Gary Taubes and what makes us fat

I mentioned him in a discussion the other day, but wanted to start an actual thread about him here in the Health forum.

For those not familiar with Taubes, he is a science writer who studied applied physics at Harvard, and aerospace engineering at Stanford in the late 70s. He graduated from Columbia University majoring in journalism in 1981, and landed his first job writing for Discover magazine a year later. He has also written articles for Science, New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

Initially Taubes' work dealt mostly with topics pertaining to physics and, in particular, cold fusion.

In the 90s he began research on what makes people fat, and in 2002 gained widespread attention for his controversial article published in New York Times Magazine, titled What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, which challenged the notion that consuming fat makes people fat and questioned the alleged health benefits of low-fat diets.

Taubes has since authored three books on the subject, which revolve around carbohydrates -- not fat -- being the true cause of obesity and heart disease. The basis of Taubes' books is that carbohydrates (from sugar, flour, bread, rice, pasta, etc.) spike the blood sugar, which causes an insulin response whereby fat is drawn into cells and stored, causing obesity. Taubes' findings are based on his research into hundreds of studies spanning decades, showing that obesity is directly related to insulin, and that dietary fat is not only harmless, but actually good for us, even in relatively large amounts.

Over the years, fat has been demonized, making the way for the low-fat craze of the 80s and 90s that spawned an entire industry based around sugar and refined carb laden junk food, sold to the public as something that will make them lose weight. Meanwhile, people have gotten fatter than ever before, with obesity reaching endemic proportions. Gary Taubes work has shown that, when carbs are restricted, one can eat an almost endless amount of fat without gaining weight. It isn't until people start adding carbs to their diet, spiking their blood glucose and causing an insulin response, when that fat is then stored.

There are few people I respect as much as Taubes with regard to the subject of health, and what I have learned from reading his books, watching his presentations and listening to his interviews has really opened my eyes to the way I look at healthy eating, which is far different from what the FDA and their laughable food pyramid would have us believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o"]Why We Get Fat - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws1TA5ivinM"]10,000 Calories a day? - Gary Taubes on eating unlimited calories - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VErPHQBG6gk"]Challenging the Dogma of Obesity: An Insulin Nation Interview with Gary Taubes - YouTube

 

I've started watching the 3rd video..

He looks like Owen Wilson, sounds like him too. Is that his name, Owen Wilson? lol I don't know.

Anyway, what happened between the 70's and the 90's was *cable TV* and a booming market of new snacks and foods. The grocery store shelves of the 70's are nothing like what they are today. The way products evolved over those decades would be best compared to cable TV .. the addition of new channels, the switch from analog to digital, the arrival of High Definition TV's and on and on.

 

How does Taubes try to support his contention of being able to eat 10,000 calories a day and not gain weight?

The account of the youtube user was terminated.

 

The video works for me.

Secondly, Taubes does not say anything about eating 10,000 calories and not gaining weight. He was asked a theoretical question about consuming mass calories on a low carb diet, then answered the question by basically saying that nobody is going to want to consume that many calories on a low-carb diet, since when you keep your carbs low and your fat high, there is no urge to eat all the time.

 

http://youtu.be/BJnszUbkTNE

 

I will once in a blue moon have days where I consume upwards of 4,000 calories and over, and I might gain a pound or two over the next 24 hours, but usually the day after that I am back down to the weight I was previously. Unless you're regularly eating more calories than you expend, you're not going to gain much weight on a low carb diet by occasionally eating too many calories. This is why most people can lose weight on a low carb diet without spending much effort on counting calories. There are two primary reasons for this, and Taubes touches on this in the interview:

1) Because your pancreas is not secreting insulin, you're not going to have the urge to overeat like you would if you were keeping your carbs high.

2) The calories you do consume are not as readily stored in the absence of insulin. This, however, does not mean you won't gain weight if you regularly consume more calories than you expend.

Nobody -- not even Taubes -- is discounting the role that calories play in weight gain. However, the focus people place on calories is oversimplified and outdated, since the type of calories you eat determines if those calories get stored or burned as energy. They also determine whether you are satiated, or always hungry. It's easy to consume excess calories when you're eating half your calories in carbohydrates. It's much harder when most of your calories are coming from healthy fats, which are satiating and do not cause the blood sugar spikes and drops that carbohydrates do.

