Gary Taubes

I don't have the science or statistics background to really dig deep into these studies, especially not at the rate they are released. It's helpful to have blogs and other sources that do this work on our behalf. For a more detailed rebuttal, I would recommend this interview with Gary Taubes: http://garytaubes.com/vegetable-oils-francis-bacon-bing-crosby-and-the…

Out of topic, but counting calories don't mean squad for a diet. It is a myth. Read http://garytaubes.com/ for a good research on this. Counting carbs is what is important. Low Carb, High Fat is what science tells you should do to loose wait. Using thermodynamics to understand our biology is useless. EDIT for on topic add: Useless data is useless, naked or not. They should have chosen a better example.

This person has rediscovered the William Banting original low-carb diet from 1863[1] : "The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, saccharine matter, starch, beer, milk and butter." Banting knew carbs made you fat over a century ago, but of course since the scientists couldn't figure out WHY they discredited it. And so it ever was. They also knew carbs should be avoided by diabetics, but when insulin was invented they chose to (more profitably) just shoot people up all the time and make them sicker. Do you know what shooting yourself up with insulin constantly does, by the way? [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting [2] http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-demise-of-the… [ see disturbing picture ]

Your assumption about the laws of thermodynamics predicates that the "Energy out" part of the equation is not somehow effected by the type of "Energy in" (Adding wet sticks to a fire will not produce as much released energy as adding dry sticks or gasoline soaked sticks) The general argument about carbs or any food with high glycemic response is that these foods are like adding "wet sticks" to the fire. There's considerable science and anicdote to support this. If you're interested (And not simply not throwing around pithy sound bytes about physics) check out: Why we get fat (And what to do about it) By Gary Taubes (http://garytaubes.com/) For some very compelling anicdotal evidence (That also supports some concepts of Paleo) check out http://www.reddit.com/r/keto

There is a long debate over this post. I personally found the best answer to the matter here: http://paleohacks.com/questions/49970/how-do-we-reconcile-stephan-guye… Taubes also responded to Guyenet: http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%80%93-the-a…

I am flabbergasted to see Gary Taubes being named a charlatan, especially since Taubes has written a whole freakishly long response to Guynete's articles on his blog: http://garytaubes.com/

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I can't recommend Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories highly enough. If you're not so interested, he wrote a TL;DR version called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. He also has a blog: http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/

It would probably a very good idea if you can keep to it. Doing so with mild T2 diabetes could lead to complete remission (as long as the diet is kept). In more advanced T2 diabetes it could lead to significant improvement, and reduction of required medication. People with T1 diabetes simply don't produce enough insulin. External insulin is required. Management of T1 diabetes is also way more complicated and mistakes are immediately life threatening. Are you familiar with Dr. Richard K. Bernstein's approach? It is a very low carb diet (he doesn't call it Keto as Ketosis is not the aim) combined with a lifetime of experience managing it. See his book The Diabetes Solution, his Youtube channel, and the Type1Grit facebook group. There are a lot of type 1s running <5% HbA1C on his program. He's definitely very contreversial, but I always found his reasoning extremley presvasive. Not to mention that he's a 90 year old with T1 from childhood, still practicing medicine and seeing patients (or at least he's been practicing up to a few months ago). https://www.diabetes-book.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@DrRichardKBernstein/videos https://www.facebook.com/Type1Grit/ There's also the great Gary Tabues and his books, especially Rethinking Diabets https://garytaubes.com/rethinking-diabetes/

Off the top of my head no, most of my insight came from observing addiction in others, and experimenting over the course of a decade. However, the two books which I guess started me on this journey are Why We Get Fat by Garry Taube [0] and The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris [1]. Both of these books take a scientific approach to diet (which is governed by habit and addiction, after all). I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions, all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad. For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist. And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK. If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee, pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold…

> But if a fat person simply eats less, no matter the macronutrient content, he or she will lose weight. This is well documented, and even Taubes doesn't disagree with that. A low-carb diet doesn't have to be intentionally low calorie. That's the point. Eating very low carb allows the body to adjust hunger levels to match existing fat stores. If you're fat and you allow your body to do its job, you won't be as hungry because you have plenty of energy stored up and the body is eager to use it. In other words, we've evolved to survive times of plenty and times of famine, and our modern diet with extremely high carb intake throws this system out of whack. Low calorie is just forced starvation and although you will always lose weight this way, it's an uphill battle because you're fighting the body's fat regulation mechanism. You might be eating high-carb but low calorie, causing insulin spikes, extreme hunger, and protein wasting. It's not an easy diet to follow and it might even be counterproductive. This is the theory anyway. This queston has been posted to Taubes many times over though, and he himself can explain it a lot better than I can. If you're interested in the topic, this is definitely worth a read: http://garytaubes.com/2012/11/what-would-happen-if-thoughts-and-though…

