Gary Taubes
53 quotes
Biography
"The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century"
"The reason for this book is straightforward: despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount."
"Obesity levels in the United States remained relatively constant from the early 1960s through 1980, between 12 and 14 percent of the population; over the next twenty-five years, coincident with the official recommendations to eat less fat and so more carbohydrates, it surged to over 30 percent."
"Skepticism, however, cannot be removed from the scientific process. Science does not function without it."
"From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day…. The facts did not support these claims, but the myths served a purpose, and so they remained unquestioned."
"Despite myriad attempts, researchers were unable to establish that patients with atherosclerosis had significantly more cholesterol in their bloodstream than those who didn’t."
"Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively."
"In preventative medicine, benefits without risks are nonexistent."
"Conflict of interest is an accusation invariably wielded to discredit those viewpoints with which one disagrees."
"By the 1920s, insulin was discovered and found to be essential for the utilization of carbohydrates for energy. Without insulin, diabetic patients could still mitigate the symptoms of the disease by restricting the starches and sugar in their diet. And yet diabetologists would come to reject categorically the notion that sugar and refined carbohydrates could somehow be responsible for the disease—another example of powerful authority figures winning out over science."
"But the greatest single change in the American diet was in fact the spectacular increase in sugar consumption from the mid-nineteenth century onward, from less than 15 pounds a person yearly in the 1830s to 100 pounds by the 1920s and 150 pounds (including high-fructose corn syrup) by the end of the century. In effect, Americans replaced a good portion of the whole grains they ate in the nineteenth century with refined carbohydrates."
"The bulk of the science is no longer controversial, but its potential significance has been minimized by the assumption that saturated fat is still the primary evil in modern diets."
"We may forget that the science is not adequately described, or ambiguous, even if the public-health policy seems to be set in stone."
"That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles of themselves."
"All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon."
"When I interviewed Grundy in May 2004, he acknowledged that metabolic syndrome was the cause of most heart disease in America, and that this syndrome is probably caused by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. Yet in his three reports—representing the official NIH, AHA, and ADA positions—all remained firmly wedded to the fat-cholesterol dogma."
"That sugar is half fructose is what fundamentally differentiates it from starches and even the whitest, most refined flour."
"Because sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) are both effectively half glucose and half fructose, they offer the worst of both sugars."
"This is considered the fundamental principle underlying modern genetic research: once evolution comes upon a genetic mechanism that works, it reuses it again and again. Those genes that regulate the development and the existence of any single living organism will likely be used in some similar fashion in all of them. “When reduced to essentials,” as the cancer researcher J. Michael Bishop suggested in his 1989 Nobel prize lecture, “the fruit fly and Homo sapiens are not very different.”"
"A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions."
"The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations."
"“It appears that efforts to promote the use of low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful,” Weinsier noted, but the reduction in fat intake did “not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population.”"
"In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture."
"The documented failure of semi-starvation diets for the obese dates back at least half a century."
"A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. Lost in this distillation is the fact that the effects of these different nutrients on metabolism and hormone secretion are so radically different, as is the manner in which the body employs the nutrients, that the energetically equivalence of the calories themselves is largely irrelevant to why we gain weight."