 

Taubes is known to be loose with his words and has difficulty interpreting science studies. Part of the reason for this is that he is a media journalist and hasn't published any papers in peer-reviewed science journals which are stringent and require the authors to justify their remarks.

He has said in one of his youtube video lessons that people on low-carb diets "can exercise as much gluttony as they want as long as they are eating fat and protein." That remark was made when he was referring to the Israeli weight loss diet study where test subjects who lost weight on a low-carb diet were allowed to eat ad libitum. The test subjects ate until they felt full at meal time and didn't eat anymore. The research study didn't show any data suggesting that the subjects were binging on calories or eating enough to be in a calorie surplus. They ate until they were satisfied but still maintained a calorie deficit and lost weight. Ad libitum and 'exercising as much gluttony as you want' aren't the same. When Taubes makes a confusing statement, people ask him to explain himself, like the person did in the 10,000 calories video. Such statements wouldn't get past a science peer review.

In the 10,000 calorie video, when pressed for an explanation, Taubes reluctantly admitted that someone who eats 10,000 calories per day on a low-carb diet 'probably' will gain weight. Nearly everyone on the planet will gain weight when eating 10,000 calories per day, regardless of the macronutrient composition. There shouldn't even be such consternation in getting him to admit to his mistake acknowledge something that is so blatantly obvious.

 

Your previous posted remark in this thread said:

Later you posted:

This is similar to the remark that Gary Taubes made about being able to engage in as much gluttony as one wants and not gain weight and then later acknowledging that people will gain weight if they consume too many calories per day. A hyperbole statement is made and then later it is recanted and smoothed over with another statement which bears at least some resemblance to reality.

 

Taubes hasn't done any published scientific work about the contention of being able to eat nearly limitless amounts of calories, as long as they aren't carbohydrates, and not gain weight. To date, he hasn't done any experiments or meta-analysis or published any science papers in peer reviewed science journals regarding any of his contentions. He has made statements and hypotheses that he bases on sometimes faulty interpretations of a literature review.

Taubes has sufficient academic background to perform his own research and publish it in peer-reviewed science journals. In the context of science, this would be a more productive approach than the unreviewed, unscientific, commentary journalism that he has done to this point.

He started the NuSI in 2012 which plans to perform actual science studies and publish results in science journals. The funding is private and coming partially from billionaire John Arnolde. Part of the rationale of private funding is to be able to fund more lengthy and detailed studies that are difficult to fund using limited government grants.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/09/19/161444045/billionaires-fund-a-manhattan-project-for-nutrition-and-obesity

http://nusi.org/about-us/a-letter-from-the-founders/gary-taubes/

 

That's true for any diet. It's not some sort of special status of eating a diet of a particular macronutrient composition. A rare binge isn't going to result in noticeable weight gain. 2000 calories over budget is equivalent to a little over a half-pound of body fat mass. If done only one time, it will hardly register on a body weight scale.

 

The science to date in general doesn't support either of those contentions. They are the Taubesian explanation for obesity. He has chosen the carb-insulin-spike theory to explain all obesity. These types of explanations sound simple and reasonable on the surface, but a more refined understanding shows the difficulty that they have in trying to explain various aspects of obesity. As an example, a calorie surplus of dietary fat gets stored readily as body fat, regardless of claims about insulin spikes.

Taubes and others are free to conduct their own research on such hypotheses and publish results in peer-reviewed science journals.. Science is always open to new studies and sometimes in the past something was overlooked.

 

Except that is not true about Taubes, It has nothing to do with these insulin spikes you refer to (which in and of themselves are quite harmless and even necessary for muscle growth in people with normal metabolisms), but rather chronically elevated insulin levels in people with compromised metabolisms which cause sugar to be diverted to the liver (where it is converted to fat) rather than the muscle tissue which would normally handle most of the sugar in the blood. The fact that some people get fat and others do not, regardless of what they eat, demonstrates it's far more complicated than simply calories in vs. calories out.

 

It is true about Taubes. He's the one who refers to the insulin spikes.

Taubes has claimed repeatedly for years that elevated insulin is what causes obesity, both post-meal spikes and chronically elevated insulin. He has said thatcarbohydrates are singularly responsible for driving insulin (which isn't factual). He lists these as conclusions in his GCBC book. He hasn't given a scientific explanation to support such claims. Much of the science doesn't support his claims.

Chronically elevated insulin (hyperinsulinemia) and obesity are closely associated in many people but that doesn't necessarily make elevated insulin the cause of obesity. There are people who are overweight but who have had normal insulin levels throughout the weight gain, so elevated insulin didn't cause their overweight condition. There are also people with hyperinsulinemia who are not overweight, so hyperinsulinemia doesn't cause an overweight condition in at least some people. It's presently not known if elevated insulin is a cause of overweight in anyone.

It's known that body fat, especially excess abdominal fat, excretes hormones and other substances that can interfere with insulin signaling and may be a cause of hyperinsulinemia and chronic low-grade inflammation. It has become clear in the past couple decades that body fat is an active hormonal tissue and not a passive tissue for energy storage as once thought.

 

Gaining weight requires a surplus in the energy budget, regardless of whatever the arguments might be about what is the ultimate cause of the weight gain (psychological, pathological, hormonal) and how complicated the mechanisms might be.

A superficial statement of CICO was never meant to be an explanation of the causes of obesity. What is useful about CICO is that all of the elements in the energy balance equation (such as resting energy expenditure, thermic energy, etc) can be measured and studied to better understand how energy is distributed, which can further the understanding of how the body manages weight. One finds that particular elements in the energy balance equation change as a response to changes in food intake or exercise. People with a superficial understanding of CICO can have the mistaken impression that people are somehow gaining weight without a calorie surplus or losing weight without a calorie deficit. It's unfortunate that some of the pop diet writers have marginalized the energy balance equation instead of grappling with it to further understand weight management.

 

What, it took you 5 months to come up with a response?

 

More Taubesian tautology. You can eat 10,000 calories per day and not gain weight because you're never going to eat 10,000 calories a day anyway.

 

Nobody ever said calories don't matter. Anyone who claims otherwise has no understanding of the law of thermodynamics. Some people are simply trying to dispel the myth that obesity is an issue pertaining to calorie intake alone. It's not. Most people who are obese are not obese simply because they consume too many calories. Just like people who are skinny do not necessarily eat less than those who are obese. Hormones play a big role on the effect calories have in terms of whether they're stored as fat or burned for energy.

 

You stated earlier in the thread that "Gary Taubes work has shown that, when carbs are restricted, one can eat an almost endless amount of fat without gaining weight."

This is saying that calories don't matter as long as someone doesn't eat carbohydrate. Gary Taubes hasn't shown evidence for this. Clinical studies of overfeeding don't support such a claim. People still gain weight on a surplus of dietary fat without carbohydrate.

Gary Taubes mistakenly thinks that insulin spikes or chronically elevated insulin are needed to store energy as body fat. He mistakenly thinks that the sole cause of insulin spikes is carbohydrate. His subsequent claims hinge on these faulty suppositions. This is the source of his confusion when he tries to explain weight management.

 

People have been studying the effects of hormones on metabolism and body weight management for decades. Taubes is a newcomer for having 'discovered' the importance of hormones for himself so recently and for talking as if people haven't studied this topic (as if he needs to dispel a myth that he perceives).

Leptin, ghrelin, glucagon, and other hormones and substances have been studied extensively. Taubes mentioned leptin, ghrelin, and glucagon once in a passing fashion in his GCBC book. He used the word insulin hundreds of times. Not to say that insulin isn't important, but there is a slew of other substances affecting body weight as well as the parts of the brain such as the hypothalamus that act as a control center for body weight management.

Leptin is known as the satiety hormone and is secreted by body fat cells. One would think that Taubes would be very interested in leptin because he thinks that obesity is a result of a fault occurring at the cellular fat level and leptin is generated by fat cells. He still dismisses the importance of leptin by claiming that it simply follows what insulin does. With Taubes, it always comes back to insulin.