James's review

I agree 100%. I'm a biochemist. I stumbled across this book and read it in 2 days to the point of eye-strain. I resisted re-reading because I had told co-workers (scientists all) about it and they wanted me to surrender it back to the library so they could start reading it. I plan to start teaching a seminar about it at the college where I teach. This book was revelatory and it made me angry and frustrated while I read it. The title could be Good Science, Bad Science. I also thought of the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy 'witch' hunts of the '50's. Anyway, this has ramifications for my elderly mother with developing dementia. There is so much to this important tome, but I have to say I think you can think of insulin in the systemic circulation (it has a slightly different effect in the brain) as doing only a few things. Hyperinsulinemia makes you crave sugar, makes you store excess calories as fat and stops the effect of growth hormorne. Growth hormone is required for a healthy functioning immune system and I also believe it stimulates growth of new inter (between) brain cell connections. That is one of the problems I think is happening with my mom (high sucrose diet) and it just makes me livid that until I came across this book, I felt helpless to slow down her developing memory deficit.
Another book, you must include and although it doesn't read as smoothly as GCBC, is "Sugar BLues" by William Dufty. These 2 books just might save your sanity. Laurie

Thank you, Laurie, great additional information and a good reference to another book. I will look into it.

A little more insight on this that has occurred today.
Having read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" it seems to me our
contemporary and constant access to refined sucrose (a big honkin' carbohydrate if ever their needed to be a poster child) and
the resultant hyperinsulinemia has put many of us in a
chronic state of alert and alarm and it doesn't do
any good. We have times when we need stored energy (as did our ancestors),for sleep and for danger. So our forefolk may have come
across sweet berries occasionally and their bodies told
them to hurry and eat up and store as fat all they could
gorge on for a later rainy, dangerous day. And that was good.
They needed short term reserves for the daily changes in
feeding availability and they needed to stock up when
sources were available and in season so they would have reserves for the longer-leaner term. Now we have constant access to highly refined and potent
sources of sucrose and I think it is wrecking havoc.
People come across sucrose 3 or more times a day and each
time, insulin SCREAMS- eat up! and eat on! and I'll
store all I can as glycogen and fat reserves for us. The insulin keeps the hunger, craving-signal UP and other long-term growth
hormone signal way down. This last part is where I think a lot of the
danger lies. This was meant to be temporary (growth hormone on the back burner). Growth hormone was just supposed to be put aside every once in a while -not constantly. Growth hormone is needed for repair and for the
immune system. If it is in a chronic state of denial, it
can't do its job. This is detrimental to health.

I just can't stop thinking about this book. Laurie yet again

I had so many light bulbs going off while I read this that I was almost blinded. I'm a chemist and I have taken a course in chemical thermodynamics. Taubes treatment of 'all calories are not created equally' was revelatory. For a long time the nutritionists argument that because you can extract (by testing with a bomb calorimeter in a lab) 9 calories/gram from fat versus 4 calories/gram from carbohydrate, that was all they looked at to assert that fat was more fattening. But what if those values are merely the 'maximum' extractable calories (in a lab setting). So, for example, what if a human body upon ingestion of a gram of fat only gleans 0.5 calories compared to getting 3 calories for every gram of carbohydrate. No laws of thermodynamics were harmed in the writing of this book, or review.

I agree with you that this seems to be a rational explanation for why we would have such a detrimental reaction to glucose in large doses -- nature rarely provides such bounty, only modern science can. It is very frightening to consider that one negative outcome, diabetes, is almost entirely preventable. After what I have seen this disease do to people I care about, it's tragic to realize we could have prevented it.

As to the thermodynamics, you're out of my league there, I don't know that area well. But it somehow stands to reason. After four months eating a glucose-restricted diet, I'm weighing less than I have in a decade and not feeling calorie restricted at all. Something like what you describe seems to be happening.

Laurie, yet again. As I step back from having read this, a lot becomes clearer, especially since I just finished 'Sugar Blues'. My sister-in-law was convinced to start reading GCBC, by me, and I then I immediately ordered and had sent to her a copy of 'Sugar Blues'. She has young children she is raising and feeding. I wish I had read both of these books when my 2 kids were small. I have asked them if I can have a do-over at raising them , but they have declined. I am going to be one heckofa good, nourishing Gramma when the time comes though!
There is so much in this book that is shocking. There are two quotes on two pages in particular that grabbed me even more. When I finished reading, I went back to find them. I'd like to share here. The quotes are from pages 30 and 123. Both refer to the (now I understand unsubstantiated) recommendation for eating low-fat diets. " Changing the composition of the fats we eat could have profound physiological effects throughout the body. Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes."
And on page 123, Peter Cleave said " Mankind has been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life. If anybody tells me that eating fat was the cause of coronary disease, I should look at them in amazement. But, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up....that is a very different proposition."