What I find most frustrating about online comments on Taubes work is the amount of people who assume that this is just another crank peddling nonsense.
Instead, Taubes has spent the better part of a decade reviewing the state of research and putting forth a compelling, detailed argument in favor of his position, that the high-carbohydrate diets associated with civilization are also the cause of the cluster of diseases known as diseases of civilization.
His latest book lays out the argument in a more reader-friendly way than his earlier tome (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but it's hardly junk science, and Taubes is hardly a junk scientist. He has been a very good science journalist for decades, and has won the the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He does his homework.
Again, I recommend that those whose gut reaction is to be skeptical of Taubes' thesis read at least his latest book, which addresses, very carefully, virtually all of the common reactions people have in these kinds of online fora. There are certainly areas still open to debate, as Taubes himself says repeatedly in his writing, but they are not about the knee-jerk topics most people think they will be about.
If you're curious, feel free to take a look at the wikipedia post summarizing the results of low-carb diet trials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low.... You'll find, at the very least, some cognitive dissonance. And that's really what Taubes' writings (in book and blog form) are about.
What I find most frustrating about online comments on Taubes work is the amount of people who assume that this is just another crank peddling nonsense.
I don't think he can complain about that. He takes his case straight to the public, and he uses rhetoric that is likely to be effectively with the public. That's what cranks peddling nonsense do, so by convergent evolution he sounds exactly like them, which makes it much less likely that people will take his ideas seriously enough to find out if he really is a crank.
I assume he is a crank because his blog seems deceptive (at least the one article I read).
In the article that hit the front page yesterday, he discussed a possible scenario (a 30 year old becoming obese by age 50), and devoted 3000 words to the extra "sip of milk/beer" (above maintenance) that this person consumed.
He devoted 0 words to other 7 strips of bacon/day that this person consumed over a hypothetical non-obese 50 year old. I made some graphs which illustrate his fallacy:
There's a difference between how people interested in public health read this research and how people such as us who are interested in our own individual health read it. People interested in public health wonder, "What happens when you tell people to follow diet X?" That's what studies like this test.
People like us wonder, "What happens when an individual actually follows diet X?" Questions like this are never studied at all, because it's difficult and expensive. Almost everybody lies about their level of compliance, and when people aren't actually lying, they're still underreporting because most people remember eating less than they actually do.
Those facts about underreporting are not controversial. I don't know where the misrepresentation happens, whether in the science itself or in the science journalism, but the studies most people read about in the newspaper or on the web are not about diet from an individual point of view. They don't study what happens when somebody actually follows a certain diet. That would require keeping people in an institutional setting and controlling or monitoring their food intake around the clock. That's really expensive, and if you're interested in improving public health, it isn't useful to know what the results of following a particular diet are, because you don't have control over what people eat. You only have influence over the public health message: what people are told they should eat.
So that's what is studied. The scientific debate over diet is not about what you should eat to improve your health, but what we should tell the public to eat to improve their health. If 50% of people on a low-fat diet stay up all night eating low-fat cookies and big bowls of pasta with low-fat margarine, then from a public health perspective, low-fat diets make you fat.
It's certainly true that dietary studies suffer from problems of underreporting. So it is possible that the the results of most recent studies (summarized well in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low...) all suffer from a reporting bias that leads people consuming low-fat diets to more significantly underreport their consumption than those on low-carb diets.
However, that in itself would be a significant finding. If the level of reporting compliance varies widely between different diets, it may also mean that compliance with the diet itself varies. I'd personally be interested in evidence on this point.
Also interestingly, studies using animal models of obesity tend to back up the findings using the (admittedly flawed) studies using human reporting. Taubes' most recent book goes into some detail about findings using rat obesity models (such as experiments involving ovary removal and experiments involving Zucker rats, which are genetically prone to obesity).
One very interesting result from those studies is that rats prone to obesity (for whatever reason) will often die of starvation while retaining some subcutaneous fat. Obese-prone rats also very clearly exhibit sedentary behavior when the food supply is low, and more active behavior when the food supply is high. They also have more fat when given identical amounts of food as lean-prone rats.
In short, while we cannot be certain about the recent experimental results, because of reporting bias, it's hard to believe that the experiments all have no validity, and that animal models of obesity are flawed. Additionally, if there was significant reporting bias, it would likely be the result of compliance problems, which would be extremely relevant to the discussion at hand.
It's one thing believe that the jury is still out on some of this; it's quite another to stick to preexisting beliefs on the grounds that virtually all recent studies have some flaw or other.
I am about finished with "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes. The main idea of the book is that carbs are what makes us fat and causes heart disease - not meat and fat as the medical establishment tells us. I know this same message is all over the place right now, one thing that makes the book unique is that he goes into the history of how the medical establishment came to the current viewpoint. According to Gary Taubes the European medical establishment was figuring out the carb/obesity link back in the 30s. WWII disrupted all that and when the Americans picked the question back up in the late 50s it was fat that was made the villain.
