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Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) |  | Author: Gary Taubes
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $9.78
as of 3/20/2010 03:15 CDT details
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Seller: OB1S
Rating:  264 reviews
Sales Rank: 735
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400033462
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.283
EAN: 9781400033461
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet despite this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates, like white flour, easily digested starches, and sugars, and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 264
 Paradigm Shift March 19, 2010
Toban Wiebe
This is an incredibly important book for anyone who values their health. Taubes shows how political incentives corrupted the scientific process and how the established positions on nutrition and disease are closer to being a faith than a science. He annihilates two pillars of the conventional wisdom: the lipid hypothesis ("eating fat, especially saturated fat, is unhealthy") and the caloric excess hypothesis("obesity is caused by caloric excess"). He makes a compelling case for an alternative hypothesis: the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis.
This is a serious academic book, accessible to the lay reader. It's ushering in a paradigm shift for our understanding of nutrition and disease. In all seriousness, it ranks among the most important books of all time. Definitely read it.
Taubes Tome Decimates Low Fat Dogma March 18, 2010
W. B. Perry (GA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Gary Taubes has written a masterpiece. What a novel idea to actually go through the scientific literature to examine the science behind the fat-cholesterol hypothesis, the carbohydrate hypothesis, and what actually makes us fat and unhealthy. This is the most rigorous piece of literature for the general readership that I have read on issues of health. Taubes interviewed over 600 clinicians, investigators, and administrators when doing research for this book. If you truly want to be informed on nutrition, and "how we know what we know" than this is the book to read. His logic and empiricism are constant all throughout this book. It would also behoove anyone that is in the medical/health field to read this book. If there ever were reading this would be the book. Taubes builds a very strong case indicting carbs, not fat, as being responsible for obesity and disease. Finally for such a rigorous book it well written and will keep your attention with no trouble. I can't recommend this highly enough for everybody that cares at all about their health.
It will change your life - it should change the world!! March 17, 2010
C. Russell (Georgia USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
After reading GCBC, I was stunned. I devoured this book because I am a nutrition student getting my masters and will be a registered dietician one day. GCBC disproves about 40% of what I've just spent 3 years studying in graduate school. Other reviews summarize the book well enough. Just know that you will not be disappointed once you finish. If anything, you will be amped up to make changes in the accepted practice that carbs are good and fat is bad. The exact opposite is true and Gary explains this in meticulous detail with a references section about the size of most other diet books.
This book changed my life and my family's life. I have lost almost 10 pounds after reading it and will talk to anyone I can about it!!! Thank you Mr. Taubes from a future registered dietician with a masters! You deserve a nobel peace prize.
Meticulous journalism from someone who really understands the science March 9, 2010
haig shahinian (Los Angeles, Ca)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of the most rigorously researched books on nutrition I have ever read. The author goes to great lengths to synthesize evidence from a variety of different sources going back over 200 years. Taubes not only compiles and analyzes the data, but deeply understands the concepts, at times it seems he does so more than the research scientists themselves. I cannot recommend this book more.
The Truth About Obesity March 4, 2010
Samuel Smith (Toronto, ON Canada)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
In a nutshell: Eating, ultimately, is about feeding cells in our body. Hunger is internal starvation. We overeat when our metabolism doesn't liberate fat stores fast enough, resulting in cellular starvation, and hence hunger. Carbs inhibit this process by stimulating too much insulin and insulin resistance. This is culminative, and in the worse case results in diabetes.
One likely proof? Low-carb diets don't induce hunger, indicating cells are being fed from internal stores. Internal food (fast) versus external food are roughly the same from a hunger perspective. And if that internal food is inhibited, more hunger, more eating. More proof: fasting is relatively easy once the body adjusts. Hunger goes away.
This book reviews all the key diet and obesity research and their associated strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions. You will likely be convinced after reading it, and learn a ton about health, science and human nature. One strikingly obvious lesson- good science, and good scientists, don't engage in the self-promotion and pet-theory mongering that, unfortunately, seem to be noticed by media and government and become public policy. The second- public policy and the status quo have a huge influence on the beliefs and outlooks of a research community.
My personal epiphany was thinking about eating as cellular nutrition, and thinking about fat stores as important energy stores, not unwanted side effects of eating. A lot of studies in the book show convincingly show hunger is cellular-need driven- both fuel and nutrients- and this opens up important new perspectives.
A few other influences on the current mess outlined nicely in the book through copious reviews of studies:
1) When you remove fats, you add carbs. You need to eat something, right? Michael Pollan raises this point nicely as well in "In Defence of Food"- when you remove something, consider what replaces it.
2) much research that showed higher fat leading to higher disease ignored the prevalence of higher refined carbs. This was the switch all interpretations turn on, and without controlling for it, renders the low-fat diet conclusions reached by these studies as unsupportable and downright dangerous.
3) the assumption that fat was more fattening due to being calorie dense (9 calories versus 4 for carbs and proteins) is absolutely wrong. This was an important secondary influence on pushing low fat diets.
Sadly, this was all known 50 years ago, and ignored due to cholesterol and fat and other red herrings. Once fat was the demon, carbs had to be the angel. And what did we get? An obesity epidemic unlike any seen in history.
This book is beautifully written, and a great, engaging read. I found one awkward chapter in the middle- Paradoxes- but it made sense when I read later chapters. It was summarizing the research covered so far, and laying down the hypothesis for the remainder of the book.
Read this book. It might save your life.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 264
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