Gary Taubes, author of “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and “What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie?” is an advocate of low-carbohydrate diets. He posted the results of his blood test on his site about 3 years ago, along with this description of his usual diet:
“Keep in mind as you go through these that I do indeed eat three eggs with cheese, bacon and sausage for breakfast every morning, typically a couple of cheeseburgers (no bun) or a roast chicken for lunch, and more often than not, a ribeye or New York steak (grass fed) for dinner, usually in the neighborhood of a pound of meat. I cook with butter and, occasionally, olive oil (the sausages). My snacks run to cheese and almonds. So lots of fat and saturated fat and very little carbohydrates. A deadly diet, according to Dr. Oz.”
I don’t want to post his lab results here; I feel that’s invasive, even though he made them public. The only values that fell out of the lab’s “reference range” were his total cholesterol (204 mg/dl) and carbon dioxide (19 mmol/L, should be below 21). His LDL was 116.
This is the diet he purports will turn around the epidemics of obesity and diabetes. It is the diet he recommends for avoiding heart disease and cancer. Keep in mind that over 100 million people in this country have diabetes or prediabetes, more than a third of the entire US population. Can you imagine how things would change if suddenly millions of people started eating mostly animal food? No grains, no beans, no potatoes, no fruit?
Taubes’ foundation NUSI has already raised $40 million and is on track to raise $190 million. There’s a lot of funding behind this diet. I think that’s one reason we’re seeing it advanced more in the media.
That means if you’re in a room of a dozen people over 65, 3 of them have diabetes, up to 6 of them have prediabetes, and very likely all of them have some form of the disease if they are Black, Hispanic, or Native American. Imagine?
Gary Taubes
In the midst of this epidemic, NUSI, an organization founded by Gary Taubes and Peter Attia, is spending millions on studies they expect will show that high-fat, low-carb diets lead to weight loss and cut risk for diabetes.
As you know, weight loss does not by itself indicate good health. You can lose weight from cancer, infectious disease, stress, drug abuse, or in this case eating a lot of animal food and saturated fat. It does not mean you’re healthy.
By the way, this article about NUSI, Why Are We So Fat? The Multimillion-Dollar Scientific Quest to Find Out, that I linked to above seems slanted in that it drops claims such as, “insulin tells fat cells to take up glucose, which is converted into fat.” Glucose is converted into fat? That’s just a given? An absolute? If that’s true, why are there studies that contradict it? Like the one in this post where women were overfed with carbohydrate by 50%. That’s like having them eat 3000 calories/day instead of 2000, in sugar no less. And they put on hardly any body fat! And if “glucose is converted into fat”, why did Cubans during their Special Period lose weight, lose body fat, lower their rates of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, by eating a diet of primarily rice and sugar?
I don’t think high-fat diets are the healthiest way out of this epidemic.
The BBC offered this diagram of an e-cigarette, an “electronic nicotine delivery system” (ENDS). Reminds me of a tiny bong.
E-cigarettes supply a hit of nicotine with each inhalation. Some nicotine, along with potentially toxic byproducts and contaminants, are released to the environment during use. The visible smoke is mostly water vapor.
Their long-term safety has not been established. However, nicotine is physically addictive (“may be as addictive as heroin, cocaine, or alcohol“), contributes to heart disease and diabetes, and may function as a cancer promoter.2
The World Health Organization just published a lengthy report on e-cigarettes saying they should be banned in public places:2
In fact, exhaled aerosol is likely to increase above background levels the risk of disease to bystanders, especially in the case of some ENDS that produce toxicant levels in the range of that produced by some cigarettes.
They are being promoted as a smoking cessation tool. The WHO says that should be stopped:
Prohibit manufacturers and third parties from making health claims for ENDS, including that ENDS are smoking cessation aids, until manufacturers provide convincing supporting scientific evidence and obtain regulatory approval.
The World Health Organization report worries that Big Tobacco is becoming “increasingly aggressive in the battle for the fast-growing e-cigarette market.
Right now, there are no federal regulations governing where e-cigarettes can be smoked, rather, vaped. In fact, according to the New York Times, “the entire industry [is] virtually unregulated.” Some states and cites have begun to ban their use in public places. (Here’s a list by the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, updated 3 July 2014.)
What do you think? Would banning them in public places discourage use of a product that might help smokers quit?
When most of the participants in a study are consuming fat above a threshold that promotes disease, it will look like fat is not disease-promoting.
