Mythology of Obesity, or of Gary Taubes? » Weightology

by James Kreiger - Weightlogy

Jun 232010

Extract:

In my last post on Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories, I stated that I would do a chapter-by-chapter critique of the book, starting with Chapter 14, “The Mythology of Obesity”. In this chapter, Taubes begins to create a mystery that doesn’t actually exist. He does this through a combination of logical fallacies, selective quotation of out-dated scientific data, and leaving out existing data that conflicts with his statements.
Taubes opens the chapter with this sentence:

“Critical to the success of any scientific enterprise is the ability to make accurate and unbiased observations.”

He then goes on to say:

“…if the initial observations are incorrect or incomplete, then we will distort what it is we’re trying to explain.”

Taubes is correct in these statements. Unfortunately he doesn’t follow his own advice. [etc]

Goodbye CutTheCarb - another ex low-carber

Goodbye CutTheCarb

Goodbye CutTheCarb

By

Hans Keer

Posted in: Featured, Miscellaneous, Our main points

In 2007, put into motion by personal experiences, I started my search for THE overweight and disease exiling diet. I investigated and tried supposed health bringing supplements, raw food, vegetarianism and more.

In the beginning of 2008 I read Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories Bad Calories. This book shifted my paradigm (and that of so many others). I probably misinterpreted it in those days, but it made me so carbophobic that I practically eliminated all carbohydrates from my diet. I mainly ate meat, fish, eggs, coconut oil and butter. And I surely lost weight, but in the long run I also got starvation symptoms like irritability and shakiness.

After years of self-studying biology and physiology and reading a lot of blog posts, books and scientific publications I have come to the conclusion that when you’re not diabetic or metabolically derailed you can safely consume reasonable quantities of carbohydrates. Reasonable is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of your calories; this as long as you match your calorie intake with your level of activity. Starch, which consists of mainly glucose, is the preferred carbohydrate. Fructose, fructan and lactose can best be firmly restricted.

Of course I brought this insight into practice and it resulted in a desired weight gain mainly coming from extra muscle. Adding about 100 net grams of carbs very much improved my body composition. Also the irritability and shakiness disappeared.

Low carb blogs - more accepting starch now?

from comments on this article: 180 Degree Health: Ray Peat - PUFA

Wolfstriked said... 

 

Hey Matt and crew.Lately I have stumbled upon two things that have brought alot of happiness to my life in the form of fatloss,sex drive,mood and energy.I wanna post this here because it has alot to do with Matt's strong stance on the "carb wars" and how we might be wrong in trying to drop carbs from our diets.Just look at all the low carb sites that are slowly saying its ok to eat rice and potatoes and now fruit.They claim LC but slowly the amounts will start to come back up to SAD levels. I have nothing against LC....just need to point that out.Its just that I have a hard time believing that all the doctors and LC gurus seem to be oblivious of Japan and the known health of its people.They eat rice of god forbid wheat(noodles)at every meal.The starch is main component with toppings like eggs,fish and meat with some vegetables.WHY WHY is this not mentioned....instead all I hear is that the Japanese eat vegetables and raw fish when a staple served in their homes is beef and potato stewed in soysauce or noodles with pork and veggies in soup. I also have found that in Japan its common thought that to lose weight you just cut the fat.....OMG!! So recently I have decided upon following the Japanese style diet just Americanized for some meals.I am talking bagels and 3 hard boiled eggs with cup of joe for breakfast from local NYC cart.Lunch and dinner is typically a starch and some meat and veg Japan style in that I top with soy sauce usually.I tried cutting the protein rich foods out two days ago but found I started getting pains in my liver(why is that)and it went away when I put back in the meat. Weightloss is superb of course due to it being low calorie meals.I know it goes against the high amount of food you push to drive metabolism but I believe now that one needs to do high and low calorie wise for best health.Its in tune with your recent posts on intuitive eating. See I always seem to do well on low calorie and then 3 days in my body rejects and I bloat out.So I am starting to notice that if I eat an extra HED style meal(butter,rice,meat) that day,I wake up with looser fitting pants.Could be why skinny people stay skinny...they eat intuitively and feast.Then the appetite is regulated from the feast the day before for a day or two after at which point....for me at least I bloat and appetite goes thru the roof.This is new to me and today I have eaten only 1000cal and not really hungry attributed to the feast 2200cal from yesterday