I would say that the message of the article is "we need more regulations". My reaction was, basically, "you haven't shown that; at best you've suggested we need better enforcement of existing regulations'. So while I disagree with the original linked article, I'm not sure you and I disagree. :) As for the studies, this is winding far afield, but there's two main ways you can do a study: Controlled and observational. Controlled is hard, but gives good data. Observational is easy, but gives unreliable data, especially when relating to people. To a first approximation, a controlled study can prove things about human health, while an observational study can suggest areas where a controlled study would be useful. It's not that these studies have methodological errors (as far as I know, they don't). It's that they're observational studies, and best case, they can't prove things in the way a controlled study would. If you want a good primer on "what are observational studies and why are they problematic for human health"...I don't actually have one handy. But there was some very good discussion floating around about the "Red Meat Consumption and Mortality" recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. A lot of headlines said, basically, "science proves meat will give you cancer", but again, it was an observational study, and it simply didn't show what people who didn't understand statistics thought it did. Some links discussing…

You can read the studies here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2673150 and here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oby.22468 They are both thorough, easy to read, and contradict Taubes’ primary claims. A third was supposed to occur (I think) but the funding, surprisingly, was withdrawn. Edit: there were three studies done, all of which contradict Taubes’ claims. You can read his wonky spin on how, even though the studies prove him wrong, he may just be right on his own website: http://garytaubes.com/the-dissolution-of-the-nutrition-science-initiat…

Gary Taubes has done a pretty comprehensive takedown of the Nurese Health study[http://garytaubes.com/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-a… and all the wrong conclusions the good folks at Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health have managed to torture out of it.

See this article from the scientific journal _Science_ from 2001 (not endorsing the linked website, it was just the first non-paywalled location of the article): http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Science-The-soft-scie… The fallacies around dietary guidelines have been known to the scientific community for over 15 years at least. I read that article when it was in the original issue and I was dumbfounded by the slapdash way nutrition guidelines are established with minimal proof.

Taubes touches on it in this article a bit: http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%80%93-the-a… It's not a scientific study, but it addresses the obese people not eating significantly too much.

Is this what you're talking about? http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Science-The-soft-scie…

In his article "Science pseudoscience nutritional epidemiology and meat" http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidem… Gary Taubes discusses how epidemiological studies can fail to account for something called the "compliance effect" - the missing variable. It was an eye opener for me.

Taubes has responded to the wholehealthsource critique (I have not read it, but it was referred to as a "thorough multi-part smack down"): http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ancestral-healt…

Actually, no. Here's an article that explains why this is not the case: http://garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/

Hmm. Maybe Gary Taubes has changed his approach, because in a typically-logorrhetic blog post last year, he went on about why low-fat calorie-restricted diets work exactly because the "absolute amount of carbohydrates consumed goes down." http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydrates/

Many obesity researchers find Guyenet to be quite the joke. For example, Peter over at HyperLipid recently ripped him to utter shreds: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/confused.html http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2012/06/insulin-un-dead-and-cof… Not to mention, Taubes countered Guyenet with a 6-part series refuting Guyenet's widely mocked food-reward/palatability hypothesis: http://garytaubes.com/2011/09/catching-up-on-lost-time-ancestral-healt… The thing is, there's a lot of infighting; These guys are always going back and forth. They both have their camps. Those both have their arsenal of studies. It's almost a sport... The simple fact of the matter is that we're not really going to actually know conclusively and incontrovertibly one way or the other for at least another decade.

Guyenet is pushing the same idea that most of mainstream nutrition science pushes: playing with the composition of a diet may affect your willingness to stick with a diet. This is pretty well known, and has a fairly simple mechanism. By imposing artificial restrictions on your diet (no carbs, no acidic foods, nothing brown to yellow in color), you reduce the amount of calories you can consume. I.e., where you previously saw "ooh, lemon cake, let me eat", you now say "no yellow food". Caloric consumption goes down, and so does bodyfat. This is why basically all weirdo diets work in the short term. The fact is that Taubes theories about insulin have been shown to be false. His theories that obese people retain more fat has also been shown to be false. His theories that obese people have a lower metabolic rate have also been shown to be false. He continues to push them in spite of this. That's the definition of charlatan. Another experiment: go read this article of his. http://garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/ Then based on his presentation, state what you think his hypothetical fat person and thin person are eating. Most people come away with a completely wrong idea.

This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head. I was just talking to my sister about kitsch, camp, and punk, and how all of those scenes were misunderstood by a certain subpopulation who didn't catch the irony. "Animal House" was pure parody. I can tell you that a lot of fellow undergrads emulated it, and not everyone caught the joke. And sometimes, some people are so enthusiastically applying irony to everything, they forget about basic decency. (I admit to making mistakes in both directions.) I suspect that a study of what people actually read would reveal that "fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience" is about par for the course. Most diet movements fit this description, yet how many billions of dollars have been wasted on them? One can't even get the general public to apply something as basic as the laws of thermodynamics without making huge mistakes. A lot of people are no better off applying basic physical laws than thinking they should make more sacrifices to Zeus. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567081 http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/ The takeaway here is that we're evolved to deal with the problems and lives of cavemen. It's only through some accidents of talent and diligence that some of us are able to understand things above and beyond that level.

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…