Home > Work > Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
61 " obesity is caused by the kind of calories we consume and not the quantity, and so if we avoid carbohydrates our bodies function correctly and shed any excess weight. "
― Gary Taubes , Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
62 " Eating carbohydrates, for example, not only elevates insulin but inhibits growth-hormone secretion; both effects lead to greater fatty-acid storage in the fat tissue. "
63 " Does lowering the plasma cholesterol level through dietary modification prevent or delay heart disease in man?” This question would never be answered, but it no longer seemed to matter. "
64 " Though more strenuous exercise would burn more calories, it would also lead to a significant increase in appetite. This is the implication of the phrase “working up an appetite.” “Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal, "
65 " Which of us would not be preoccupied with thoughts of food if we were suffering from internal starvation? Hunger is such an awful thing that it is classically cited with pestilence and war as one of our three worst burdens. Add to the physical discomfort the emotional stresses of being fat, the taunts and teasing from the thin, the constant criticism, the accusations of gluttony and lack of “will power,” and the constant guilt feelings, and we have reasons enough for the emotional disturbances which preoccupy the psychiatrists. "
66 " Feinstein examined the efficacy of various obesity treatments in a lengthy review in the Journal of Chronic Diseases, he dismissed exercise in a single paragraph. “There has been ample demonstration that exercise is an ineffective method of increasing energy output,” Feinstein noted, “since it takes far too much activity to burn up enough calories for a significant weight loss. In addition, physical exertion may evoke a desire for food so that the subsequent intake of calories may exceed what was lost during the exercise. "
67 " McGovern’s Dietary Goals had turned the dietary-fat controversy into a political issue rather than a scientific one, "
68 " Foreman believed McGovern’s Dietary Goals supported her conviction that “people were getting sick and dying because we ate too much,” and she believed it was incumbent on the USDA to turn McGovern’s recommendations into official government policy. Like Mottern and Hegsted, Foreman was undeterred by the scientific controversy. "
69 " Skepticism, however, cannot be removed from the scientific process. Science does not function without it. "
70 " McGovern’s Dietary Goals had turned the dietary-fat controversy into a political issue rather than a scientific one, and Keys and his hypothesis were the beneficiaries. "
71 " If insulin fattens those who receive it, as the evidence suggests, then how does it work? The prewar European clinicians who used insulin therapy to treat anorexics accepted the possibility, as Falta suggested, that the hormone can directly increase the accumulation of fat in the fat tissues. Insulin was “an excellent fattening substance,” Erich Grafe wrote in Metabolic Diseases and Their Treatment. "
72 " overeating and sedentary behavior could not explain the prevalence of obesity and diabetes in modern societies, "
73 " obesity is also associated with poverty, and even extreme poverty, and that should be a compelling argument against physical inactivity as a cause of the disease. Those who earn their living through manual labor tend to be the less advantaged members of societies in developed nations, and yet they will have the greatest obesity rates. "
74 " Oversimplification has been the characteristic weakness of scientists of every generation. ELMER MCCOLLUM, A History of Nutrition, 1957 "
75 " expenditure by focusing on expenditure alone. “For a long period the role of exercise in weight control was disregarded, if not actually ridiculed,” he wrote in a 1965 New York Times Magazine article. “One reason often advanced for this neglect is that ‘exercise consumes very little energy.’…Somehow the impression was given that any such exercise had to be accomplished in a single uninterrupted session. Actually, exercise does correspond to a caloric expenditure that can be considerable, and this expenditure will take place in a day or a decade. "
76 " dreadful science can pass for seminal research in the field of obesity. "
77 " studying many obese people in great detail and following them over a long period of time, I have come to the conclusion that…overeating, though it is observed with great regularity, is not the cause of obesity; it is a symptom of an underlying disturbance…. Food, of course, is essential for obesity—but so is it for the maintenance of life in general. The need for overeating and the changes in weight regulation and fat storage are the essential disturbances. "
78 " Allinson’s chain of cause and effect from white bread to constipation to chronic disease was given credibility in the late 1920s by the innovative and eccentric Scottish surgeon Sir Arbuthnot Lane in a book entitled The Prevention of the Diseases Peculiar to Civilization. The hypothesis would hold a tight grasp on a school of British medical researchers for decades to come. "
79 " This half century of research unequivocally supported the alternative hypothesis of obesity. It established that the relevant energy balance isn’t between the calories we consume and the calories we expend, but between the calories—in the form of free fatty acids, glucose, and glycerol—passing in and out of the fat cells. If more and more fatty acids are fixed in the fat tissue than are released from it, obesity will result. "
80 " David Kritchevsky, a member of the Food and Nutrition Board when it released Toward Healthful Diets, put it this way: “The U.S. government is as big a pusher as industry. If you say what the government says, then it’s okay. If you say something that isn’t what the government says, or that may be parallel to what industry says, that makes you suspect. "