It should be noted that the author of the linked article is Gary Taubes, who is best known for Good Calories, Bad Calories, a book that seeks to turn the conventional wisdom of nutrition on its head.
I loved GCBC, but unfortunately Taubes goes a little bit too far near the end in condemning carbohydrates. It's really hard to recommend the book because of that overreaching.
A little too far is an understatement. I read GCBC when it came out and found its arguments compelling at the time. After learning more, I've reversed my opinion almost completely.
James Krieger's critique of the core chapter of GCBC is very worthwhile reading: http://weightology.net/?p=265. His blog also has other articles addressing the core Atkins-Taubes thesis of the link between insulin, carbs and obesity. Alan Aragon's Research Reviews had an Editor's Cut on Taubes, as well as pieces specifically on the role of insulin and carbs in obesity and weight gain, but unfortunately all that is subscriber-only. Lyle McDonald (who literally wrote the book on ketogenic diets) has also written a lot on that whole orbit of ideas--never an article against GCBC directly, though he has certainly expressed his negative opinion of it on many occasions.
However, I think most of the book is still worth reading, especially the history behind the demonitization of fat and the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." Taubes is at his best as a science historian and, obviously, not a scientist.
There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright. As an example, there's an old post on Michael Eades's blog where he talks of a small woman allegedly eating 5000 calories and maintaining her weight. As explained in James Krieger's article, people's reports of their own calorie intake for studies have consistently been found to be way off the mark, to the point of being useless. When you actually measure what is being eaten under clinical conditions, the result is in line with the conventional theory of energy balance.
The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable), and especially lots of highly palatable foods (to use Guyenet's terminology). But most longer-term comparative studies of diets that look at the performance past the 12-month mark show that low-carb diets don't fare any better on average than other standard weight-loss diets. The one exception is a study the low-carbers like to hold up as a vindication of their views; Lyle McDonald addresses that one here: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/comparison-....
>There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright.
On the last point, of course it's wrong. I never saw Taubes deny CICO as being true. He repeatedly states that, while true, it isn't useful for answering _why_ people get fat.
It's as if I asked why some people are rich and others are poor. And you simply said that the poor people spent more money than they took in. It's true and yet utterly useless if you keep harping on that single point while ignoring inheritance, education, mental illness, drug abuse etc.
You've further convinced me not to recommend GCBC to anyone, since I keep realizing its possible for people to miss the central point of the book.
I'm totally in agreement on Guyenet's stuff, but he agrees with Taubes on CICO being not helpful:
>This is where I agree with Taubes-- 1) the key thing to understand is what is causing the energy imbalance, and 2) the idea that "eat less, move more" is a practical fat loss strategy does not necessarily follow from the first law of thermodynamics. Taking in less energy and expending more does cause fat loss, but the problem is that it's difficult to maintain-- the body opposes changes in its fat stores.
No. Low-carber thesis is that raising intake of fats suppresses appetite so you can eat what you like until you are full. The idea is carbs keep you hungry because of energy partiioning and so you over consume calories because you feel hungrier than you should. Taubes explains this very well in What Makes us Fat.
His main claim is that the energy balance problem is a consequence of getting fat, not the cause.
The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable)
Another benefit is that the low-carb diets provide better satiety. In studies, if people were advised to eat ad libitum, those who had to choose from low-carb foods eventually consumed less calories than those, who could choose from "regular" food.
Yeah calories matter but processed foods seem to be the real culprit. They make it easy to eat too much and get addicted to the fat salt sugar combo that leads to problems.
I hate how grains make me feel so I am not going back. Losing weight is a side effect of having more energy via cutting out food that was toxic for me to be eating. This isn't religion but just empirical testing on my part. If it didn't work I wouldn't do it.
I follow Taubes, Sissons and Robb Wolf approach (paleo in general) because it just works for me and I love the food. I am thinner, stronger and with much better health eating tasty food and doing minimal exercise. I think Guyenet's approach may work too (maybe there is not only one right answer) but I think low-carb is easier to me and I dont see a reason to change it. My life is much better after limiting (almost banning) grains and refined sugar.
I just wish we could see more directly a sense of how little we know about good nutrition.
My favorite example is Vitamin B12, mostly because I learned the story when I reduced my meat consumption to about once a month. So there's this family of massive molecules containing the metal cobalt which we can't make on our own because we're not adapted to eat cobalt, and they're all called "Vitamin B12". It helps in the last step of making the protein building-block called methionine; if you get malnourished in this way your body just basically fills up with "almost finished" methionine which is useless and might even be poisonous. There can also be a slight risk of nerve damage although as I understand it we don't actually understand why the hell that would be.
The biggest cause of malnutrition in this sense is simply being old -- you can't absorb Vitamin B12 so well in the first place because it is huge and weird, and old people have even more trouble either because their gut is slowly dying or because they're infected with H. pylori, which is a safe bacteria more than 80% of the time and might even be important for a well-functioning stomach, but might sometimes cause a chronic tummy-bug.
Okay, so that's the problem, but what do we know about how much of the B12s we need and get? We know very little. The US Recommended Daily Allowance of B12s is 2.4 μg, but the US Daily Value for B12 is 6.0 μg. How much do you get in your food? You get almost none from vegetables, and vegans are basically all ipso facto suffering from B12 deficiency unless they take supplements or eat enriched cereal -- but most of them are quite healthy and see no problems from it. As for vegetarians like (almost-) me, the exact range for milk and eggs to get to this limit is imprecise because the limit itself varies by a factor of 3, so you might need to eat three eggs per day or else ten; so you might need to drink two cups of milk per day or else five, to live up to those numbers. So in theory there are lots of vegetarians also who come in at half or one-third their daily requirement, and never notice anything. Meanwhile there are people over 60 who eat plenty of meat but are starting to feel the effects anyway.
We actually don't even know how well you absorb it. A USDA researcher named Lindsay Allen did a 2011 study where she marked Vitamin B12 in eggs so that she could detect it, and then fed those eggs to 10 people. She found that the body absorbed 50% of a 1.5 μg dosage but only 20% of a 2.6 μg dosage. Let me repeat that. She found that, in absolute value terms, eating more B12 led to less of it being absorbed, 0.75 μg versus 0.5 μg. It's probably not statistically significant with 10 people, but still. We don't even know that eating more leads to you absorbing more of it. (I also wonder whether RDAs are "amount absorbed" while DVs are "amount eaten", as this is pretty much never reported, but I will assume that they aren't crazy and that it's always "amount eaten.")
I wouldn't use the scare-quotes around "science" when talking about nutrition science, as I think there is potential for real research here and I think people do indeed do it -- but it's a lot of work before we have a firm understanding, and most of that work hasn't been done yet, and yet you hear these confident conclusions. I would just like to hear people publish standards in the form, "you might need this much, or that much, we don't really know."
The engineer in me craves error bars. Where are the error bars?
I think that when it comes to diet, you should follow your instinct on how much to consume and listen to your body, while also doing blood analyzes from time to time.