In case my point did not get thru well.I believe now that the best tool in the war against fatloss is to....first cut calories to lose fat...then to eat extra when you feel the diet stops working. I tried the Leangains diet a few months back and found fatloss was superb and muscle growth also but hate any diet based on meat.  I now think that LeanGains is working(fatloss wise)due mainly to the fat that you double calories on days you WO.....not that you intermittant fast or that its very high protein(the high protein does pack on the muscle though if thats what you want)but that you alternate low calorie days with high calorie which prevents the slowdown of metabolism.I find that I have to take a dump and feel hot and sweaty a 1/2 hour after this large meal.

June 2, 2011 2:42:00 PM MDT

Matt Stone - Dr Kurt Harris critiques

Archevore - Archevore Blog - 180 + 180 = 360

180 + 180 = 360

Friday, February 5, 2010 at 1:31PM

Reader Jeff writes in with a comment about Matt Stone of 180 Health.

Matt is the subtle attention-shy guy who poses shirtless holding a pig’s head on his blog.
Matt doesn’t really need any attention from me, he is busy commenting in a “contrarian” fashion all over the blogosphere right now. However, enough readers are asking me what I think that I should say something, I suppose.

Jeff writes regarding Matt Stone's guest post on Tom Naughton's blog re colton osborn's question- i just went over and read the post at the link. i think the key section is:

And therein lies the true danger of uber-low-carbohydrate diets. All my experience tells me that, the first few years aside, a low-carbohydrate diet and certainly a full-blown ketogenic diet exacerbates a low metabolism. It is not a matter of having a genetically-doomed dysfunctional thyroid gland; it is fixable, and it lies at the core of the health problems we’ve seen explode over the last century. This is why all prolonged restricted diets, low-carb included, in the words of Robert Atkins himself (from page 303 of Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution):

“…tend to shut down thyroid function. This is usually not a problem with the thyroid gland but with the liver, which fails to convert T4 into the more active thyroid principle, T3. The diagnosis is made on clinical grounds with the presence of fatigue, sluggishness, dry skin, coarse or falling hair, an elevation in cholesterol, or a low body temperature.”

To that I will add constipation, bad moods, heartburn, cold hands and feet, and a whole host of other minor but significant health problems. To get an idea of how “shutting down the thyroid” can manifest, Mark Starr’s chapter on Hypothyroidism symptoms is 83 pages long.

Jeff here- most of what is in the post is fully compatible with PaNu. But Matt Stone asserts that once you've been on zero carb or very low carb for a while [several years] you'll run into problems as specified above. The carbs he recommends sound like potatoes and rice, not clear what he thinks about whole grains, but the bottom line question seems to be about thyroid function over the long term.  I read the post and it starts out reasonably. Matt's hyping a pseudo -contrarian position that has some truth to it, but reading him later he goes off the rails when he starts talking about cortisol and thyroid function.

His first target is really a straw man. PaNu, Wholehealthsource and Peter at Hyperlipid all target fructose and linoleic acid as the main causes of metabolic disturbance in the western diet. Even Gary Taubes in his recent lectures has said "it may indeed all be fructose". None of us, read carefully, claims that "carbohydrates = disease".

His observation that some people may not feel good, even "hypometabolic" on VLC I don't take issue with. It seems like common sense that you might feel better eating more or less of just about anything. As long as you are avoiding the neolithic agents, tinker away! (That's for Brett and Nassim)
My blog with 60 or so main posts and pushing 3000 comments does not have any content from me prescribing precise ratios of anything, except for when advising how to lose weight. I respect the Optimal diet and Peter but I think any tightly defined macro ratio is rather artificial, including Kwasniewski's. I am sure that bias shows in my irritation at the bodybuilding questions : )

At the same time, Stone's statement that long term ketogenic eating per se ruins your metabolism is much less supportable than the "all carbs are metabolic poison" straw man he is attacking. Again, even Taubes does not really say this in GCBC.

My own view on the ratio of carbs in the diet should be pretty clear by now.

1) I think a wide range is tolerable for those with normal metabolism. For those about to ask "how wide" - OK, let's say 5% to 40% or even more if you can tolerate it and the rest of your food is very high quality. If your metabolism is damaged (you know who you are - type II or obesity prone) or you don't tolerate starches well like me, you should probably stay on the low end of carb intake. 

