Gary Taubes Quotes & Sayings

Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as "the worst mistake in the history of the human race.") — Gary Taubes

Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant ... — Gary Taubes

Requires only the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency. If we can get our insulin levels to drop sufficiently low (the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency), we can burn our fat. If we can't, we won't. When we secrete insulin, or if the level of insulin in our blood is abnormally elevated, we'll accumulate fat in the fat tissue. That's what the science tells us. — Gary Taubes

McGovern's Dietary Goals had turned the dietary-fat controversy into a political issue rather than a scientific one, — Gary Taubes

This research supports the hypothesis that elevations of insulin and IGF will increase the risk of disease and shorten life, and so any diet or lifestyle that elevates insulin and makes IGF more available to the cells and tissues is likely to be detrimental. — Gary Taubes

When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said ...
Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant.
If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing
(University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube) — Gary Taubes

In 1960, fewer than 13 percent of Americans were obese, and diabetes had been diagnosed in 1 percent. Today, the percentage of obese Americans has almost tripled; the percentage of Americans with diabetes has increased sevenfold. — Gary Taubes

The belief in physical activity as a method of weight control is relatively new, however, and it has long been contradicted by the evidence. When Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic lectured on obesity in 1932, he noted that his patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, "while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss." "The patient reasons quite correctly," Wilder said, "that the more exercise he takes the more fat should be burned and that loss of weight should be in proportion, and he is discouraged to find that the scales reveal no progress. — Gary Taubes

In fact, the evidence was clear, but it was difficult to reconcile with the assembled experts' preconceived notion - the dogma - that obesity is caused by gluttony and/or sloth. — Gary Taubes

Dreadful science can pass for seminal research in the field of obesity. — Gary Taubes

The report then provided recommendations on how we might remain cancer free. The first is to "be as lean as possible" and "to avoid weight gain and increased waist circumference through adulthood." The second recommendation is to "be physically active as part of everyday life," because the experts who wrote this report believe that "physical activity protects against weight gain, overweight and obesity" and by doing so protects against cancer. And the third recommendation is to "limit consumption of energy-dense foods [and] avoid sugary drinks," because this is also thought "to prevent and control weight gain, overweight and obesity. — Gary Taubes

pressure in school-age children. The NIH has funded subsequent — Gary Taubes

Does lowering the plasma cholesterol level through dietary modification prevent or delay heart disease in man? This question would never be answered, but it no longer seemed to matter. — Gary Taubes

we are driven to get fat by "primary metabolic or enzymatic defects," as Hilde Bruch phrased it, and this fattening process induces the compensatory responses of overeating and/or physical inactivity. We eat more, move less, and have less energy to expend because we are metabolically or hormonally driven to get fat. — Gary Taubes

By the 1920s, sugar refineries were producing as much sugar in a single day - millions of pounds - as would have taken refineries in the 1820s an entire decade. With — Gary Taubes

Does being "thin" ensure optimal "health"? No. It's now well accepted that many lean individuals have the condition known as metabolic syndrome, which is a step along the progression from health to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and possibly Alzheimer's disease as well. The likely scenario is that these individuals, despite being lean, have what's called visceral fat - fat around the organs, and particularly the liver - and that this is exacerbating or causing the metabolic syndrome. The argument I'm making is that this visceral fat, too, is caused by the quality and quantity of the carbohydrates in the diet. 8. — Gary Taubes

The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt. — Gary Taubes

A more rational form of treatment," Pennington suggested, would be one that makes fat once again flow readily out of the fat cells, that directs "measures primarily toward an increased mobilization and utilization of fuel" by the muscles and organs. — Gary Taubes

Insulin works to deposit calories as fat and to inhibit the use of that fat for fuel. Dietary carbohydrates are required to allow this fat storage to occur. Since glucose is the primary stimulator of insulin secretion, the more carbohydrates consumed - or the more refined the carbohydrates - the greater the insulin secretion, and thus the greater the accumulation of fat. "Carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat," as the Harvard endocrinologist George Cahill recently summed it up. — Gary Taubes

If insulin fattens those who receive it, as the evidence suggests, then how does it work? The prewar European clinicians who used insulin therapy to treat anorexics accepted the possibility, as Falta suggested, that the hormone can directly increase the accumulation of fat in the fat tissues. Insulin was "an excellent fattening substance," Erich Grafe wrote in Metabolic Diseases and Their Treatment. — Gary Taubes

The one fundamental requirement to increase the flow of fatty acids out of adipose tissue - to increase lipolysis - and so decrease the amount of fat in our fat tissue, is to lower the concentration of insulin in the bloodstream. — Gary Taubes

Yudkin also fed high-sugar diets to college students and reported that it raised their cholesterol and particularly their triglycerides; their insulin levels rose, and their blood cells became stickier, which he believed could explain the blood clots that seemed to precipitate heart attacks. — Gary Taubes

Obesity researchers now use a quasi-scientific term to describe exactly this condition: they refer to the "obesigenic" environment in which we now live, meaning an environment that is prone to turning lean people into fat ones. — Gary Taubes

There is a theory that creativity arises when individuals are out of sync with their environment. To put it simply, people who fit in with their communities have insufficient motivation to risk their psyches in creating something truly new, while those who are out of sync are driven by the constant need to prove their worth. — Gary Taubes

To be a dissenter was to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism, — Gary Taubes

What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs. — Gary Taubes

But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn't the "exercise explosion" and the "new fitness revolution" have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity? — Gary Taubes

It may be easier to believe that we remain lean because we're virtuous and we get fat because we're not, but the evidence simply says otherwise. Virtue has little more to with our weight than our height. When we grow taller, it's hormones and enzymes that are promoting growth, and we consume more calories than we expend as a result. Growth is the cause - increased appetite and decreased energy expenditure (gluttony and sloth) are the effects. When we grow fatter, the same is true as well.
We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because were fat. — Gary Taubes

The evidence suggests that nicotine induces weight loss by working on fat cells to increase their insulin resistance, while also decreasing the lipoprotein-lipase activity on these cells, both of which serve to inhibit the accumulation of fat and promote its mobilization over storage, as we discussed earlier — Gary Taubes

If we consider the last forty years of research as a test of Mayer's hypothesis that physical activity induces weight loss or even inhibits weight gain, it's clear the hypothesis leads nowhere meaningful. What Mayer initially insisted had to be true, so much so that he publicly accused the "enemies of exercise" of propagating "pseudo-science," had devolved over the intervening decades into an analysis of whether the prescription of an exercise program would inhibit weight gain by three ounces each month or accelerate it by two. — Gary Taubes

This half century of research unequivocally supported the alternative hypothesis of obesity. It established that the relevant energy balance isn't between the calories we consume and the calories we expend, but between the calories - in the form of free fatty acids, glucose, and glycerol - passing in and out of the fat cells. If more and more fatty acids are fixed in the fat tissue than are released from it, obesity will result. — Gary Taubes

extra calorie either be consumed or conserved. As a result, anyone driven to put on fat by such a metabolic or hormonal defect would be driven to excessive eating, physical inactivity, or some combination. Hunger and indolence would be side effects of such a hormonal defect, merely facilitating the drive to fatten. — Gary Taubes

What constitutes a healthy diet? What should we eat if we want to live a long and a healthy life? To address this question, we'll examine the evidence supporting both the prevailing wisdom and this alternative hypothesis, and we'll confront the strong possibility that much of what we've come to believe is wrong. — Gary Taubes

Feinstein examined the efficacy of various obesity treatments in a lengthy review in the Journal of Chronic Diseases, he dismissed exercise in a single paragraph. "There has been ample demonstration that exercise is an ineffective method of increasing energy output," Feinstein noted, "since it takes far too much activity to burn up enough calories for a significant weight loss. In addition, physical exertion may evoke a desire for food so that the subsequent intake of calories may exceed what was lost during the exercise. — Gary Taubes

First of all, the carbohydrates restricted are sugar, refined flour, and starchy vegetables, not the green leafy vegetables, so there should still be significant fiber in the diet, although it's not actually necessary. In fact, a likely scenario is that you'll eat more green vegetables when you're carb-restricting than not, because you're likely to substitute more green leafy vegetables and salads for the starchy vegetables, pasta, and bread that you're not eating. A restaurant meal might be a dish of meat, fish, or fowl with green vegetables or salad substituted for the potatoes (or rice or pasta or the hamburger bun). — Gary Taubes

If we replace five pounds of fat with five pounds of muscle, which is a significant achievement for most adults, we will increase our energy expenditure by two dozen calories a day. — Gary Taubes

From the 1980s onward, manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat or specifically in saturated fat (not to mention "gluten free, no MSG & 0g trans fat per serving") took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally, if not more, palatable, and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty-plus names by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat — Gary Taubes

Making LDL the "bad cholesterol" oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades' worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients. — Gary Taubes

Excess weight and obesity, like all diseases of civilization, are caused by the singular hormonal effects of a diet rich in refined and easily digestible carbohydrates. The fattening of our adult years, after all, is not just associated with chronic diseases of civilization, it is a disease of civilization, and so it, too, may be a symptom of an underlying disorder. In this hypothesis, it is the quality of the calories consumed that regulates weight, and the quantity - more calories consumed than expended - is a secondary phenomenon. — Gary Taubes

What makes this shift all the more perplexing is that it occurred immediately after the science of fat metabolism evolved to explain why carbohydrates were uniquely fattening, and it followed a six-year period in which carbohydrate-restricted diets achieved unprecedented credibility among clinicians. — Gary Taubes

The fatter we are, the more likely we are to get cancer and the more likely we are to become demented as we age. — Gary Taubes

It's the effect of these carbohydrates on insulin that would explain the dietary observations - the futility of calorie restriction, the relative ease of weight loss when carbohydrates are restricted, and perhaps two centuries of anecdotal observations that sweets, starches, bread, and beer are uniquely fattening. — Gary Taubes

This "harmony of tissue metabolisms" is orchestrated by the hypothalamus, via the central nervous system and the endocrine system of hormones. These regulate the filling and emptying of the various storage depots in response to an environment that might require that we suddenly expend more or less energy, or store more or less fat, to accommodate seasonal variations. — Gary Taubes

For every 5 percent of saturated-fat calories that replaced carbohydrates in the diet, the risk of breast cancer decreased by 9 percent. This certainly argued against the hypothesis that excessive fat consumption caused breast cancer. — Gary Taubes

Obesity is also associated with poverty, and even extreme poverty, and that should be a compelling argument against physical inactivity as a cause of the disease. Those who earn their living through manual labor tend to be the less advantaged members of societies in developed nations, and yet they will have the greatest obesity rates. — Gary Taubes

By perceiving obesity as an eating disorder, a defect of behavior rather than physiology, and by perceiving excessive hunger as the cause of obesity, rather than a symptom that accompanies the drive to gain weight, those investigators concerned with human obesity had managed to dissociate the perception of hunger and satiety from any underlying metabolic conditions. — Gary Taubes

The simple answer as to why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not — Gary Taubes

For those who would immediately dismiss the possibility that sugar itself may be responsible for more premature deaths than cigarettes, we have to consider the fact that cigarettes themselves would have been far less harmful and far less addictive had it not been for sugar. "Were it not for sugar," Wightman Garner, — Gary Taubes

Foreman believed McGovern's Dietary Goals supported her conviction that "people were getting sick and dying because we ate too much," and she believed it was incumbent on the USDA to turn McGovern's recommendations into official government policy. Like Mottern and Hegsted, Foreman was undeterred by the scientific controversy. — Gary Taubes

We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we're getting fat — Gary Taubes

Obese patients who try to reduce their weight by semi-starvation, as Rony noted, will always be fighting what he called their "spontaneous impulses of eating and activity." Once they give in to these impulses, which is effectively preordained, they will get fat again. — Gary Taubes

As this research had now made clear, the critical molecules determining the balance of storage and mobilization of fatty acids, of lipogenesis and lipolysis, are glucose and insulin - i.e., carbohydrates and the insulin response to those carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes

Referring to obesity as a "form of malnutrition" comes with no moral judgments attached, no belief system, no veiled insinuations of gluttony and sloth. It merely says that something is wrong with the food supply and it might behoove us to find out what. — Gary Taubes

Any diet can be made healthy or at least healthier - from vegan to meat-heavy - if the high-glycemic-index carbohydrates and sugars are removed, or reduced significantly. — Gary Taubes

Diabetologists implicitly take the same tack whenever they discuss the need for their diabetic patients to "normalize" blood sugar, while recommending that this be accomplished primarily with "intensive insulin therapy" rather than restricting the carbohydrate content of their diets. — Gary Taubes

If blood-sugar levels increase - say, after a meal containing carbohydrates - then more glucose is transported into the fat cells, which increases the use of this glucose for fuel, and so increases the production of glycerol phosphate. This is turn increases the conversion of fatty acids into triglycerides, so that they're unable to escape into the bloodstream at a time when they're not needed. Thus, elevating blood sugar serves to decrease the concentration of fatty acids in the blood, and to increase the accumulated fat in the fat cells. — Gary Taubes

It's the fructose in these sweeteners that makes them sweet, just as it makes fruit sweet, and it appears to be the fructose that makes them so fattening and, in turn, so bad for our health. — Gary Taubes

The simplest way to look at all these associations, between obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and Alzheimer's (not to mention the other the conditions that also associate with obesity and diabetes, such as gout, asthma, and fatty liver disease), is that what makes us fat - the quality and quantity of carbohydrates we consume - also makes us sick. — Gary Taubes

Though the traditional response to the failure of semi-starvation diets to produce long-term weight loss has been to blame the fat person for a lack of willpower, Bruch, Rony, and others have argued that this failure is precisely the evidence that tells us positive caloric balance or overeating is not the underlying disorder in obesity. — Gary Taubes

By the 1830s, when the British emancipationists finally put an end to the slave trade, some twelve and a half million Africans had been shipped off as slaves to the New World; two-thirds of them worked and died growing and refining sugar. — Gary Taubes

Research finally established the dominant role of fatty acids in supplying energy for the body, and the fundamental role of insulin and adipose tissue as the regulators of energy supply. — Gary Taubes

Studying many obese people in great detail and following them over a long period of time, I have come to the conclusion that ... overeating, though it is observed with great regularity, is not the cause of obesity; it is a symptom of an underlying disturbance ... . Food, of course, is essential for obesity - but so is it for the maintenance of life in general. The need for overeating and the changes in weight regulation and fat storage are the essential disturbances. — Gary Taubes

Cohen testified that there was no 'direct relationship' linking heart disease to dietary fats, and that he had been able to induce the same blood-vessel complications seen in heart disease merely by feeding sugar to his laboratory rats. Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. 'I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment,' Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. 'For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life ... but, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up ... that is a very different proposition. — Gary Taubes

By the 1960s hypertension and high cholesterol were two of the three major risk factors associated with premature coronary heart disease (the third was smoking), so it was difficult to imagine that eating carbohydrates might be beneficial for one risk factor, cholesterol, while being detrimental for another, blood pressure. — Gary Taubes

The point to keep in mind is that you don't lose fat because you cut calories; you lose fat because you cut out the foods that make you fat-the carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes

Yalow and Berson showed that those who had developed diabetes as adults had levels of circulating insulin significantly higher than those of healthy individuals - — Gary Taubes

The hypothesis simply failed to explain how the brain manages to monitor our fat stores, and then raise or lower food intake and energy expenditure in response. Saying that we're all endowed with a lipostat that monitors our adiposity and then regulates hunger appropriately is just another way of saying that our weight remains remarkably stable, whether we're lean or obese, and then assigning the cause to a mysterious mechanism in the brain whose function is to achieve this stability. — Gary Taubes

Cleave believed the concentration of carbohydrates in the refining process did its damage in three ways. — Gary Taubes

Even though fructose has no immediate effect on blood sugar and insulin, over time -maybe a few years-it is a likely cause of insulin resistance and thus the increased storage of calories as fat. The needle on our fuel-partitioning gauge will point toward fat storage, even if it didn't start out that way, — Gary Taubes

These preliminary studies then prompted hundreds of millions of dollars of studies that failed to confirm the initial hypothesis that fat or animal fat led to cancer. — Gary Taubes

Some regulatory phenomenon could drive us to gain weight, which would in turn cause a positive energy balance - and thus overeating and/or sedentary behavior. — Gary Taubes

An obvious example of this reverse causation would be pregnant women, who are driven to fatten by hormonal changes. This hormonal drive induces hunger and lethargy as a result. In the context of evolution, these expanded fat stores would assure the availability of the necessary calories to nurse the infants after birth and assure the viability of the offspring. — Gary Taubes

When Rony discussed positive energy balance, he compared the situation with what happens in growing children. "The caloric balance is known to be positive in growing children," he observed. But children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing. — Gary Taubes

So the real question for me as an educator is, if I go out and tell people that I think they are eating too much sugar, if I go out and tell mothers I think they should stop their kids from eating so much sugar because it is bad for them, am I going to get flak from the scientists? Or am I going to be allowed to make that statement without travail, on the grounds that even though we do not have hard evidence to link sugar with a specific disease, we do know that a dietary pattern containing considerably less sugar, in which sugar is replaced by a complex carbohydrate, would be a much healthier diet? JOAN GUSSOW, chairman, Columbia University nutrition department, 1975 I — Gary Taubes

British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere. — Gary Taubes

First, it led to overconsumption, because of what he called the deception of the appetite-control apparatus by the density of the carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes

In 2002, a Cochrane Collaboration review of the evidence concluded that low-fat diets induced no more weight loss than calorie-restricted diets, and in both cases the weight loss achieved "was so small as to be clinically insignificant." A similar analysis was published in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In this case, the authors identified twenty-eight relevant trials of low-fat diets, of which at least twenty were also calorie-restricted. The overweight subjects consumed, on average, less than seventeen hundred calories a day for an average weight loss of not quite nine pounds over six months. — Gary Taubes

By 1980, this link between cancer and low cholesterol was appearing in study after study. The most consistent association was between colon cancer and low cholesterol in men. In the Framingham Study those men whose total cholesterol levels were below 190 mg/dl were more than three times as likely to get colon cancer as those men with cholesterol greater than 220; they were almost twice as likely to contract any kind of cancer than those with cholesterol over 280 mg/dl. — Gary Taubes

It is my belief that when all the evidence is taken into account, rather than just a prejudicial subset, the picture that emerges will be more revealing of the underlying reality. — Gary Taubes

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted. — Gary Taubes

All those who have insisted (and still do) that overeating and/or sedentary behavior must be the cause of obesity have done so on the basis of this same fundamental error: they will observe correctly that positive caloric balance must be associated with weight gain, but then they will assume without justification that positive caloric balance is the cause of weight gain. This simple misconception has led to a century of misguided obesity research. — Gary Taubes

Fructose, and fructose is uniquely fattening as carbohydrates go. — Gary Taubes

Anything that works to transport more glucose into the fat cells - insulin, for example, or rising blood sugar - will lead to the conversion of more fatty acids into triglycerides, and the storage of more calories as fat. — Gary Taubes

Energy balance must be regulated involuntarily, without conscious intent, and that the mechanisms that do so adapt both intake to expenditure and expenditure to intake. Our bodies work to minimize long-term fluctuations in energy reserves and maintain a stable body weight, and they do so, as with all our homeostatic systems, — Gary Taubes

In retrospect, the influential figures in the clinical investigation of human obesity in the 1970s can be divided into two groups. There were those who believed carbohydrate-restricted diets were the only efficacious means of weight control - Denis Craddock, Robert Kemp, John Yudkin, Alan Howard, and Ian McLean Baird in England, and Bruce Bistrian and George Blackburn in the U.S. - and wrote books to that effect, or developed variations on these diets with which they could treat patients. These men invariably struggled to maintain credibility. Then there were those who refused to accept that carbohydrate restriction offered anything more than calorie restriction in disguise - Bray, Van Itallie, Cahill, Hirsch, and their fellow club members. These men rarely if ever treated obese patients themselves, and they repeatedly suggested that since no diet worked nothing was to be learned by studying diets. — Gary Taubes

These investigators, too, concluded that differences in cancer rates could be explained by differences in fat consumption and animal-fat consumption, particularly between Japan and the United States. They did not serve science well by ignoring sugar consumption and the difference between refined and unrefined carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes

Eating carbohydrates, for example, not only elevates insulin but inhibits growth-hormone secretion; both effects lead to greater fatty-acid storage in the fat tissue. — Gary Taubes

Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides. — Gary Taubes

Even low levels of insulin, far below those considered the clinical symptom of hyperinsulinemia (chronically high levels of insulin), will shut down the flow of fatty acids from the fat cells. Elevating insulin even slightly will increase the accumulation of fat in the cells. The longer insulin remains elevated, the longer the fat cells will accumulate fat, and the longer they'll go without releasing it. — Gary Taubes

Just as animal research tells us that gluttony and sloth are side effects of a drive to accumulate body fat, it also says that eating in moderation and being physically active (literally, having the energy to exercise) are not evidence of moral rectitude. Rather, they're the metabolic benefits of a body that's programmed to remain lean. — Gary Taubes

The idea that obesity in humans is caused, as it is in animals, by a defect in the homeostatic maintenance of energy distribution and fat metabolism - that we overeat because we're getting fat, and not vice versa - barely survived into the second half of the twentieth century, although the evidence has always supported it. — Gary Taubes

The hypothesis was based on decades of eyewitness testimony from missionary and colonial physicians and two consistent observations: that these "diseases of civilization" were rare to nonexistent among isolated populations that lived traditional lifestyles and ate traditional diets, and that these diseases appeared in these populations only after they were exposed to Western foods - in particular, sugar, flour, white rice, and maybe beer. — Gary Taubes

In 1975, Richard Doll and Bruce Armstrong published a seminal analysis of diet and cancer, in which they noted that, the higher the sugar intake in different nations, the higher both the incidence of and mortality from cancer of the colon, rectum, breast, ovary, uterus, prostate, kidney, nervous system, and testicles. — Gary Taubes

It's tempting to suggest that one reason why the obesity-research community has paid little attention to the logical and scientific deficiencies of the overeating/sedentary-behavior hypothesis is that it becomes difficult even to discuss the subject without constantly tripping over the solecisms it engenders. — Gary Taubes

Researchers have reported that the brain and central nervous system actually run more efficiently on ketones than they do on glucose. — Gary Taubes

Obesity is caused by the kind of calories we consume and not the quantity, and so if we avoid carbohydrates our bodies function correctly and shed any excess weight. — Gary Taubes

The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one - specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary. — Gary Taubes

Though more strenuous exercise would burn more calories, it would also lead to a significant increase in appetite. This is the implication of the phrase "working up an appetite." "Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal, — Gary Taubes

The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century — Gary Taubes

Despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount. — Gary Taubes