Big Fat Lies
18
February
2/18/2008:
If you were expecting an entry about Hoboken city government, you’re out of luck.
This very interesting post is about a recent lecture held at Stevens Institute on February 6, 2008. Since most of you are off on this rainy day, take the hour to watch the video!
Author and scientist Gary Taubes was the featured speaker invited to discuss his theories about the obesity epidemic in his latest book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Taubes strongly explains his principles about the importance of a low-carb lifestyle. He goes into the history of how we became fat, and exactly why most current “diets” you see littering the shelves of your local bookstore are worthless.
The lecture is a bit technical at times, but it is very informative. He cites many historical references and shows how the obesity trend has worsened.
Now I’ve always been a firm believer in “burning more than you consume” as the rule of thumb for weight loss (whether I can put my words into action is another story.) However, his presentation and theories really made me think that there’s more to this than meets the eye. Maybe all the bread I love to consume isn’t such a great idea…
Grab a beverage, watch the video and share your thoughts!
For me, following a regimented Atkins Diet is too much to handle, but I’m certainly going to find lower carbohydrate food alternatives in the future.
February 22nd 2008 - 15:25:38 |
boston1 wrote:
For the FIRST and FINAL time, I never said you said all fats were bad. You have stated repeatedly that saturated fats are dangerous. If you had read and understood Gary’s book, you wouldn’t be goin around making such dogmatic proclamations. None of the science behind that notion holds up to serious scrutiny.
so, if 99% of intelligent people agree on a point, it must be true? really? interesting…
Regarding exercise, here’s a simple thought experiment. Imagine you need to eat under 2000k to lose weight from whatever you weigh now. 2000k is the smallest amount you can eat without being hungry. In fact, you are just a bit hungry at that level. Now go out and run 45 minutes per day, and try to keep your calories at 2000. You can’t because you’ll be famished. You easily eat 2500ish. Which will pretty much negate the weight loss benefit of the running. You’ll still lose weight, due to the caloric deficit you are creating (unless you really overeat, which isn’t hard to do).
The point is, as far as weight loss is concerned, you could have done just as well without the exercise by just eating the 2000k per day.
Exercise in and of itself offers no magic metabolic advantage. You burn X calories, but at the same time, you are driven to eat X calories more than you would have. Unless you are really good at dealing with hunger, I suppose.
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February 22nd 2008 - 15:48:07 |
LOL – So, because this Gary person theorizes in his book that saturated fats are not bad, Everyone should believe Gary’s theory and take it to heart(no pun intended)? Again, you are starting to sound pretty scary. and FYI, not everyone stuffs themselves after they exercise. Everyone you know is completely famished after they workout and gorges on food? wrong. Certainly not people trying to lose weight. ME and my friends do triathlons in the summer and do not gorge afterwards. It’s common knowledge that one will lose weight FASTER combining exercise with diet then just dieting alone. Sorry, except you. Frightening. Honestly, I’m bored with this already. I’ll believe all the medically trained doctors, nutrionists, exercise physiologists and other scientist’s theory that saturated fat can cause heart disease and exercise aids weight loss and you can believe Gary Taubes. Done. Have a terrific weekend.
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February 22nd 2008 - 16:09:08 |
boston1 wrote:
You’re unwittingly a providing classic example of why the prevailing dogma, ahem, prevails so strongly. People just know these things, don’t they? It’s common knowledge. No need to examine them, we all just know it, right? right? LOL at anyone who disagrees…
Sorry you’re bored, I’ve been enjoying this back and forth.
a last comment, today anyway, on exercise. Of course, if you can manage to exercise and not eat more, you’ll have an advantage. The same advantage you would have had if you had eaten even less (oh, say 1600k in my prior example) and skipped the exercise. Either way you are forcing your self to live on X fewer calorie than you are burning. Am I missing something here (other than “hmmph, everyone knows this…”)?
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February 22nd 2008 - 19:11:26 |
boston – hate to see you bored. I agree with you on most of your original post. I also happen to agree with you about exercising to help with weight loss, though I believe its more a holistic effect related to emotional state than a true physiological effect. “Healthy people exercise more and people who exercise more are more healthy…”
And not that I think you haven’t done your research, but just that I believe that most of the information out there is incomplete or misinformed. So I do have to disagree with you and “99% of the intelligent people” out there on the idea that saturated fat is in any way bad for you. It was a theory which gained momentum when its proponents were able to influence the government to adopting them into the USDA dietary recommendations. At that point the dogma became entrenched in the medical community.
The problem is that not only Gary Taubes but many, many doctors and scientists over the last 30 years have questioned the science behind this assumption, and asked for proof.
And like many other generally accepted “common sense” ideas (the earth is flat, etc.), when it is put up to critical examination it is suddenly found very lacking. But like any other profession doctors and dietitians are just human, and so they ignore those ideas that go against what they “know to be true” and dismiss them, and so, for awhile the established dogma maintains its position as the generally accepted “truth”.
To quote Michael Crichton: “The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
I started my path to a low-carb diet through the investigation of cholesterol therapies. More than anything else, the “saturated fat is evil” dogma is prevalent in the cardiovascular treatment community. The American Heart Association has bought into the prevailing theories that blocked arteries are caused by high cholesterol, that saturated fat in the diet causes high cholesterol, and therefore saturated fat is a direct contributor to heart disease. The problem is, they have no proof showing this causation, anywhere in the chain. None, zero, zip, nada. BUT, when you look at the evidence and ask how does dietary carbohydrate affect these factors the data becomes overwhelmingly in favor of carbohydrate restriction as a positive effector of cardiovascular health markers.
You don’t have to believe me, believe the people doing the research or treating patients.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resea...h_related_to_low-carbohydrate_diets
http://www.thincs.org
Have a great weekend! Eat some buttered bacon. Its good for you.
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