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by
Gary Taubes
Started reading
February 8, 2021
the physicians and dietitians on the front lines, believe that the advice we get from our public health, nutritional, and medical authorities is simply wrong, and that’s why it fails, and that’s why so many people remain fat and diabetic, often miserable and burdened with medical bills. We have reached this conclusion based on evidence that we find compelling. We believe that an injustice is being perpetrated that has to be righted. Until we get these ideas understood and accepted—and tested as well as science will allow—not enough people are going to get the advice and counsel necessary to
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My goal is to help each of us shed a century of tragic preconceptions about the nature of a healthy diet, to learn to ignore the bad advice we have been given, and to replace it with a way of thinking about diets, our weight, and our health that works.
obesity is neither a behavioral issue nor an eating disorder, not the result of how much we choose to eat consciously or unconsciously.
They believed the truth was obvious, which is always an impediment to making progress in any scientific endeavor.
Obesity ran in families, Astwood said, as the authorities all agreed, but not because fat parents overfed their children. It did so because of a strong genetic component.
“Consider the pig,” he said: “His corpulence and gluttony resulted from man’s artificial selection; selective breeding provided us with this hulk with his hoggish ways, and no one will convince me that his gourmandizing is provoked by parental oversolicitude.”
“This theory,” Astwood said, “would explain why dieting is so seldom effective and why most fat people are miserable when they fast. It would also take care of our friends, the psychiatrists, who find all kinds of preoccupation with food, which pervades dreams among patients who are obese. Which of us would not be preoccupied with thoughts of food if we were suffering from internal starvation? Add to the physical discomfort the emotional stresses of being fat, the taunts and teasing from the thin, the constant criticism, the accusations of gluttony and lack of ‘will power,’ and the constant
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we’re going to be attracted to popular diet books because the conventional approach is not working for us. Why not experiment with alternatives? Wouldn’t any reasonable, thoughtful individual under those circumstances turn to different approaches to see if they work better?
Those who are lean find it easy or at least relatively easy to control their weight. For this reason, they assume the rest of us can also do it.
Or, rather, they assume that we could if we were sufficiently motivated or had our priorities right. This line of thought leads quickly and directly to the not-so-subtle fat shaming that has been a forceful undercurrent throughout the last century of academic and medical thinking about obesity.
Those who are lean, and particularly those whose patients are also generally lean, have no reason to question the conventional thinking of the authorities. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working for them and for their not-fat patients.
it’s almost invariably lean, healthy people who advocate that we should eat effectively as we’ve been told to eat for the past fifty years—because it seems to work for them. Their logic is that surely those of us who are fat would be lean and healthy or become so if we did the same. At the very least, we wouldn’t get fatter. So if we do get fatter by eating as they advise or if we have the misfortune to stay fat, it must be because we’re not following their wise counsel, or because we just don’t care. Hence the problem is our motivation and our priorities, and we should be ashamed.
“Maybe if the idea got around again that obesity is immoral, the fat man would start to think.”
Whether they know it or not, every doctor, every dietitian and physical trainer and friendly neighbor and sibling, every figure of authority who has ever counseled that we eat less and exercise more to lose weight, that we count our calories and so try to consume fewer than we expend, is wedded to this idea that the lean and the eventually-to-become-obese are physiologically identical; only their behavior sets them apart.
Here’s the circular logic: Why do we get fat? Because we’re overeating. How do we know we’re overeating? Because we’re getting fatter. And why are we getting fatter? Because we’re overeating.
those who fatten easily are fundamentally, physiologically and metabolically different from those who don’t.
People with obesity are not thin people who couldn’t control their appetites (for whatever reason, psychological or neurobiological) and therefore ate too much. They’re people whose bodies are trying to accumulate excess fat even when they’re half-starved. The drive to accumulate fat is the problem, and it’s the difference between the fat and the lean. The hunger and the cravings, and then the failures and the sins, as Astwood suggested, are the results.
Those who fatten easily are profoundly different from those who don’t and may have been from the womb onward. Their physiology is different; their hormonal and metabolic responses to foods are different. Their bodies want to store calories as fat; the bodies of their lean friends don’t.
those of us who want to achieve and maintain a healthy weight can’t afford to think about obesity as an energy balance problem. It gets us nowhere we haven’t already been our entire lives. We have to think about it as a hormonal, metabolic, and physiological problem, perhaps akin to diabetes, as Astwood suggested. Some of us who don’t seem to have it now are going to get it as we age. Some of us aren’t. Some of us can load up on ice cream, pie, meat, and potatoes and stay lean as a west Kansas coyote; some of us can’t.
The epidemic about which we hear so much, and about which I and others are so concerned, represents a gain in the average American’s weight of twenty to twenty-five pounds over thirty to forty years, excess fat accumulation, on average, of half a dozen to a dozen calories a day. Now we’re talking about the calories in a single almond or a single gummy bear or less than one-eighth of a teaspoon of olive oil stored per day. If you gained thirty pounds of fat between high school and your fiftieth birthday, this is the amount of calories you stored in your fat tissue every day that you didn’t burn
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When we assume that people who get fat are merely lean people who ate too much, we do them a terrible injustice. Considering the burden that obesity is to those who suffer from it, why would they not do the little things necessary to fix the problem if little things were indeed the cause, as the calorie model implies?
So we know that lean, healthy people can’t live with this kind of calorie restriction, not if they have any choice. Why expect a fat person to do it?