2) I think the paleolithic principle itself argues against LC and VLC being damaging the same way it argues against plants and all carbs as being poison. It just makes no sense, as it implies that humans in any given econiche, even one rich in a huge variety of animal foods, would have been at risk of metabolic damage from being in long term mild ketosis if they were not able to find enough starchy tubers and fruit in season. (We've agreed that grains like white rice are a recent food, I hope).
Enough nonstarchy greens to choke a gorilla with an otherwise all animal diet will not keep you totally out of ketosis, I guarantee. If it did, I wouldn't want to share your bathroom.
Of course, you can start eating a lot of coconuts like the Tokelauans or Kitavans and you can elevate your B-hydroxybutyrate even with a normal carb intake. Uh-oh - now our thyroid glands will die!

3) I suppose it is a corollary of my own paleo principle that I don't like approaches that require "seeking" behavior for something that provides only calories. "I'd better eat some carbs or my thyroid and adrenal glands will be screwed up". Really? HGs had to consciously think about whether they were getting enough starch? Or is starch just something that we eat because it helps us not starve? 

4) On the other hand, avoidance behavior is totally compatible with the paleolithic principle. "Avoid that, as it is outside of our evolutionary experience or causes metabolic effects that are outside our experience in the amounts that are available". This is my template. Fructose, wheat and excess linoleic acid.

5) It is true that being in negative energy balance – losing weight -generates an energy conserving response. That is not surprising. Once you are at equilibrium though, does a lower free T3 with normal TSH and T4 on lower carbs mean something pathologic? What if you had cold hands and a low basal temperature when even you ate 50% of calories as carbs? Are you now supposed to go from 10% to 70% to "restart your thyroid" or are you rather still hypothyroid because you have always been hypothyroid and you are just no longer euphoric now that you have stopped losing weight? Remembering your mood or body sensations one hour ago is hard enough. We are supposed to remember what they were years ago?

6) In answer to the idea that we need to carefully regulate macronutrient ratios to control the function of our thyroid and adrenal glands I have only one comment for now:
Lacks biological and evolutionary plausibility.

To summarize, Matt is a clever and entertaining writer, but his main target is a straw man, as most of the science oriented paleonutrition blogs are not really "low carb" blogs at all. His observation that starch per se need not be unhealthy is not really that controversial.

Matt's claims about his own serum BG after meals should be published as a case report in a medical journal. They are at odds with clinical studies I have read on glucose metabolism in normal highly insulin sensitive young people (can you say "superhuman"?).

Matt's got some good observations, but is over or mis-interpreting the literature in the realm of endocrinology. I did not notice if he has any medical or scientific credentials, but his views of hormonal action lack nuance, to say the least. He is also avidly mining the "I feel like shite, it must be my thyroid or adrenal glands" meme.

Matt Stone - Paleo Hacks critic

Low-Carb Paleo Eating Ruined Matt Stone's Health? - Paleo Hacks.com

3

After finding low-carb paleo diet to be perfect for me and my lifestyle I am so dissapointed to hear Matt Stone at 180-degree health refute what I beleive. Stone use to be low-carb paleo and suffered several health problems and talks about his client with the lowest body temperature being a guy after he went LC paleo. I understand people gaining weight after stopping LC paleo bc I beleive they shouldnt be eating foods that aren't LC paleo. But Stone says LC paleo ruins metabolisms. What do you think?  low low-carb metabolism thyroid temperature

Answers

oldest newest votes

16	He has no qualifications. He is the glenn beck of paleo/health blogs

For more Paleo hacks: http://paleohacks.com/questions/9414/low-carb-paleo-eating-ruined-matt-stones-health#ixzz1QTueC4oz

Review of Matt Stone ("I Was Wrong") - by Danny Roddy

I Used To Think Matt Stone Was A Douche, I Was Wrong - The Danny Roddy Weblog - Animal-Based Nutrition For Hair & Health

great "comments" section, including:

• high everything diet (HED) gets discussed
• Kurt Harris contributes, gives some insightful comments and balanced views
• Matt Stone makes minor comments
• lot of discussion of zero carb, and folk it didnt work for
• many say Stone led them to re-adopt starches
• interesting comments from continuing zero-carbers, saying why it works for them and may not for others
• 3 pages of comments