John Tierney has an interesting column in the NY Times today about how many Americans — including the Surgeon General and the McGovern Commission — came to mistakenly believe that low-fat diets were better than diets with more fat.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Seth, the ideas you’re propagating in this post and the others are not only mistaken, but dangerous. Tierney’s article cites one source, Taubes’ new book. As I’ve indicated in my previous responses, abundant evidence, both epidemiological and experimental, exists that shows that a high fat diet is bad for health and promotes not only heart disease, but cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, and a host of other degenerative diseases which are the plague of the Western world. But people want to believe good news about their bad habits (which is why the news in recent years that alcohol may be good for health has had such an enthusiastic reception). When Taubes and others claim that low fat dies show no benefit, they are talking about diets that are 30% fat, as recommended by the American Heart Association, and this diet is indeed not beneficial, because it isn’t really low fat.
This new meme about high fat diets is going to cause a world of suffering.
Dennis, Taubes (and Tierney , in the NY Times) discuss at length why that “abundant evidence” cannot be trusted…at all.
Further, it would be appropriate if you revealed in your posts that you don’t think humans have the moral right to eat animal flesh. It would enable readers to put your opinions in context.
It would be nice if you’d address the issue rather than citing “authority” and making ad hominem arguments. You certainly haven’t “revealed” anything about yourself. I stated the evidence clearly. The fact, and it is indeed a fact, that the populations of many other countries have far lower rates of heart disease (cancer, etc.) than the U.S., along with other lines of evidence, such as that high fat diets cause atherosclerosis, points to diet as the explanation. The biggest and best epidemiological study of diet, The China Study, concluded that diet profoundly affects disease rates, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer.
I hope to interview Taubes. Dennis, do you have some questions you would like me to ask him?
Dennis, it’s not an “ad hominem” argument; I’m simply referring your Animal Rights agenda which you clearly set out on your blog but never here.
And the “China Study” has been amply debunked elsewhere, but Seth might ask Gary Taubes to address it.
Another possible question to ask Taubes to elaborate on how he’s adjusted his own diet in the light of his research, and has he made further adjustments since publication?
Seth: Sure. What is his explanation of cross-country mortality in heart disease and cancer? Why does he think experimental animals, such as rabbits and monkeys, develop atherosclerosis when fed a high fat diet? Why have we seen regressions in atherosclerosis when people go on a low fat diet such as Ornish or McDougall? Why is there an epidemic of heart disease in the Western world, and why is heart disease on the rise in places like China? Why do statins decrease the risk of heart attack? Why do high fiber diets lower serum cholesterol?
That’s more than enough, and thanks Seth for allowing me to comment here.
By the way, Seth, I read your book and think your discovery of the ability to change one’s set point to be brilliant. Your research into omega-3 is also compelling, and convinced me to start taking flax seed oil. And your blog is always interesting. So all the more reason for me to dispute with you and your readers on this topic which has so much consequence for life and health.
Dennis, I fear you are missing the bigger point. Dying of some things is preferable to dying of other things. Morality is the issue, not the specific disease, since in the long term we shall all be dead. As medical science stands now, for example, CHD is much preferable to stroke. Replumbing and rewiring the heart is fairly straightforward; replumbing the brain is not. This is why longevity in Japan has increased even while the diet has become more “westernized” and CHD has climbed accordingly.
But longevity for Japanese living in the U.S. has increased more: “Asian women in the United States–many of whom are second-generation and have spent their whole lives here–have a life expectancy that is three years longer than Japanese women . . . . Previous research suggested that Asians lose their ‘survival advantage’ after they are in the United States for a long time and have adopted an American diet and habits, but the new study suggests that is not happening with Asian women.”
https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003254679_longevity12.html
My own educated belief is that mortality (rather than the incidence of specific diseases) will in the final analysis correlate strongest to public health and hygiene, general nutrition, and caloric intake. The biggest problem with high-fat diets is that it’s so easy to consume a lot of calories at once. I suspect that the interaction of genes, along with the intake of fish and soy (much higher in Asia), will prove significant as well.
Thanks for the praise, Dennis, thanks for your questions for Taubes, and thanks for your comments here. And if you think the flaxseed oil is affecting you, please let us know!
Hello!
I’ve been enjoying reading the comments here
What Taubes has succeeded in doing for me is to carve out my niche on the fence even deeper. I’m really torn at the moment. For instance, he has been defending the impotence of exercise in weight loss:
“Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.”
and …
“Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.”
Any light you can shed on this would be welcome
Taubes is much closer to the truth than what you usually hear. If you are sedentary, exercise indeed causes weight loss. If you sit all day every day, you may lose 10 pounds by walking to work every day, for example. But after you have lost those 10 pounds it becomes very difficult to lose much more. You have to practically train for a marathon to lose a lot of weight by exercise. That is of course impractical so exercise is not a good way to lose a lot of weight.
Thank you for your reply, Seth.
As I understood Taubes, he says that exercise does not lead to weight loss, even if you are sedentary. That our body compensates for increased activity such that there is a negligible effect on weight.
It’s quite a proposal, in the current climate.
One emerging theory I find compelling is that aerobic exercise is what our predatory ancestors did before killing something and eating it. And the more of it the better. Look at a pride of lions. They’ll sit around all day, get hungry, run down an antelope and eat it, and then go back to sitting around doing nothing. We really are carrot and stick creatures, and when we run around a lot without getting the carrot, we’ll stop at McDonald’s and buy one (with fries and a shake). This theory argues that when it comes to weight control, it’s muscle mass that matters–that which keeps on burning calories when you’re sitting around doing nothing. In other words, don’t exercise to burn calories, exercise to build muscle.
Gina Kolata, author of Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Fitness, said in an interview*:
“The too-good-to-be-true myth is one that I had believed. I had thought, and so did many people, that if you build muscle that muscle will burn more calories and fat and therefore throughout the day, even if you do nothing, even if you just sit still, you will automatically be burning more calories, your metabolism will be higher. Unfortunately, that’s not true. I asked an exercise physiologist to do a calculation for me. If a man goes to a gym and lifts weights seriously for four months he might build about four pounds of muscle, which is a lot; a woman would build much less. That four pounds of muscle would burn an extra 24 calories a day. That’s like a bite of a cookie.”
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* https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=54516
On the other hand, these things are cumulative. The man who wakes up on his 40th birthday and steps on the bathroom scale and realizes he’s carrying an extra 50 pounds around the middle since graduating from high school did not put it all on since his 39th birthday. More likely that he’s been adding 24 extra calories or so a day for the past 22 years.
Dave Lull,
Just wanted to say I just read that Gina Kolata interview. Loved it!