What really makes us fat (NYTimes.com)

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AMEN to that...been trying this diet for a couple of weeks and i've lost 11lbs so far

I find it is the easiest way to eat for life. The problem is that there is so much junk food in our path that will derail us and send us back to the starting line! Taubes isn't just a reporter, he lives the low carb lifestyle and is a healthy member of the low carb community!

AMEN to that...been trying this diet for a couple of weeks and i've lost 11lbs so far

I've been doing lower carb for 2 weeks and have lost 10lbs!

Our bodies were not designed to consume high quantities of sugar and handle the levels of stress we encounter in our technologically advanced culture. Carbohydrates are not evil.

The real cause: too much food, lack of exercise and messed up hormones.

The usual garbage from Taubes

Yep

You know what I reckon makes us fat?

Food.

Not even the 'wrong kind' of food - just food.

I think our whole society is geared towards making us want food, I think there are too many ads on tv for food, too many billboards advertising food, too many sports events sponsered by food companies. Ad infinitum.

And too many news articles avoiding this issue, instead they focus on 'white noise' and confusing notions. (Because 'big food' absolutely owns us)

You know what I reckon makes us fat?

Food.

Not even the 'wrong kind' of food - just food.

I think our whole society is geared towards making us want food, I think there are too many ads on tv for food, too many billboards advertising food, too many sports events sponsered by food companies. Ad infinitum.

And too many news articles avoiding this issue, instead they focus on 'white noise' and confusing notions. (Because 'big food' absolutely owns us)

^^ So agree with this post.

Coming from an Asian background, I do not believe that a lower carb diet is always the way to go. Everyone is different and low carb works for many individuals, but my mother, brother, and sister were born in Asia and they have been slim my entire life and they eat loads of "bad" carbs(aka white rice). The difference is that they don't consume processed foods like chips, deserts, packaged foods, etc... My mother has always cooked from scratch. I was born here with a father that only ate typical American processed foods(tv dinners, fast foods, boxed stuff), so I developed very bad eating habits. Everywhere you turn there is a fast food joint or someone selling junk food.
Moderation with the aim towards quality foods is what I believe is the best "diet".

In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect. What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.

I have been saying this for YEARS

I stopped reading at "By GARY TAUBES".

The usual garbage from Taubes

Just because you choose to eat low calorie compared to low carb doesn't make him a quack. There are millions of good studies over the past 30 years that tell us that eating lower carb keeps you healthier and less likely to get the diseases associated with being fat. If it helps people why are you such a hater?

Just because you choose to eat low calorie compared to low carb doesn't make him a quack.

No, the fact that Taubes cherry-picks data, ignores everything that disagrees with his fantasy, and misrepresents his own sources makes him a quack.



From some of his own sources:

“He knows how to spin a yarn,” says Barbara Rolls, an obesity expert at Pennsylvania State University. “What frightens me is that he picks and chooses his facts.”

She ought to know. Taubes interviewed her for some six hours, and she sent him “a huge bundle of papers,” but he didn’t quote a word of it. “If the facts don’t fit in with his yarn, he ignores them,” she says.

Instead, Taubes put together what sounds like convincing evidence that carbohydrates cause obesity.

“He took this weird little idea and blew it up, and people believed him,” says John Farquhar, a professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University’s Center for Research in Disease Prevention. Taubes quoted Farquhar, but misrepre-sented his views. “What a disaster,” says Farquhar.

Others agree. “It’s silly to say that carbohydrates cause obesity,” says George Blackburn of Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “We’re overweight because we overeat calories.”

It’s not clear how Taubes thought he could ignore—or distort—what researchers told him. “The article was written in bad faith,” says F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, director of the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. “It was irresponsible.”

I stopped reading at "By GARY TAUBES".

I wished I'd noticed it before reading it.

oh dear me... no, post-diet people cannot even slightly be considered to be the same as a person with a predisposition to obesity. holy what...

and... really? we're surprised that it takes more energy to break down proteins--massively complex molecules--than carbohydrates? >_>

that was some painfully bad journalism, too. >_>

The more we concentrate on hormones and the less on the overly simplistic calories in/out math problem the better off we'll collectively be.

If calories in/out worked as effectively as touted then we'd be able to do it, and we can't.

I always find it interesting that the younger people tend to be down on this idea, presumably because their metabolism has been battered around less and yeh, they can lose weight by cutting the calories a bit, no worries. And hey, look at my ripped profile pic to prove it, check out those 'guns', etc.

Compare that to yer average dieter approaching middle-age just wanting to lose a bit of wobble ... Hormones a bit more of a factor there I'd wager.

But hey, you go your way, you keep trying to exercise off that grub by burning xxxx calories, and keep it up, good luck to ya.

LOL

I guess it's much better to blame insulin than to take responsibility for one's own actions. Can't have that -- much better to blame carbs. Even though the insulin hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked. Let's just ignore everything published over the last 30 years (except for the few poorly designed studies that support our fantasies).

When calories are tightly controlled, there is no metabolic advantage to low-carb diets -- so let's ignore those and look at self-reported intake and rat studies instead.

If free-living conditions, low carb diets perform no better than any other calorie controlled diet.

But let's stick our fingers in our ears and go La, La, La, La --- CARBZ


Whether you want to admit it or not, the physiology of fat loss is actually quite simple, and it has been shown ad nauseum. Human behavior, on the other hand, is the complicated part. The single most important factor pertaining to fat loss is adherence - but we can't have that, we want to shun responsibility and look for the magic bullet instead.

But this clown Taubes insists on trotting out this crappy little study filled with design flaws that supposedly shows a metabolic advantage to low carb. But it this were true, how come

"Body weight did not differ significantly among the 3 diets (mean [95% CI], 91.5 [87.4-95.6] kg for low fat; 91.1 [87.0-95.2] kg for low glycemic index; and 91.2 [87.1-95.3] kg for very low carbohydrate”."


And speaking of hormones, the low-carb diet had the lowest leptin levels, but elevated cortisol and CRP. I like how Taubes chose to ignore that gem.

But we'll just ignore that too. Instead we'll focus on the supposed increases in REE and TEE --- they were shown to be consistently higher in the low-carb group, weren't they?

Or not



Oops!

How about this.....Find something that works and do it! If its Adkins, WW, Fasting, pizza, vodka, or insert fad diet here. If you are healthy and more importantly happy, who gives a rats *kitten* about the rest? All these charts, science reports, and nut jobs telling us what we should be doing is trash. Get regular check ups with the doctor, eat what makes you happy and healthy, and just live life! A ton of people seem to over think this.