Good Calories, Bad Calories, Early Readers Reviews

What others have to say....

A friend sent an article that appeared in the New York Times by a staffer that had written a book, and he thought this book pretty much advocated what I had been saying. Reading the article myself, it certainly sounded like we had arrived at the same conclusions but I would not have time to get it from Amazon and read in time for this issue but since the book apparently is about almost the same thing i dedicated this issue to, I decided you really should get someone else's take on this since this is too far from the main stream medias ideas for some to put into practice just on my research......and you should at least know about the book... I will read it and report on it next issue, in the meantime you might want your own copy or check and maybe even the public library will have it soon. Even though he has apparently arrived at many of the same conclusions I have, I doubt we got there by the same route and I am anxious to read it.

Anyway, looked it up on the web, got a cover pic and the following review from Amazon. The book sells for around 17 bucks from Amazon and maybe by now you can find it locally in your book store... Here is the review...and then I will run a little information from a popular blog that is running information on the book. Amazon Review.....by a reader....

This is a much awaited book . Taubes published an article in the New York Times Magazine a few years back called, 'What if it's all a big fat lie?' In that article he challenged what has now become the conventional medical wisdom i.e. that excessive intake of fats is the major cause of obesity. And that therefore drastic reduction in the intake of fats is the best way to lose weight. Taubes who spoke to most of the topflight nutritionists in America in the course of his research, challenged this conventional wisdom.

In the book he traces how in the nineteen- fifties it was generally accepted that carbohydrates were the culprit in obesity. But in the seventies Jean Mayer at Harvard changed the general way of thinking, by making high fat diets the culprit. They were not only taken to be the culprit in obesity but also in heart - related diseases. Taubes challenges this and points out that the great acceleration in the rate of obesity occurred at roughly the same time the 'reduction of fats diets' and the 'exercise craze' got under way.

If in the sixties the obesity rate was something like twelve percent it rapidly accelerated through the seventies and arrived in the eighties at well over twenty percent. Taubes investigations led him to feel there was something very amiss in dietary science, in the methods of research and certainly in the conclusions. Bottom line- Taubes believes the much maligned Atkins diet is the more promising path to weight- reduction. He believes that the earlier conclusions making excess carbohydrate consumption the villain in the obesity story is correct. The carbohydrates from wheat flour and sugar which are so readily digested, and rapidly raise the glycemic index are the culprits. Taubes also challenges the connection conventionally made between high- fat intake and coronary disease. In another area he suggests that the values of exercise in weight- reduction are minimal- and that there is even evidence that heavy exercising leads to heavier eating and increased weight gain.

Taubes is a very serious and responsible journalist who has done a great amount of interviewing and researching for this work.
His conclusions will of course not go unchallenged by great parts of the health establishment. But they seem to make sense though I of course as a single individual with no great expertise in the field have no way of being able to truly evaluate the correctness of his claims. I do however have a sense after years of dieting that the culprit is most likely my beloved 'carbohydrates', and not what are from my point- of - stomach the more expendable 'fats'. Nonetheless, the book is indisputably a challenging, eye- opening must read for all those for whom 'diet and health issues' are important.

On the web I found a blog with information on the book and the following review and many articles including an interview with the new books author.

Here is the blog....
Jimmy Moore, author of "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb: My Journey From Flabby Fat To Sensationally Skinny In One Year" livinlowcarbman@charter.net Here is the Atkins group review on the book.
Colette Heimowitz from Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. Here is her review of the book:

Four years ago, a blockbuster article on the cover of the New York Times Magazine asked the question, "What if it's all been a big fat lie?" The epynonomous "big fat lie" was the belief that "fat" in any form was evil and the root of all disease.

The concepts presented in that article were so revolutionary that they earned Taubes a much-publicized (and very lucrative) book deal. Now, four years later, the book has arrived. And it was very much worth the wait. Some critics have already called "Good Calories Bad Calories" the most important nutrition book of the past 50 years. They may be right. In almost 500 pages of closely reasoned, impeccably researched material, Taubes details how the "low-fat" philosophy gained traction in the 60's, largely on the strength of seriously flawed research by Ancel Keys. Keys surveyed 21 countries looking for correlations between diet and heart disease, selected seven that supported his thesis that cholesterol and heart disease were cause and effect, and then tirelessly campaigned for his position to reduce cholesterol by reducing fat. The resulting tale is part sociology, part politics, part medicine, and part detective story, all of it absolutely fascinating. Taubes painstakingly and carefully explains some basics of research that will make any reader a more knowledgeable and astute consumer of information-- namely the difference between correlation and cause. Correlation is when two things happen together (the rooster crows, the sun come up). But correlation is not cause (the rooster doesn't cause the sun to rise). Yet in much nutritional and dietary research, they are treated as the same thing. High fat diets are indeed often found in societies where heart disease is high. But so is smoking, eating processed foods, low vegetable intake, smog, stress and exposure to chemicals. And-- most important to Taube's brilliantly detailed arguments- so is sugar.

The story of how fat came to be blamed for the ills of western society is more sociology and politics than it is good medicine. Actually, sugar consumption accounts for the "data" just as well- but the sugar hypothesis did not have the same support and political lobby as the "fat hypothesis". Yet sugars- and foods that convert quickly into sugar- are prime culprits for the many diseases that have insulin and insulin resistance at their core. The brilliance of Taube's book is that he explains that those diseases are far more numerous than we might suspect. Alzheimer's, for example. High levels of insulin actually divert energy from the same pathways that would normally be clearing out the plaques and tangles that are so central to Alzheimer's. Taubes also explains the insulin connection to cancer. And of course to diabetes, obesity and heart disease. A pretty damning indictment, overall, and a pretty compelling case for eating low on the glycemic scale. We can't help ourselves from feeling somewhat vindicated. Here's a serious book, with serious, detailed, meticulously documented research, that supports what we at Atkins Nutritionals have been saying in one form or another for decades. Fat is not the enemy. But a diet high in sugar, processed carbohydrates, and trans-fats most certainly is. This book deserves a wide audience, probably wider than it will actually get, since it's a long and tough read. But if you take the time to get through it- time which the material richly deserves- you may never think about your diet, and about food, in quite the same way.

And that would be a very good thing indeed.

Colette Heimowitz, M.Sc.
VP Nutrition Communication & Education
Atkins Nutritionals, Inc.

Editors Note:

The entrenched industry, thru their well paid media connections, have their hired guns currently attacking Taubes book as expected using all of their "any idiot knows" and it just makes sense if you eat fat you gain fat etc...

All the usual attacks on anything that might expose as complete faleshoods, what they have for 35 years spent billions selling the public on, and the media are too embarrassed to admit they were part of.... You will soon see those critics extreme efforts in putting down his expose all over the place.

Read Harlans review, "Great New Book, Our Subject and Goals" click here