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Good Calories, Bad Calories |  | Author: Gary Taubes
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Seller: KYBOOKS
Rating:  264 reviews
Sales Rank: 1358594
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.6
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.283
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking book, the result of seven years of research in every science connected with the impact of nutrition on health, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.
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 with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) and sugars–via their dramatic and longterm effects on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation–and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. There are good calories, and bad ones.
Good Calories
These are from foods without easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. These foods can be eaten without restraint.
Meat, fish, fowl, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy vegetables.
Bad Calories
These are from foods that stimulate excessive insulin secretion and so make us fat and increase our risk of chronic disease—all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. The key is not how much vitamins and minerals they contain, but how quickly they are digested. (So apple juice or even green vegetable juices are not necessarily any healthier than soda.)
Bread and other baked goods, potatoes, yams, rice, pasta, cereal grains, corn, sugar (sucrose and high fructose corn syrup), ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fruit juices, bananas and other tropical fruits, and beer.
Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then –wrongly–were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.
With precise references to the most significant existing clinical studies, he convinces us that there is no compelling scientific evidence demonstrating that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, that salt causes high blood pressure, and that fiber is a necessary part of a healthy diet. Based on the evidence that does exist, he leads us to conclude that the only healthy way to lose weight and remain lean is to eat fewer carbohydrates or to change the type of the carbohydrates we do eat, and, for some of us, perhaps to eat virtually none at all.
The 11 Critical Conclusions of Good Calories, Bad Calories:
1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, does not cause heart disease.
2. Carbohydrates do, because of their effect on the hormone insulin. The more easily-digestible and refined the carbohydrates and the more fructose they contain, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.
3. Sugars—sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup specifically—are particularly harmful. The glucose in these sugars raises insulin levels; the fructose they contain overloads the liver.
4. Refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are also the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the other common chronic diseases of modern times.
5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.
6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter any more than it causes a child to grow taller.
7. Exercise does not make us lose excess fat; it makes us hungry.
8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is a tour de force of scientific investigation–certain to redefine the ongoing debate about the foods we eat and their effects on our health.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 264
 Read This Book -- It Will Change Your Life March 21, 2010
Eric Wargo (Washington, DC)
I can't recommend this book enough. It's not a diet book, but a piece of great investigative science journalism -- as well as, in some ways, a history book. Specifically, it's the history of how and why a particular meme -- "fat is bad" -- came to dominate nutritional thinking over the last half century. Taubes, a Science magazine reporter with a track record of debunking bad science and bad scientists, shows that it was personalities and politics, not sound science, that got the medical establishment and policymakers to scapegoat dietary fat. The evidence was never there, or was (and remains) extremely flawed: studies with inadequate controls, small sample sizes, often designed to find the thing the researchers were looking for. Yet when an idea becomes as widely touted and entrenched in the public consciousness as the "fat hypothesis," it can have a snowball effect, biasing our perception and the direction of research thereafter. The meme stays in the picture.
If, like me, you grew up with the food pyramid, built on a broad base of grains and starches, it can be hard at first to wrap your head around Taubes' conclusion that the real culprit in everything from heart disease to cancer is "wholesome" stuff like bread, pasta, cereal (and sugar) -- not fat, not cholesterol, not salt. Atkins and South Beach and other "fad diets" have been vilifying refined carbs for decades, but they never get taken all that seriously. Even if you lose weight on those diets, replacing bagels and pasta with eggs, bacon, and steak is a recipe for a heart attack, runs the refrain. But study after study are showing that not to be the case. Evidence has been quietly accumulating for a long time that it's carbs you need to cut out, and you can eat all the steak and eggs you want.
In retrospect it is easy to see why, as a meme, the fat hypotheses had such sticking power. It's totally intuitive, for one thing: The fat you eat becomes the fat around your middle or butt. Why wouldn't it? Taubes doesn't spare the reader the complicated metabolic reasons why it doesn't work that way (and it can make the book a bit of a slog at times): The main hormonal mediator between what you eat and what your body does with what you eat (for example, storing it as fat versus burning it for fuel) is insulin. Most people think of insulin as something that is just relevant for diabetics, but increasingly insulin resistance, the metabolic dysregulation characteristic of diabetes, is being seen as a model for numerous other health woes: obesity, heart disease, cancer, you name it. It just so happens that all these scourges coincided, in America and globally, with the expansion of insulin-spiking refined carbs in the diet (in bread, pasta, cereal, soft drinks, juices, etc.).
Try and persuade people of this, and you'll see just how emotional people can get about their dietary beliefs. People look at you like you're crazy if you defend fat and evil if you disparage bread -- for all kinds of deep-rooted cultural reasons. Even once one accepts that one should cut out sugars and refined carbohydrates one still adds, under one's breath or as an afterthought, "well, and eat low fat." Probably because we're so used to decades of austere, unrealistic, and even contradictory nutritional recommendations.
GCBC heralds a coming clarity in the field of nutrition. The dense science makes it slow-going at times, but it's also the book's greatest strength. With a wealth of evidence, it can't be dismissed as another fad diet or crackpot opinion.
[...]
Paradigm Shift March 19, 2010
Toban Wiebe
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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)
2 out of 2 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)
3 out of 3 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)
3 out of 3 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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 264
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