He goes into a lot of the biochemistry as well. As I was reading the book I kept coming back to this notion that carbs are pushed down our throats and the main reason why is that they are cheap. Not only cheap but they are easy to transport and store. It made me wonder if the common people of ancient Rome developed some of the health problems that modern people face. After all, they were kept on a state sponsored diet of grain and bread.
1. In this one particular study, caloric restriction diets were explicitly calorically restricted.
2. In this one particular study, low-carbohydrate diets were not explicitly calorically restricted.
3. Weight loss was similar for both groups, but we assume that the Atkins fatties were gorging themselves on meat while the other people were not.
But, the data from this study was self-reported. To me, this is an immediate red-flag. It's two large waving red-flags for the inference the author is trying to engage in. He's basing a huge article on an assumption which is absent from data. This is anomaly hunting, plain and simple. The author obviously has a preconceived desire to support carb-limiting as the Deep Secret of weight loss, and so any anomaly is cast into evidence for this desire.
This is not to say the author is wrong, I'm simply saying his logic doesn't hold and analysis falls apart as a result. It's at least as basic a concept to science as the notion of control that the article leads with: "You cannot draw strong conclusions in an absence of data."
P.S., I'm not inclined to believe this good-calories-bad-calories stuff. I lost 100lbs over the course of 13 months, and I didn't do it by carb cutting.
Data from almost all diet studies is self-reported (see comment by dkarl) and inherently unreliable, but it's the best we have. And his argument in this article isn't that carb cutting is the source of the weight loss, just that because we don't isolate the variables, we can't know for sure what the source is.
Another diet article that's very, very long, low on facts, and repetitive on the few facts they have. Are these showing up just because people have New Year's Resolutions?
Another diet blog post. If you want facts, buy the Good Calories, Bad Calories book, or presumably his recent book which I can't recommend either way as I have not read it. If Gary Taubes does not have enough facts, regardless of how you like his interpretation of them, you may give up all hope of ever understanding diet issues yourself now.
So as to avoid a redundant post, I make this point to KirinDave as well. This is not Taubes' argument, it's one particular small point, a marketing teaser. If you really want to dismiss him you're going to have to do a lot better that poking apart one blog post, you've got a book (or two, though I don't know what the overlap is) to dismantle.
Haven't read the new book, but Taubes' previous work 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' makes a strong case that there's shockingly little experimental evidence in favor of the conventional wisdom that "eating better" means a low fat, low calorie diet.
Yes, but what is "better"? And what is the best way to make both life changes enduring? (E.g. if someone is constantly hungry, their change in diet is probably not sustainable.)
According to the article, just eat fewer carbs (and/or higher quality carbs) because even if they don't realize they're doing it, the people who "eat better" or "exercise more" also cut carbs which is what truly leads to the weight loss they experience.
I don't agree with the premise, for one thing there's a line or two about the science of metabolism as it relates to carbs and naught else to actually support the theory in the article, but alas the point of the article wasn't to prove, rather it was to disprove the methods of comparing diets typically used. That part it did well.
Why are your preferred sources better than someone else's?
Not saying that they can't be but you've provided nothing more than hyperbolic hand waving to explain why two other random guys on the Internet are more reliable.
Taubes may be wrong, but he has a very devoted following that apparently includes HN. It's popular to sell magic bullet ideas, like carb-cutting, and the anti-carb brigades have made an entire industry around this. It is far less popular to tell people that they need to get off their rears, and get active, since they'd rather stay on their rears and find a magic bullet that will let them remain sedentary, and still lose weight.
[+] [-] wycats|15 years ago|reply
Instead, Taubes has spent the better part of a decade reviewing the state of research and putting forth a compelling, detailed argument in favor of his position, that the high-carbohydrate diets associated with civilization are also the cause of the cluster of diseases known as diseases of civilization.
His latest book lays out the argument in a more reader-friendly way than his earlier tome (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but it's hardly junk science, and Taubes is hardly a junk scientist. He has been a very good science journalist for decades, and has won the the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He does his homework.
Again, I recommend that those whose gut reaction is to be skeptical of Taubes' thesis read at least his latest book, which addresses, very carefully, virtually all of the common reactions people have in these kinds of online fora. There are certainly areas still open to debate, as Taubes himself says repeatedly in his writing, but they are not about the knee-jerk topics most people think they will be about.
If you're curious, feel free to take a look at the wikipedia post summarizing the results of low-carb diet trials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research_related_to_low.... You'll find, at the very least, some cognitive dissonance. And that's really what Taubes' writings (in book and blog form) are about.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
I don't think he can complain about that. He takes his case straight to the public, and he uses rhetoric that is likely to be effectively with the public. That's what cranks peddling nonsense do, so by convergent evolution he sounds exactly like them, which makes it much less likely that people will take his ideas seriously enough to find out if he really is a crank.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|15 years ago|reply
In the article that hit the front page yesterday, he discussed a possible scenario (a 30 year old becoming obese by age 50), and devoted 3000 words to the extra "sip of milk/beer" (above maintenance) that this person consumed.
He devoted 0 words to other 7 strips of bacon/day that this person consumed over a hypothetical non-obese 50 year old. I made some graphs which illustrate his fallacy:
http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...
