Read It: Good Calories, Bad Calories

I just finished Gary Taubes' book last night. It was very interesting and enlightening.

The main takeaway for me was his debunking of calorie balance, or at least the interpretation of it. The conventional wisdom is that we get fat because we eat too much and exercise too little. While it is true that there is an association between excess eating and being a couch potato, it doesn't mean that is the cause. He suggests that there is compelling evidence to suggest the causation is backwards and overeating and sloth are instead caused by being overweight and having a metabolic imbalance due to carbohydrates. The screwed up metabolism channels nutrients to fat, thus "starving" people internally. Like all starvation this leads to lower energy expenditure and severe hunger. They eat, but it isn't usable by their bodies since insulin pushes it into fat storage and they are hungry afterward, deepening the vicious cycle. Eating less doesn't work since it just makes the hunger worse. The way out is to drop the carbs down to a minimum so the insulin won't continue
messing things up. The hunger then subsides and the body's natural energy balance mechanisms can work as they evolved to.

He discounts the value of exercise, and I can understand why. Burning calories will just make the starvation worse as well. You can't exercise your way to being thin and lean unless the insulin is lowered and you have access to your fat stores of energy. Typical cardio exercise is the worst since it blindly burns calories without the positive hormonal drive. In my mind, a shorter, intense activity pattern would be very beneficial, and possibly be essential to long term health, but this would be less optimal unless the main hormone, insulin, is back under control. Growth hormone, driven by intense exercise, mobilizes stored fat for example. Low level cardio won't help with this.

In short, it appears to mostly be about hormone balance, not energy balance. With the right hormone drive the energy balance sorts itself out and body composition improves. Perfect energy balance(calories in/out) won't help much if hormones are out of whack since it will starve you internally. It explains the belly fat on joggers too.

I see fat people in a different light after reading it. I also further buy into Evolutionary Fitness as a result since it will return you to the right hormone drive.

As an engineer I found the book interesting as well. Biases are everywhere and scientists ignore empirical evidence counter to their theories. Wrong ideas take on a life of it's own if repeated often enough. We all are guilty of this confirmation bias and need to be very skeptical of our own thoughts and experts opinions in this very complex, modern world. We are paying the price of the lack of real science in the nutrition research process.

I highly recommend the book. If this doesn't change your thinking about low fat high carb diets then nothing will.