From the Los Angeles Times:
What is the evidence that the low-carb Atkins diet is healthy?
First, all you’re doing is not eating foods that none of us ate up until a few hundred or thousand years ago.
That’s a good way to put it. However, I wonder about processing: What about a food eaten thousands of years ago processed in a new way that increases speed of digestion? E.g., applesauce, orange juice. I believe fruit juice that tastes the same each time is very fattening, for example. Taubes says he lost about 12 pounds doing Atkins that he has kept it off. I lost and kept off the same amount of weight by reducing how much my food was processed. Oranges instead of orange juice. The whole interview is a summary of Taubes’ new book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
More Taubes links. Taubes on Larry King Live. Radio interview with Taubes about epidemiology. In this interview, around the 22:00 mark, Taubes makes some very interesting comments about the evidence against trans fats. He says all the evidence against trans fats comes from a data set (the Nurses Health Study) in which trans fat intake is completely confounded with processed-food intake.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
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Taubes said he lost 12 pounds avoiding refined carbs and potatoes, *not* by following Atkins.
On the processing issue, I think it’s really a matter of quantity and availability over processing. Our pre-agricultural ancestors would have had access to relatively small quantities of climate-appropriate seasonal fruit. It’s doubtful that they would have access to anything as sweet and fructose-filled as an orange, or even modern apples.
I agree that processing does make it easier to overeat such foods, and Taubes does lay out how fructose leads to bad lipid mojo, but I don’t think overeating unsweetened applesauce or drinking too much orange juice are major contributors to obesity on the whole.
I don’t see this as a very clean justification, seeing as how for those same thousands of years (except for Methuselah), we didn’t live so long either. Now, you can say that’s because of predators, illnesses, or violence, sure. But I don’t think anyone can say for sure.
In addition, now we have modern research data into the longevity of different cultures, and you’d think we’d have gained a glimmering of wisdom from examining huge variations between diets. And to me, that wisdom says: vegetables, fruit, more fish, and whole grains. Anyone who trades that wisdom for the Atkins diet is either foolish or lazy in my book.
It’s clear enough that eating ancient diets is much healthier. That is the evidence in Taubes’s book, in fact, that I found most persuasive: that when groups suddenly shift their foodways from ancient to modern their health suddenly goes downward. I think this evidence is why Taubes describes the Atkins diet like that.
Shouldn’t Taubes’ ideas about weight loss be reformulated in terms of Seth’s theory? Carbs tend to be strong tasting.
I’ve only read the interview, but is he saying that other things being equal, a less “nutritious” calorie will be more fattening than a more nutritious one? Does a nutritious calorie assuage hunger more than a less nutritious one?
I think the carbs that Taubes dislikes — bread, mashed potatoes, pasta — are digested quickly. They tend to be eaten with strong flavors so they are bad both ways: strong flavor, digested quickly.
Taubes is saying that certain carbohydrates are more fattening than fat & protein, calorie for calorie.
Our farming subsidies can’t help the situation. This country produces massive amounts of cheap corn syrup and enriched flower due to subsidies.
No domestic government policy frustrates me more than farming subsidies.
A calorie is only a calorie when burned in a calorimeter. The idea that a bomb calorimeter is a good proxy for human metabolism is bizarre — but not as bizarre as the fact that no “dietary expert” ever seems to question it!
Unlike in a calorimeter, in the body, CHO calories behave very differently from protein and fat calories. Dietary carbohydrate spikes insulin, causing a metabolic cascade that not only makes us store fat, it eventually makes us sick.
But with paleo diets, carb levels (and insulin) remain low, and there is little fat stored, and fat is actually burned. Taubes: “When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it as fuel.”
But if we’re eating carbs, insulin levels never fall.