If he wants us to assume he isn't a crank, he shouldn't be deliberately deceptive.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
People like us wonder, "What happens when an individual actually follows diet X?" Questions like this are never studied at all, because it's difficult and expensive. Almost everybody lies about their level of compliance, and when people aren't actually lying, they're still underreporting because most people remember eating less than they actually do.
Those facts about underreporting are not controversial. I don't know where the misrepresentation happens, whether in the science itself or in the science journalism, but the studies most people read about in the newspaper or on the web are not about diet from an individual point of view. They don't study what happens when somebody actually follows a certain diet. That would require keeping people in an institutional setting and controlling or monitoring their food intake around the clock. That's really expensive, and if you're interested in improving public health, it isn't useful to know what the results of following a particular diet are, because you don't have control over what people eat. You only have influence over the public health message: what people are told they should eat.
So that's what is studied. The scientific debate over diet is not about what you should eat to improve your health, but what we should tell the public to eat to improve their health. If 50% of people on a low-fat diet stay up all night eating low-fat cookies and big bowls of pasta with low-fat margarine, then from a public health perspective, low-fat diets make you fat.
[+] [-] wycats|15 years ago|reply
However, that in itself would be a significant finding. If the level of reporting compliance varies widely between different diets, it may also mean that compliance with the diet itself varies. I'd personally be interested in evidence on this point.
Also interestingly, studies using animal models of obesity tend to back up the findings using the (admittedly flawed) studies using human reporting. Taubes' most recent book goes into some detail about findings using rat obesity models (such as experiments involving ovary removal and experiments involving Zucker rats, which are genetically prone to obesity).
One very interesting result from those studies is that rats prone to obesity (for whatever reason) will often die of starvation while retaining some subcutaneous fat. Obese-prone rats also very clearly exhibit sedentary behavior when the food supply is low, and more active behavior when the food supply is high. They also have more fat when given identical amounts of food as lean-prone rats.
In short, while we cannot be certain about the recent experimental results, because of reporting bias, it's hard to believe that the experiments all have no validity, and that animal models of obesity are flawed. Additionally, if there was significant reporting bias, it would likely be the result of compliance problems, which would be extremely relevant to the discussion at hand.
It's one thing believe that the jury is still out on some of this; it's quite another to stick to preexisting beliefs on the grounds that virtually all recent studies have some flaw or other.
[+] [-] johnwatson11218|15 years ago|reply
He goes into a lot of the biochemistry as well. As I was reading the book I kept coming back to this notion that carbs are pushed down our throats and the main reason why is that they are cheap. Not only cheap but they are easy to transport and store. It made me wonder if the common people of ancient Rome developed some of the health problems that modern people face. After all, they were kept on a state sponsored diet of grain and bread.
[+] [-] Create|15 years ago|reply
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
[+] [-] KirinDave|15 years ago|reply
1. In this one particular study, caloric restriction diets were explicitly calorically restricted.
2. In this one particular study, low-carbohydrate diets were not explicitly calorically restricted.
3. Weight loss was similar for both groups, but we assume that the Atkins fatties were gorging themselves on meat while the other people were not.
But, the data from this study was self-reported. To me, this is an immediate red-flag. It's two large waving red-flags for the inference the author is trying to engage in. He's basing a huge article on an assumption which is absent from data. This is anomaly hunting, plain and simple. The author obviously has a preconceived desire to support carb-limiting as the Deep Secret of weight loss, and so any anomaly is cast into evidence for this desire.
This is not to say the author is wrong, I'm simply saying his logic doesn't hold and analysis falls apart as a result. It's at least as basic a concept to science as the notion of control that the article leads with: "You cannot draw strong conclusions in an absence of data."
P.S., I'm not inclined to believe this good-calories-bad-calories stuff. I lost 100lbs over the course of 13 months, and I didn't do it by carb cutting.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|15 years ago|reply
How did you lose that much weight over 13 months?
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] powera|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|15 years ago|reply
So as to avoid a redundant post, I make this point to KirinDave as well. This is not Taubes' argument, it's one particular small point, a marketing teaser. If you really want to dismiss him you're going to have to do a lot better that poking apart one blog post, you've got a book (or two, though I don't know what the overlap is) to dismantle.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rfugger|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masomenos|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephgrossberg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noarchy|15 years ago|reply
You can easily get away with eating a lot of carbs; being physically active not only allows it, but often requires it.
[+] [-] alanfalcon|15 years ago|reply
I don't agree with the premise, for one thing there's a line or two about the science of metabolism as it relates to carbs and naught else to actually support the theory in the article, but alas the point of the article wasn't to prove, rather it was to disprove the methods of comparing diets typically used. That part it did well.
[+] [-] sdghjtykty|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skunkworks|15 years ago|reply
If you want to read some intelligent analysis of dieting/nutrition, I suggest reading Lyle McDonald (http://www.bodyrecomposition.com) and Alan Aragon (http://www.alanaragonblog.com).
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|15 years ago|reply
Not saying that they can't be but you've provided nothing more than hyperbolic hand waving to explain why two other random guys on the Internet are more reliable.
[+] [-] noarchy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kareemm|15 years ago|reply