How Carrots Became the new Junk Food

I mentioned Taubes' earlier bona fides because it was presumably his track record with articles and books on cold fusion and particle physics research that convinced the editors of _Science_ to give him the go-ahead on his 2001 journal article that preceded the 2002 NY Times article and the 2007 book. I think his track record demonstrates his concern for both good science and good journalism.

I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field.

Oh dear. Even if you had data to back that up, are you really going to embrace science as a popularity contest?

I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.

I'm not as interested in scientists' opinions as I am in the underlying science. I'm unaware of any studies that show the Atkins diet is really a disaster, but feel free to cite away. But to repeat myself, don't conflate warnings on the dangers of carb consumption with being a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Taubes' focus for most of his career is about how good science is perverted for not-so-good human motives. So for example when some of your "real scientists" offer a "real controlled scientific study"[1] showing that people lost weight on both low-fat and low-carb diets, Taubes asks[2] the rather logical question, how is that a weight-loss study would restrict total calorie intake on only one (low-fat) of the two diets. I mean, if you're studying weight loss, shouldn't you be controlling total calorie intake for all groups?

the scientists he quoted have said repeatedly that the disaster is that we eat 20% more calories per day, in general, than we did before WW2, and that increased fat consumption also occurred during that time

Well if those scientists really said that, which I doubt, I'm pretty sure they're wrong on the facts. I haven't digested the whole NHANES data set from the CDC, but a quick Google check found this nutritionist's summary[3]:

"In 1964 Americans ate 39 percent of their calories from fat and only 13 percent were obese. Now, while most Americans get only about 33 percent of their calories from fat, two-thirds, more than 190 million Americans are overweight or obese."

In short: Fat is not your enemy, but keep your eyes on both calories and carbs.

Edit: added following links...

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20679559

[2] http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydra...

[3] http://www.redcedarwellness.com/2010/07/the-truth-about-fats...

I've never said that Taubes has all the answers and neither has he. Indeed, on his blog Taubes himself has identified areas where he has a hunch about mechanisms but admits we simply won't know until better research is done.

Throughout this discussion you've made vague assertions about how scientists disagree with Taubes, but never cited specific points where got he facts wrong, only that some scientists don't like his using their data and words to support a conclusion they don't share. You made the bizarre claim that Americans have been eating more fat and that the Atkins diet is a disaster, both without any supporting evidence. I find this unpersuasive.

If the Atkins diet is such a disaster, for example, why is that when some of your "real scientists" conducted the relatively famous ATOZ diet study[1], it showed that the Atkins diet provided roughly twice the weight loss of the Zone, LEARN, and Ornish diets while providing as good or better secondary benefits (e.g. heart disease indicators). I mean, does that sound like "a disaster" to you?

Taubes is hardly alone in crying "foul" over the low-fat, high-carb diet fiasco. Watch Robert Lustig's UCSF talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"[2] He'll go into plenty of detail on the biochemistry involved. He starts out, however, by saying his goal is to debunk the last 30 years of nutrition information in America, and I think he makes a damn good case.

The money slide for our discussion appears at 0:09:40 in the talk. It shows, as I alluded to earlier, that the percentage of calories from fat in US adult diets has been steadily declining since the mid-1960s. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the percentage of prevalence of obesity is pretty stable, maybe ticking up a percent or so. But in 1982 the AHA, AMA, and USDA tell us we should cut our fat intake. Faced with low-fat processed foods that taste like cardboard, the manufacturers try to improve the taste with things like high-fructose corn syrup and guess what happens? In the mid-1980s the incidence of obesity shows a sudden, dramatic increase, doubling from 15% to 30% over the next two decades. Yes, there was a disaster all right, but it had nothing to do with increased fat intake or the Atkins diet.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17341711

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

"Faced with low-fat processed foods that taste like cardboard, the manufacturers try to improve the taste with things like high-fructose corn syrup and guess what happens? In the mid-1980s the incidence of obesity shows a sudden, dramatic increase, doubling from 15% to 30% over the next two decades."

Here's where we can all agree. But, I don't think the "low-fat" foods are the sole culprit. I think all of our processed foods are the culprit. The choices of what to eat are not just "low fat" processed foods or high animal protein fatty foods. We have other options; there's a whole produce section in the grocery and damned near everything in it is healthier for you than a microwaved "low fat" dinner. The processed foods, I believe, are contributing mightily to the weight problem in our society. If you go to the store and buy a bunch of "low carb" processed foods, you'll still get fat, and feel bad.

If people lose weight on Atkins, that is a net positive for their health. Heart disease or complications from diabetes is probably what's going to kill a really fat person. So, if they remove weight as a contributing factor in those problems, they might live past the average lifespan of someone who dies of those diseases. However, there is quite a bit of evidence that diets very high in animal proteins and fats contribute to higher incidence of many kinds of cancer, as well as heart disease.

The thing is, I suspect you and I agree about what people should eat a lot more than we disagree. My problem is with picking one specific macronutrient and calling it the cause of all of our troubles. Because Taubes recommends eating wholes foods most of the time, I think following his recommendations are better for you than Weight Watchers or similar processed food-based diets. But, the science still seems to indicate that there are long-term health consequences to eating large amounts of animal protein and animal fats. I know Taubes has done a lot of hand-waving about the China Study, and the book itself probably does deserve some of the thrashing he gave it; but the actual study is one of the largest and most impressive studies of human diet ever undertaken. I don't think you can simply ignore all that data, and the healthiest populations did generally have quite low intake of animal proteins.

All I'm saying is that the human body is among the most complex systems we study (there are billions of moving parts in the bacterial flora in our digestive system, we have barely a clue how any of that works), and Taubes sometimes has hunches based on correlation that are probably wrong.

"Watch Robert Lustig's UCSF talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"[2] He'll go into plenty of detail on the biochemistry involved."

We can both agree on the danger of sugar, as well. Humans have just gotten really good at making foods that have almost no nutrition and loads of energy, and sugar helps. Lustig's treatise is that too much sugar and not enough fiber are key to some of our problems, which doesn't have much overlap with recommending a high protein/high fat diet (his first slide is "What do the Atkins diet and Japanese diet have in common?").

But, if you're including this link as evidence that we understand insulin, I would mention dairy. Dairy causes a tremendous insulinemic response, several times what it's glycemic index indicates it should. And yet, numerous studies have shown that eating dairy can help with weight loss. There are many other areas where insulin doesn't behave in a simplistic way; we don't actually know what insulin does in many circumstances.

One more point about Lustig's video. In the graph of fat intake vs. obesity, he leaves out one very important line: Total caloric intake. I think that's an important omission.

"You made the bizarre claim that Americans have been eating more fat and that the Atkins diet is a disaster, both without any supporting evidence."

Caloric intake is up, as is total fat intake. Only percentage of fat is down, and only by some measures. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/DEC2002/frvo...)