Good Calories, Bad Calories Quotes

“The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The deposition of fat in men and women is distinctly different. Men tend to store fat above the waist—hence the beer belly—and women below it. Women put on fat in puberty, at least in the breasts and hips, and men lose it. Women gain weight (particularly fat) in pregnancy and after menopause. This suggests that sex hormones are involved, as much as or more than eating behavior and physical activity. “The energy conception can certainly not be applied to this realm,” as the German clinician Erich Grafe observed in 1933 about this anatomical distribution of fat deposits and how it differs by sex.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The “remarkable sodium and water retaining effect of concentrated carbohydrate food,” as the University of Wisconsin endocrinologist Edward Gordon called it, was then explained physiologically in the mid-1960s by Walter Bloom, who was studying fasting as an obesity treatment at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, where he was director of research. As Bloom reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine and The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the water lost on carbohydrate-restricted diets is caused by a reversal of the sodium retention that takes place routinely when we eat carbohydrates. Eating carbohydrates prompts the kidneys to hold on to salt, rather than excrete it. The body then retains extra water to keep the sodium concentration of the blood constant. So, rather than having water retention caused by taking in more sodium, which is what theoretically happens when we eat more salt, carbohydrates cause us to retain water by inhibiting the excretion of the sodium that is already there. Removing carbohydrates from the diet works, in effect, just like the antihypertensive drugs known as diuretics, which cause the kidneys to excrete sodium, and water along with it. This”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“In retrospect, the influential figures in the clinical investigation of human obesity in the 1970s can be divided into two groups. There were those who believed carbohydrate-restricted diets were the only efficacious means of weight control—Denis Craddock, Robert Kemp, John Yudkin, Alan Howard, and Ian McLean Baird in England, and Bruce Bistrian and George Blackburn in the U.S.—and wrote books to that effect, or developed variations on these diets with which they could treat patients. These men invariably struggled to maintain credibility. Then there were those who refused to accept that carbohydrate restriction offered anything more than calorie restriction in disguise—Bray, Van Itallie, Cahill, Hirsch, and their fellow club members. These men rarely if ever treated obese patients themselves, and they repeatedly suggested that since no diet worked nothing was to be learned by studying diets.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“If blood-sugar levels increase—say, after a meal containing carbohydrates—then more glucose is transported into the fat cells, which increases the use of this glucose for fuel, and so increases the production of glycerol phosphate. This is turn increases the conversion of fatty acids into triglycerides, so that they’re unable to escape into the bloodstream at a time when they’re not needed. Thus, elevating blood sugar serves to decrease the concentration of fatty acids in the blood, and to increase the accumulated fat in the fat cells.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“This research supports the hypothesis that elevations of insulin and IGF will increase the risk of disease and shorten life, and so any diet or lifestyle that elevates insulin and makes IGF more available to the cells and tissues is likely to be detrimental.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Making LDL the “bad cholesterol” oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades’ worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Yudkin also fed high-sugar diets to college students and reported that it raised their cholesterol and particularly their triglycerides; their insulin levels rose, and their blood cells became stickier, which he believed could explain the blood clots that seemed to precipitate heart attacks.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“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. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell. The relative saturation of these membrane fats could affect the aging of cells and the likelihood that blood cells will clot in vessels and cause heart attacks.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The evidence suggests that nicotine induces weight loss by working on fat cells to increase their insulin resistance, while also decreasing the lipoprotein-lipase activity on these cells, both of which serve to inhibit the accumulation of fat and promote its mobilization over storage, as we discussed earlier”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“According to this hypothesis, the fundamental difference between the lean and the obese is the amount of fat stores that the hypothalamus is set to defend—the set point—not the manner or vigor with which it is defended.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“It’s possible that obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and the other associated diseases of civilization all have independent causes, as the conventional wisdom suggests, but that they serve as risk factors for each other, because once we get one of these diseases we become more susceptible to the others.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Once these authorities insist that a consensus exists, they no longer have motivation to pursue further research. Indeed, to fund further studies is to imply that there is still uncertainty.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Ironically, some of the most reliable facts about the diet-heart hypothesis have been consistently ignored by public-health authorities because they complicated the message, and the least reliable findings were adopted because they didn’t.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Over the years, compelling arguments dismissing a heart-disease epidemic, like the 1957 AHA report, have been published repeatedly in medical journals. They were ignored, however, not refuted.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem,” H. L. Mencken once said—“neat, plausible, and wrong.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The refining of carbohydrates represented the most dramatic change in human nutrition since the introduction of agriculture.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Atkins wanted “a revolution, not just a diet.” “Martin Luther King had a dream,” Atkins wrote. “I, too, have one. I dream of a world where no one has to diet. A world where the fattening refined carbohydrates have been excluded from the diet.” Atkins deliberately portrayed his diet as diametrically opposed to the growing orthodoxy on the nature of a healthy diet.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The fact that insulin increases the formation of fat has been obvious ever since the first emaciated dog or diabetic patient demonstrated a fine pad of adipose tissue, made as a result of treatment with the hormone. REGINALD HAIST AND CHARLES BEST, The Physiological Basis of Medical Practice, 1966”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“considering the half century of experimental observations on these diets. It leaves us with two seemingly paradoxical observations. The first is that weight loss can be largely independent of calories. The second is that hunger can also be.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“These researchers simply never confronted the possibility that the nutrient composition of the diet might have a fundamental effect on eating behavior and energy expenditure, and thus on the long-term regulation of weight.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“The first law of thermodynamics dictates that weight gain—the increase in energy stored as fat and lean-tissue mass—will be accompanied by or associated with positive energy balance, but it does not say that it is caused by a positive energy balance—by “a plethora of calories,” as Russell Cecil and Robert Loeb’s 1951 Textbook of Medicine put it.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“what should be the salient question in all obesity research: why wasn’t intake adjusted downward to match expenditure, or vice versa? Nor does it explain why reversing this caloric imbalance fails to reverse the weight gain reliably.*”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“Von Noorden’s proposition, which still obtains today, is the equivalent of saying that “alcoholism is caused by chronic overdrinking” or “chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by excessive lethargy and/ or deficient energy.” These propositions are true, but meaningless. And they confuse an association with cause and effect. They tell us nothing about why one person becomes obese (or alcoholic or chronically fatigued) and another person doesn’t.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“If eating behavior did not produce deposits of body fat we could not call it overeating,” is how this phenomenon was phrased in 1986 by William Bennett, then editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter and one of the rare investigators interested in obesity ever to make this point publicly.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease