Gary Taubes has a fascinating story. He studied physics at Harvard but when he struggles with quantum mechanics his advisory recommend he switch majors. He still loved science, so he switched to journalism with the idea that he would report on the science that other people were doing.

 

His career was initially covering physics. He would write about scientists who had fooled themselves into thinking that they had discovered something that wasn’t really there. He was fascinated by how difficult Science was to do correctly and how easily people fooled themselves when it came to their research.

 

While he was looking for his next project people in the physics community told him that if he like doing the expose stuff, he needed to get into the Public Health space because the science was terrible.

 

That untimely lead him on the journey that lead to this book, Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It.

 

In the book, Gary shows how it has been known for a long time what causes obesity, but after world war two the science sort of reset as the center of the scientific world shifted from Germany to America.

 

Unfortunately, America got the question of why we get fat dead wrong, and the result is the twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity.

 

The popular notion of why we get fat can formally be called the “energy balance hypothesis,” but in conversation you might hear it describes as “Calories in, Calories out,” or ” a Calorie is a Calorie is a Calorie.” In other words, if you don’t eat too much and you exercise enough, you can lose weight. So when someone is overweight, their doctor will tell them to eat less and exercise more.

 

Gary’s case is that the paradigm above is simplistic, naive, and altogether misguided. The real culprit is not some combination of gluttony and sloth, the real culprit is sugar (I’m using “sugar” as shorthand for the following: sugar, including table sugar, high fructose corn syrup and fruit, especially fruit juice, starch like potatoes, rice, and corn, and refined carbohydrates like white flour in particular, all carbs to a lesser extent).

 

And he makes an incredibly compelling case.

 

His analysis is impressively comprehensive, tracing the entire history of the science on the issue, examining the more recent science, looking at case studies of indigenous populations that became obese and diabetic when introduced to sugar, and examining what the fields of biology and specifically endocrinology (the study of hormones) has to say about how energy is partitioned and stored in our bodies.

 

Not only has this book convinced me, but now every time I read a book or watch a presentation from someone who holds to the “Calories in, Calories out” perspective, all I can notice is their blind adherence to their faulty paradigm. I was reading a book just yesterday where someone said that simple changes to get people to eat less calories are the path to sustainable weight loss. He gave the example of a woman who had lost weight simply by quitting caffeine. Because of this she no longer drank six cokes a week. The author attributed her weight loss to the removal of the calories of the soda without even considering if maybe she lost weight because she cut out one of the biggest sources of sugar consumption.

 

Almost every time you’ll hear about a study where someone lost weight on a “high carb” diet (which pretty much always means a calorie-restricted diet where more carbs are eaten than the other macro-nutrients) or a “low calorie” diet, it’s because those diets cause people to eat way less sugar than they would have otherwise. Since carbs make up over half of the daily caloric intake of the Standard American Diet (which can fittingly be abbreviated SAD), any reduction in calories inevitably cuts carbs more than anything else, especially the worst offenders like soda, fruit juice, and sweets. “High-carb diets” are all actually low carb, low sugar diets that are harder to stick to than a high fat diet because they don’t let you eat as much as you want.

 

Here is a small sample of the six solid pages of notes that I took:

 

• It is often speculated that obesity has exploded in the West because we are so rich, and so we have access to more food and less need to move. However, obese women are 6x more likely to be poor, and obese men are 2x more likely to be poor.
• In fact, obesity used to be considered a symptom of malnutrition, not of eating too much.
• Girls enter puberty with just 6% more body fat than boys on average, but exit with 50% more. Boys actually lose fat and gain muscle in puberty. The reason is a difference in sex hormones. In fact, the determining factor in fat storage, including where the fat is stored (these girls accumulate fat in very different places than boys), always turns out to be hormonal.
• Having the energy to exercise is a benefit of having a body that is metabolically regulated to stay thin.
• Insulin in the primary regulator of fat metabolism. It does this by promoting the enzyme that stores fat (Lipoprotein Lipase or “LPL” of you’re interested), and deactivating the enzyme that releases fat from the fat cells to be used as fuel (Hormone-sensitive Lipase or “HSL”)
• Every hormone except insulin (and sometimes cortisol, the stress hormone) makes us leaner by mobilizing our stored fat to be used as energy. But insulin trumps these other hormones and they are not as effective in the presence of elevated insulin levels (which are caused by constantly eating sugar and carbs).
• Cortisol can either make you fatter or leaner. It works to help you store fat, but it also works to let you release fat. Depending on the net effect, you can either lose weight or gain weight when you are stressed.
• Burning fat only requires the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency (i.e., eat less carbs and sugar so there is less insulin being produced by your pancreas).
• Anything that makes us fatter will make us eat more in the process. This is because the food we initially eat can’t fuel our bodies anymore because insulin stores it as fat and won’t let it be used for energy. This means that even though you ate enough to fuel your cells, they don’t have enough fuel and you need to eat more to get the energy you need. This means that people who are gaining weight are indeed overeating, but they are overeating because they are getting fat, not the other way around. Telling them to eat less won’t hep. You need to address the root cause, namely carbs –> insulin –> fat.
• The most fattening foods are usually the cheapest, hence the reason why poor people are so likely to gain weight
• Among sugar, fructose (which is found in anything sweet: fruit, table sugar, soda, etc)is especially harmful. It is processed in the liver and turned into fat, making us fatter and leading to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Human beings were never meant to handle the extraordinary quantity of fructose currently available to us.
• It’s possible that if we never ate sugar, we would never get fat or diabetic, regardless of how many carbs we ate in general. If you want to lose weight, the sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, and excessive amounts of fructose found in fruit juice need to be the first things to go (fruit is probably a bad idea when you are losing weight as well. Fruit is far healthier than the other things I just mentioned, and is less fattening because it has less sugar than a sugary drink and has fiber which prevents you from absorbing the some of the sugar. The problem is while you are losing weight, you want to keep insulin as low as possible as much of the time as possible. Save fruit for cheat day)
• 200 years ago we ate 1/5 the amount of sugar that we do now

 

Anyway, for me, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how we get fat and what we can do to lose weight.

 

I listened to the audio, but I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up a physical copy for myself at some point, and maybe a few more to give to friends and family.

 

Here’s where you can get it: