Carbs make you fat, but fat doesn't

A study published last month, rather than looking only at total “calories in, calories out,” looked instead at the individual contribution of carbohydrates, fat, and protein to weight gain in the populations of 164 countries,

Their conclusion: "Findings from all analyses suggest that increases in carbohydrates are most strongly and positively associated with increases in obesity prevalence even when controlling for changes in total caloric intake and occupation-related physical activity. If anything, increases in fat intake are associated with decreases in population weight."

The article is "Macronutrients and Obesity: Revisiting the Calories in, Calories out Framework" and the abstract is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2279503.

In the past several years, it's been recognized that fat has been wrongly villified. Yet another dietary pendulum swing. It still doesn't mean that even healthy fat can be eaten with abandon.

They used data from the USDA for possible macro intake also accounting for food disappearance (food available for sale - wastage = consumed).......nutrition is a wonderful sugarland where grants are given out like candy. Anyway, no, not even close to anything resembling reality.

NO.

NO.

I'm Asian born in Asia and have a rice - dominant diet. 80% of my calories used to be from white rice and I'm not fat. 5ft2 and 106lbs. The only reason I switch to high protein diet is to build muscles, not to lose fat. My cousin born in the US has a very low Carb diet, she rarely eats more than 1 cup of rice, and weights 20 lbs more than I do with the same height.

Could the difference be that you got most of your carbs from just rice and your cousin got them from rice, pizza, donuts, cookies, french fries, and everything else that goes along with anwestern carbage junk diet.

How about no? I lost the majority of my bulk eating little other than carbs due to money, housing issues and ill-education.

I'm Asian born in Asia and have a rice - dominant diet. 80% of my calories used to be from white rice and I'm not fat. 5ft2 and 106lbs. The only reason I switch to high protein diet is to build muscles, not to lose fat. My cousin born in the US has a very low Carb diet, she rarely eats more than 1 cup of rice, and weights 20 lbs more than I do with the same height.

Studies also show a lower incidence of colorectal cancers related to traditional Asian and Mediterranean diets.

CALORIES make you fat, but only if you have too many of them.

Lol um no........ carbs are not the enemy. .....

Wrong.

I knew it!
A pyramid scheme :bigsmile:

They used data from the USDA for possible macro intake also accounting for food disappearance (food available for sale - wastage = consumed).......nutrition is a wonderful sugarland where grants are given out like candy. Anyway, no, not even close to anything resembling reality.

Okay, I read the paper. I try to avoid reading non-peer-reviewed papers by academics, and this paper was a painful reminder of how badly written these things tend to be.

For the American part of the study, they analyzed the relationships between food disappearance, and estimates of work-related energy expenditures, and data on the macronutrient composition of the food and the BMI of the people. Food an estimate of how much food is available for human consumption, though not a good measure of how much people actually eat because nobody is counting how much of the food ends up in the restaurant garbage can. The energy expenditure measure is particularly bad, since I don't think it is a stretch to assume that people are getting less exercise as the country is becoming more and more suburban. What they do next is look at whether obesity increases as a function of carb intake, while controlling for correlated variables (cointegrated, in time series talk) that tend to increase as carb intake increases. They found the normal expected effects: the less you move and the more you eat, the fatter you get, and the more you eat carbs, the more you eat other things. There is also this crucial passage:

In  comparison,  protein   consumption  shows  a  mixed  pattern,  in  some  cases  associated  with  an  increase  in  weight  (overweight   prevalence)  and  in  others  a  decrease  in  weight  (obesity  prevalence).  Although  revealing,  a  limitation  of   dynamic  OLS  and  error  correction  models  is  their  inability  to  account  for  potential  dynamic  interactions   between  the  regressors  and  feedback  effects  from  the  dependent  variable.

This is where I became despondent. In order to assert that intake of carbs is a predictor of obesity, you have to keep protein intake constant, and there is no way to do that with their data because carb/protein intake levels are correlated (in this case, inversely) if you keep calories constant.

There is also the issue that someone noted earlier in the thread about diabetes/insulin sensitivity. Suppose you get fat from eating too much of everything, develop insulin insensitivity, and then eat a high-carb diet while not moving much. Carbs didn't make you fat, but they might make you even fatter than you would be if you were eating a more balanced diet at that stage.

Anyway, this paper is a long way away from constituting conclusive proof of the claim in the thread title.

I'm Asian born in Asia and have a rice - dominant diet. 80% of my calories used to be from white rice and I'm not fat. 5ft2 and 106lbs. The only reason I switch to high protein diet is to build muscles, not to lose fat. My cousin born in the US has a very low Carb diet, she rarely eats more than 1 cup of rice, and weights 20 lbs more than I do with the same height.

Studies also show a lower incidence of colorectal cancers related to traditional Asian and Mediterranean diets.

Studies also show a lower incidence of red hair related to traditional Asian and Mediterranean diets.

NO.