Comments on Tom Naughton's Interview with Taubes on Why We Get Fat

Why We Get Fat: Interview With Gary Taubes - Tom Naughton

This is a pretty long interview, so I'm not going to address all of the points, but just a few of the exchanges.

GT:  I’m always asking myself, “How can I explain this to a general audience? How can I simplify the science to the point that it is barely noticeable?” In fact, often the best science writing has no noticeable science at all.

OK ;-)

Fat Head: I found those critiques rather odd, considering that Good Calories, Bad Calories includes an entire chapter titled Conservation of Energy, in which you wrote at length about the laws of thermodynamics and how nutritionists misinterpret them. How do you deal with criticisms of your books coming from people who clearly haven’t read them?

Gary Taubes: The knee-jerk response is always to assume that the people who criticized the book haven’t read it, and I try to avoid the knee-jerk response. Still, I always want to ask them, “Did you read the book?”  Because it usually seems pretty clear they didn’t. It happens all the time.

I have a chapter in the new book discussing how it is quite possible that anyone who loses weight on a diet does so because they reduce either the quantity of carbohydrates consumed or improve the quality — even on low-fat, low calorie diets this is likely to be the case, counter-intuitive as that may seem.

Then I get a review in the health section of the New York Times from a physician, and she ends the review with this pat response that humans come in wonderful variations, so some diets work for some people and other diets work for others. And I wanted to call her up and ask, “Did you read the chapter on why diets work? Do you really have information that I don’t have that makes you certain what you’re saying is true? Because it very well may not be …” 

In response to Tom Naughton, I would say that those who believe the human body does not get to defy the laws of physics simply don't buy that nutritionists are misrepresenting this basic fact.  It's not that folks haven't read that chapter in GCBC, it's that it doesn't make much sense.  On the one hand, Taubes argues that calories don't count, while on the other hand he argues that CICO is valid but tells us nothing about the direction of causality.  Indeed a major thesis of GCBC is that fat accumulation (energy stored) drives increased CI and/or decreased CO, not vice versa as is supposedly erroneously claimed by conventional wisdom.   He offers up no real evidence for this.  Indeed he uses the word "excess" in reference to calories, fat calories, fatty acids, carbs whatever, repeatedly in the book and his lectures.  So how does the accumulation "come first" driving the energy balance?   How does the first law tells us that changes in body mass will drive compensatory actions on the energy terms??

Apparently Taubes is still in thin skinned denial.  He wants to avoid the knee jerk reaction but just can't he'p himself.  The NYT reviewer could simply not have actually read his gobbledegook and just not buy it. (I haven't read the book, and if the chapter he refers to differs significantly from his nonsensical blog post - Calories, fat or carbohydrates? Why diets work (when they do).  - please let me know).  Even taking those dietary records on face value, as I've discussed previously, (and commented on over on GT's blog), proves nothing and contradicts both theories if it could be taken at face value.

So ... which is it??  Calories don't count?  Fine, but then GT's bass ackwards energy balance theories are ever the more absurd.  But just about every LC "guru" that argues against the first law ends up making first law arguments in defense of their theories (e.g. thermogenesis, metabolic cost of gluconeogenesis, futile cycling and uncoupling would all fit perfectly well on the "out" side).   

Fat Head: In addition to having a background in physics, you’re a rather tall and athletic person who played college football. Do you ever want to just haul off and smack some of these people?

Gary Taubes: I boxed, too, as an amateur. Painful, short, ugly career. ...

WOW.  Sorry gang, but never in a million years would I have pegged GT as a former athlete.  I'm just going to leave it at that ;-)

Fat Head: Why We Get Fat includes a fair amount of new information, so obviously you’re continuing to study the latest research. Have you changed any of your beliefs or conclusions since Good Calories, Bad Calories was published? If so, what?

Gary Taubes: I’m not actually studying the latest research as much as I’d like. I have two small children now, and they tend to take time away from obsessive research. I have come to realize that some of the details I discussed in GCBC were incorrect, and I’m sure I’ll learn about more as time progresses. Other than that, nothing much of significance has changed. That could either mean that the data continue to support what I say, as I believe they do, or that I’m so close-minded that I’m not paying attention to the evidence refuting my ideas.

As GT puts fingers in ears and goes "la la la" when presented with any of those pesky little details.  I suggest the last statement is closer to the truth.  Hey ... he suggested it!

Fat Head: ... Do you ever lie awake at night worrying that any of your fundamental conclusions will turn out to be wrong?

Gary Taubes: Yes. But not as often as I lie awake at night worrying about other things. ...

Easier to ignore I suppose ....

Gary Taubes: Actually, there’s an old line I like from a physicist and philosopher of science named John Ziman, who said something to the effect that 90 percent of the stuff in the scientific journals is wrong and 90 percent of the stuff in the textbooks is right, and the process of science is distilling the truths from the former into the latter.

First, wouldn't you at least look to more current texts, than say those that are 20, 30, 40 and more years old?  The core of his insulin hypothesis is from a 1965 physio text!!  But apparently Ziman and perhaps Taubes, never studied from the softer science texts.   My freshman bio text was outdated by my senior year.  They were full of "this theory" and "that theory" and even if "this" was prevailing concensus at publication, often we were taught that new evidence points to "that".  Texts are often 5 even 10 years behind the times which is why they are almost never used as references in even undergraduate term paper type research.   And of course, apparently that 90% rule failed GT on the glycerol phosphate by his telling of the story (even though it didn't really, he just didn't read the text fully and/or represent it accurately).  Thing is, there is a LOT of good recent science out there, much of it in summary form.  GT just refuses to acknowledge it.

Fat Head: Dr. Robert Lustig insists it’s fructose that makes us insulin resistant, not starchy foods. If he’s right, then it was the Coca-Cola and Captain Crunch that turned me into a fat kid, not the mashed potatoes. But as an adult, I’ve avoided sugar yet found that starches most definitely make me gain weight. So assuming for the sake of argument that Lustig is correct, would you say that once fructose has done the damage, we lose our tolerance for carbohydrates in general? If so, why?

Gary Taubes: That’s exactly the possibility I’m discussing. Once you become insulin resistant, your body responds to carbs by secreting more insulin. So it is quite possible — and laboratory work backs this up — that sugar causes the initial insulin resistance because of the effect of the fructose on the liver. So if we never had sugar, we’d be able to eat the other carbs with relative impunity. But being possible doesn’t mean it’s true. I suspect it is, but I’m not sure exactly how this can be tested.

And I agree with you: the world is full of obese and diabetic people who know enough not to eat sugar, but remain obese and diabetic. I could avoid sugar and go back to eating starches and put on 20 pounds of fat effortlessly. I’ve done it in the past — distant past. So I don’t buy the idea that avoiding sugar is enough to make an obese person lean again. And the people I know who believe that all tend to be somewhat plump despite their beliefs. In fact, I recently heard Dr. Lustig give a talk in San Francisco, and he acknowledged that he still has a weight problem, but doesn’t know what to do about it. Hmmm…

{... in a later response }  ... the way I describe it is this: if I grew up in a hunter-gatherer environment — and my mother did as well, because there are effects that are passed from mother to child through the uterus — I’d probably weigh around 175 pounds, even as an adult. Had I stopped eating carbs in my late teens, I might naturally weigh about 190 or 200, which was my football weight in high school. The fact that I not only kept eating carbohydrates into my forties but gorged on them during the low-fat, you-can’t-get-fat-if-a-food-doesn’t-have-fat-in-it years of the late 1980s and early 1990s means the best I can do now, even eating virtually no carbs at all, is about 220. And there’s nothing I can do to go lower, short of starving myself. Semi-starving myself doesn’t work. I tried that long ago.

Okey dokey.  So Lustig just looks at sugar and weight and GT "hmms..." his wondering what to do about what appears to be a small weight problem.  Lustig doesn't appear to buy into the whole insulin thing much from what I can gather from his interviews/lectures.  Yet GT is, by his own account, able to do no better than 20-30 lbs overweight even eating VLC.  I won't even "go there" with the scads of low carbers (myself included) for whom carb restriction works only so far.   But that is an interesting acknowledgment there because although he says semi-starving himself didn't work, he holds out that starving himself would make his weight go lower.  Funny how one twists in the wind bucking reality.

Fat Head: One of the anti-Taubes articles going around the internet claims that we don’t need insulin to store fat, and that insulin is an appetite suppressant. Can we store any significant amount of fat without insulin? If so, why do untreated type 1 diabetics waste away?

Gary Taubes: Short answer, probably not. We don’t need insulin to burn glucose for fuel, but if we don’t have insulin, we don’t store fat.

I presume this is James Kreiger's series here.  Taubes goes on about the whole insulin thing.  But its a moot point.  Even zero carbers produce insulin.  T1's produce NONE, and without it they die.

The rest is about the book etc. How well it will do, yada yada.

Before I leave this, I jumped ahead over this one exchange:

Fat Head: In Why We Get Fat, you wrote that some people might have to give up dairy products and nuts to lose weight. Dr. Mike Eades has also mentioned that nuts and cheese seem to inhibit weight loss in some low-carb dieters. What is it about those foods that can stall weight loss? Is it just that they’re so calorically dense, or do they produce a higher insulin response than their low carbohydrate content would suggest?

Gary Taubes: I think the caloric density thing is nonsense. Remember, I’m trying to get every last one of us away from thinking in terms of calories as the variable of interest. What we want to know is whether these foods stimulate insulin secretion, or cause insulin resistance, or have some other effect on the storage of fat in the fat tissue or the oxidation of fatty acids by other tissues in the body. So nuts still have carbs in them, and for some people they might contain too many carbs. Same is true for nut butters.

Dairy products can stimulate insulin secretion beyond what you would expect from the carbohydrate content. I don’t know if this is true of cheese because I’ve never seen data on this, but it is possible. And some cheeses could be better than others — hard cheeses, for instance, may be better than soft cheeses. 

So, despite blasting the likes of Shai for shoddy analysis in failing to address the variable of carbohydrate consumption, GT ups the ante -- he wants us all to ignore the variable of calories completely!!  Oh never mind that data.  Ignore all those studies and flat out observations that when we measure expenditure and match it, we remain relatively stable, when we restrict, we lose, when we overfeed, we gain.  Ignore all that inconvenient stuff.  Calories are simply not even a variable worth considering anymore.  How very scientific!  Given that (mutual friend of both Naughton & Taubes I believe) Dr. Eades actually believes it's the calories one wonders what GT must think of his belief in such nonsense!