Gary Taubes Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. [T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.

Gary Taubes

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The obvious implication is that obesity and Type 2 diabetes are two sides of the same physiological coin, two consequences, occasionally concurrent, of the same underlying defects - hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.

Gary Taubes

#12. 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

#13. Dreadful science can pass for seminal research in the field of obesity.

Gary Taubes

#14. Overeating and sedentary behavior could not explain the prevalence of obesity and diabetes in modern societies,

Gary Taubes

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Fructose, and fructose is uniquely fattening as carbohydrates go.

Gary Taubes

#18. Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as "the worst mistake in the history of the human race.")

Gary Taubes

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Gary Taubes

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. McGovern's Dietary Goals had turned the dietary-fat controversy into a political issue rather than a scientific one,

Gary Taubes

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. pressure in school-age children. The NIH has funded subsequent

Gary Taubes

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. If you're predisposed to get fat and want to be as lean as you can be without compromising your health, you have to restrict carbohydrates and so keep your blood sugar and insulin levels low.

Gary Taubes

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we're getting fat

Gary Taubes

#43. 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

#44. The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt.

Gary Taubes

#45. The simple answer as to why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not

Gary Taubes

#46. To be a dissenter was to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism,

Gary Taubes

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Cleave believed the concentration of carbohydrates in the refining process did its damage in three ways.

Gary Taubes

#50. 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

#51. 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