A Review of "Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It"

I just read Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It". My roommate had read it and he and I were arguing about basic nutrition. The two main points of the books argument are thus:

-The calories in/calories out concept is deeply flawed
-We get fat because of carbohydrates

The author admits that yes you cannot use more calories than you physically possess, because that would be magic and this author is not a big believer in magic. However, he says, not all calories are treated equally by the body.

For starters this concept recommends both constricting your diet and getting more exercise. The author rightly points out that after a good work out you are hungrier than you would have otherwise been and you eat more because of it. Exercise expends calories but your body is not fooled and gives you all the signals to take in more calories to compensate.

Further the author says, if we operated strictly according to a calories in/calories out model the margin of error we would have to achieve daily in our calorie intake and our exercise is excruciatingly small. Essentially maintaining a stable weight is virtually impossible in the long run using this model.

Speaking to the carbs cause weight gain the author shows that carbohydrates cause an insulin reaction. Insulin is the chemical responsible for sequestering fat and glucose (blood sugar) into fat cells. Thus anytime you eat carbohydrates your body is hoarding those calories in fat cells. The author notes that the link between carbohydrates and insulin is so well established that the medical community uses the presence of insulin as an indicator of the prevalence of carbohydrates in the patient's diet.

The author also shoots down my own personal complaint that diets that say cut out X from your diet are dangerously foolish. The author points out that carbohydrates provide no significant nutrients. Carbohydrates are almost purely calories, thus when you cut them from your diet you lose no nutritional content.

My complaints with this book start with a sense of scope.

I can accept his science, and his reasoning seems straightforward but that being said this book suffers from the same problem all books porporting to tell you what to eat do, they lack a sense of scope. Is eating one potato going to kill me? Is one bowl of pasta going to spell an early death from diabetes?

More seriously he goes on about how carbs trigger an insulin response and that that is essentially what you want to avoid, things like white bread, pasta, and the like are all bad, but what about whole grains? How much of an insulin response is triggered by eating whole grains and how bad is that for me compared to the processed stuff?

Another problem I have with his recommendations is that it says I can eat anything I want, just watch out for the carbs. What about deep fried foods? Maybe it is just all the negative press fats have gotten in popular medicine but I have a hard time believing that someone that gobbles down deep fried butter (yes, this exists and here is how to make them http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/paulas-fried-butter-balls-recipe/index.html) isn't going to have to pay for it later.

This doesn't even take into account my own personal experience. You ever eaten a Big Mac? because I have and afterwards it feels like a grease bomb exploded in my stomach. I am extremely skeptical that simply removing the buns would take care of that and suddenly I would feel like sunshine and rainbows.

One thing I will give the author credit for is disabusing me of the calories in/calories out concept. He proves to my satisfaction that it is a crock of shit and is really a moral argument. Fat people are fat because they make poor decisions that is within their power to change. The same still holds true even with his revelations about carbohydrates but they are doing it unwittingly; because neither they nor the doctors advising them know any better.

The thing is though I believe that there is a moral component to exercise. I do believe that exercising makes us better as people. I have only newly discovered that I hold this belief so I am unable to expound upon it much further but I found his de-emphasis of exercising to me personally. I realize that this belief may well make me something of a fringe thinker.

All told the science was good, the arguments convincingly and soberly made. I encourage anyone who wants to start looking into nutrition to read this book.