not just on this front but on others as well. It's not that simple.
(I've resolved that if any of my children ever want to be vegetarians, I'm OK with that, but a critical precondition is that they demonstrate that they have done their homework and understand the nutritional implications. I believe it can be done safely, but it's not trivial; it takes work in our environment.)
Re: Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet Taubes' book is not a diet book, it's a thick book on all the things that are wrong on modern research on nutrition. It explains why the problem is not fats (nor greens), but refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour. Very worth your time, really.
American obsesity can correlated to eating too much salt, sugar and fat. Fast food makes it cheap and easy to get into a pattern where a significant portion of your daily intake is essentially a combination of sugar (soda, coffee, tea, etc), fat (burgers, fries, tacos, etc) and salt (flavoring, preservatives, etc.) If we went back to the diet before there was fast-food then we'd have a lot less obesity. People would…
Look, you just spouted the dietary dogma in the face of a book that has dozens upon dozens of references to scientific literature. The only thing stopping me saying "hundreds" is I'm not quite sure if it gets up to 200, though I bet it does. (I don't have it in front of me to check.) Even if you're completely right (which I do not believe despite being raised on that theory), simply re-spouting it is not an adequate response to this book.
That theory simply doesn't explain all the observations, and you need to catch up to modern science. Salt especially; current science strongly indicates that salt is not a problem for a normal person, it only matters if you already have a blood pressure problem (and I still think it may yet be revealed that it actually has no effect at all and it's all sugar). This isn't even from Taubes' book, this is simply the current state of the science.
Running on the dietary theories of the 1960s leaves you defenseless in the face of our current food environment, and when you get in trouble it doesn't give you a way out. Check this new stuff out. Check out the sugar video lionhearted referenced, it's free and the source is unimpeachable, and unlike reading the book which has the step of obtaining a book, that video is as easy to watch as any other video on YouTube. It has biochemistry in it. It's pretty good.