The Case for Keto Quotes

“All diets that result in weight loss do so on one basis and one basis only: They reduce circulating levels of insulin; they create and prolong the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“Carbohydrate-rich foods—grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars—work to keep insulin elevated in our circulation, and that traps the fat we eat in our fat cells and inhibits the use of that fat for fuel. That’s what the obesity research community should have been trying rigorously to resolve or refute for the past sixty years.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“Looking at obesity without preconceived ideas,” she wrote, “one would assume that the main trend of research should be directed toward an examination of abnormalities of the fat metabolism, since by definition excessive accumulation of fat is the underlying abnormality. It so happens that this is the area in which the least work has been done.” She added, “As long as it was not known how the body builds up and breaks down its fat deposit, the ignorance was glossed over by simply stating that food taken in excess of body needs was stored and deposited in the fat cells, the way potatoes are put into a bag. Obviously, this is not so.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“Astwood’s belief that those who fatten easily are fundamentally, physiologically and metabolically different from those who don’t. This implies that those of us who fatten easily can get fat on precisely the same food and even the same amount on which lean people stay lean. We can’t be told to eat like lean and healthy people eat and expect that advice to work, because we get fat eating like lean and healthy people. Indeed, we get fat and hungry eating like lean and healthy people do.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“If the conventional thinking and advice worked, if eating less and exercising more were a meaningful solution to the problem of obesity and excess weight, we wouldn’t be here. If the true explanation for why we get fat were that we take in more calories than we expend and the excess is stored as fat, we wouldn’t be here.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“The authorities who insist that abstaining from carbohydrates is an unsustainable lifestyle once again typically do so from the perspective of lean people whose primary fuel happens to be carbohydrates and whose bodies can tolerate carbohydrates without accumulating excess fat. From their perspective, a program that requires living without carbohydrates appears doomed to fail. Why would anyone do it, if another way existed that allowed for the occasional consumption of cinnamon buns and pasta (in moderation, not too much)? But for many of us, there may be no other way. Lean folks aren’t like us. They don’t get fat when they eat carbohydrates; they may not hunger for them just by thinking about them. They have a choice to live with carbohydrates or not. We don’t. Not if we want to be lean and as healthy as we can be.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“Despite decades of obesity research, and billions of dollars spent in the laboratory and on clinical trials, the bedrock fundamental concept underlying all nutrition and dietary advice is that fat and lean people are effectively identical physiologically, and that our bodies respond to what we eat the same way, except that the fat people at some point in their lives ate too much and expended too little energy and so became fat, while the lean people didn’t.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“There’s a good reason, as Miller said to me, why alcoholics don’t celebrate the successful completion of a twenty-eight-day rehab program with a champagne toast.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“The patients who succeed, these physicians agreed, tended to be those who could be induced to read at least some of the copious literature on LCHF/ketogenic eating that’s now available. They had to become people who cared enough to do the work.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“To cut to the chase, we are a carbohydrate substance abuse program, not a weight loss program.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“To get fat out of those fat cells, as Yalow and Berson described it, the absolute fundamental requirement was not eating less or exercising more, but lowering the amount of insulin in the circulation. (Eating less and exercising, as I’ll discuss, can be inefficient ways of lowering insulin levels.)”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“blood sugar values go down, blood pressure drops, chronic pain decreases or disappears, lipid profiles improve, inflammatory markers improve, energy increases, weight decreases, sleep is improved, IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] symptoms are lessened, etc. Medication is adjusted downward, or even eliminated, which reduces the side-effects for patients and the costs to society. The results we achieve with our patients are impressive and durable.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“As self-help and management advice books will often say, setting a goal and committing to it are vitally important. Without the commitment, we never get to find out if the goal is achievable. By diluting the commitment and allowing us to compromise, we never know.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“imprimatur”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“Borrowing from the philosopher of science Robert Merton, I wanted to know if what we thought we knew was really so. I applied a historical perspective to this controversy because I believe that understanding that context is essential for evaluating and understanding the competing arguments and beliefs. Doesn’t the concept of “knowing what you’re talking about” literally require, after all, that you know the history of what you believe, of your assumptions, and of the competing belief systems and so the evidence on which they’re based?”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“Many of the most influential of those prewar European authorities had become convinced that obesity must be the result of a hormonal or metabolic dysfunction, not caused by overeating, a concept that they recognized as circular logic. (“To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’ ” the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer had aptly commented eight years before Astwood’s presentation, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’ ” It’s saying the same thing in two different ways, at best describing the process, not explaining why it’s happening.)”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“This book is a work of journalism masquerading as a self-help book. It’s about the ongoing conflict between the conventional thinking on the nature of a healthy diet and its failure to make us healthy, about the difference between how we have been taught to eat to prevent chronic disease and how we may have to eat to return ourselves to health. Should we be eating to reduce our risk of future disease, or should we be eating to achieve and maintain a healthy weight? Are these one and the same? Since the 1950s the world of nutrition and chronic disease has been divided on these questions into two major factions.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“Back then, as Astwood implied, obesity treatment had become the purview primarily of psychiatrists and psychologists. These were the medical professionals charged with teaching fat people to get thin and supposedly elucidating our understanding of the disorder. They saw the obese and overweight, not surprisingly, from their own unique perspective and context, as clearly suffering from mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders. They found it easy to ignore a revolution in endocrinology, because that wasn’t their area of study.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“We eat to satiety. So why don’t we all get fat? Certainly animals don’t walk away from their plates hungry. Why don’t they all get fat?”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“One challenge of abstaining from carbohydrates that doesn’t exist quite so intensely in quitting cigarettes, for example, is that the world conspires to make carbohydrate abstention as difficult as possible.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“David Unwin, a general practitioner in England who in 2016 won the National Health Service innovators award for advocating LCHF/ketogenic eating to his patients with diabetes, describes this as “turning everything that was white on your plate to green.” Even with equal or greater calories, the plate on the bottom is part of a weight-loss program (a fad diet, Atkins!); the plate on the top is likely what you’ve been eating all along and has contributed to making you fatter.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” The same is true of research and science. Trying to tell what’s true by looking at the latest articles published in a journal—and particularly in nutrition—is another fool’s game. The best idea is to attend little to the latest research and focus instead on the long-term trends, the accumulation of studies (one hopes, interpreted without bias), even if the long-term trends rarely, if ever, appear in the news.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“Excess fat, specifically above the waist, is an exceedingly good sign of insulin resistance, in which case insulin is indeed elevated higher than it should be and elevated for longer than it should be. Those who are insulin resistant are in fat-storage mode (which is the kind of phrase used by diet book authors but one that is nonetheless biologically appropriate) for much longer in the day than ideal and will be predisposed to hold on to fat rather than mobilize it or burn it. They will fatten easily, at least until their fat cells also become insulin resistant, at which point their weight will plateau.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating

“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 guilt feelings, and we have reasons enough for the emotional disturbances which preoccupy the psychiatrists.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

“Insulin does many things in the human body. A primary function is indeed to keep blood sugar under control, but the relevant point for our purposes is that one way it accomplishes that is by also promoting the storage of fat.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating