Gary Taubes has written a new book entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease .
He does indeed challenge the conventional wisdom. He contends that it isn’t fat making Americans fat and causing cancer, heart disease and other terminal ailments but it is refined carbohydrates. I am inclined to agree with him. Ever since American started eating fat-free foods (which happen to have even more carbs than the fat containing versions), they’ve been gaining even more weight!
Needless to say, Taubes’ position is pretty controversial. Unlike the doctors, dietitians and nutritionists of our time, he is blaming America’s obesity epidemic on our increased consumption of carbohydrates.
In his book, Taubes contends that refined carbohydrates (aka: starchy carbs, The White Stuff) stimulate the production of insulin which leads to the storage of fat. We know from scientific studies that this is indeed true. Where he really ticks off the medical and health communities is in his assertions that saturated fat and cholesterol are not the cause of heart disease, salt does not cause high blood pressure, fiber is not a necessary part of a healthy diet and it is not the quantity of calories that matter but the quality with animal products being good and carbs bad.
Now, anyone who has successfully followed the Zone, South Beach or Atkins Diets will be able to attest to all of his assertions. It is the people stuck in the 1970’s, following a food guide pyramid designed by lobbyists for the wheat industry that will disagree. Because his ideas rock the boat and fly in the face of what is considered conventional wisdom, Taubes has made some pretty big enemies with the American Heart Association (AHA), the American College of Sports Medicine, and the American Diabetes Association.
Oddly enough, the AHA recently raised the acceptable upper limit for total fat consumption from 30 to 35 percent of a day’s total calories. Their justification for this is the fact that very low fat diets lower both LDL (bad cholesterol) and HDL (good cholesterol). Could it be their research is finally coming around to seeing what many Americans have learned for themselves?
Conventional wisdom also states that a low-fiber diet increases the risk for colon cancer. Strangely enough, there are studies that have found that people who ate a lot of fiber in a controlled setting did not lower their risk of contracting colon cancer at all. Perhaps conventional wise guys need to take a closer look at more recent studies and update their attitudes?
The bottom line, according to Taubes: “Carbs make us secrete insulin, insulin is driving fat accumulation; you eat less carbs you’ll accumulate less fat.”
While they don’t like the fact that his assertions fly in the face of everything they’ve been spouting for generations, the experts do agree on the bottom line.
Maybe it is time we all stop listening to the conventional wisdom that has put us in this situation to begin with and start looking a little bit deeper, learning more about how our own bodies work and taking an educated, knowledgeable approach to our own individual weight loss and lifestyle choices.
What do you think?