I often say that in studies comparing one group to another, you won’t detect a harmful effect of _____ if both groups are exposed to a level of ______ that is risk-producing. I said this recently about that saturated fat study (meta-analysis) that got so much attention in the media, and that spurred proclamations such as “Eat Butter” and “Saturated Fat Vindicated”:
“One way you can arrive at all your groups showing similar risk, which this study found, is when there isn’t much difference in consumption among your comparison groups. … Or when most of your participants are consuming saturated fat above a threshold where risk for CVD increases.”
As Jeff Novick pointed out:
“One major problem with this study is they did not look at any studies where the saturated fat intake was less than 7%, which is the level recommended by the [American Heart Association]. … Most of the diets had saturated fat intakes in the range of 10-15% (or more).”
I also said this in reference to the PREDIMED study. That was a big trial studying effects of the Mediterranean diet. It had three groups: “low-fat,” olive oil, and nuts. All the groups ate high-fat, even the “low-fat” group which ate 37% of their calories from fat! Not even the American Heart Association considers that low-fat. For perspective, a whole-food plant-based diet gets less than 15% of its calories from fat. The PREDIMED study found eating lots of olive oil was similar in CVD risk to eating “low-fat.” All groups suffered heart attacks at similar rates. All groups were exposed to a level of fat that was risk-producing.
I just saw a video that Dr. Greger posted about a month ago where he says essentially the same thing:
“If everyone smoked 20 cigarettes a day, then clinical, case-control and cohort studies alike would lead us to conclude that lung cancer was a genetic disease; and in one sense that would be true, since if everyone is exposed to the necessary agent, then the distribution of cases is wholly determined by individual susceptibility.”
Within a population, that is, within a group with similar characteristics, you may not see a big range of exposure to something, e.g. in the US, most people eat around 30-35% fat, not a big range. But when you compare populations with different characteristics…
But at the level of populations it is a different story: it has proved easy to show strong associations between population mean values for saturated fat intake versus serum cholesterol level and coronary heart disease incidence, sodium intake versus blood pressure, or energy intake versus overweight.
The reason we know that smoking increases the risk for lung cancer is because:
In the case of cigarettes and lung cancer it so happened that the study populations contained about equal numbers of smokers and non-smokers, and in such a situation case/control and cohort studies were able to identify what was also the main determinant of population differences and time trends.
In sum:
But to identify the causal agent by the traditional case-control and cohort methods will be unsuccessful if there are not sufficient differences in exposure within the study population at the time of the study.
There are some real gems in this paper…
Grateful patients are few in preventive medicine, where success is marked by a non-event.
That’s so true! You don’t really know if your behaviors are adding years to your life.
And this. I can’t believe he said this:
Harder to overcome than any of these, however, is the enormous difficulty for medical personnel to see health as a population issue and not merely as a problem for individuals.
Just about 100% of the people I know, even those in the public health community, harp on about individual behavior. You will never, ever be successful in disease prevention if you only intervene at the individual level. Social norms, peer pressure, environmental pollutants, occupational hazards, there are just too many things an individual is up against, and doesn’t control. You have to change the environment in addition to, perhaps more than, changing individuals’ behavior.
Greger is right when he says:
This is one of the most famous papers ever written in preventive medicine. It should be required reading for all medical students.
Back to the point I was making at the beginning of this post… If you want to know if something is harmful – smoking cigarettes, eating saturated fat, watching television – make sure you have a comparison group that isn’t doing it, or isn’t doing very much of it. Something that’s red is invisible against a red background.
Glad to see someone in the organic community recognize income inequality as a reason for poor organic food sales. Ronnie Cummins from the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) asked: What’s Holding Back The Organic Revolution?, OCA, 20 August 2014
Cummins says:
“Organic and climate-friendly food today represent no more than 3% of combined U.S. grocery and restaurant sales.”
And asks:
“If the overwhelming majority of U.S. consumers say they prefer organics and would like to buy and consume healthier and more sustainable food, then why aren’t they doing so?”
And answers:
“[Reasons] include the addictive nature and omnipresence of “chemically engineered” processed foods; lack of money and time; rampant nutrition and cooking illiteracy; and labeling fraud.”
I don’t think American consumers are illiterate about cooking or nutrition or labeling. The reason an “overwhelming majority of U.S. consumers say they prefer organics and would like to buy and consume healthier and more sustainable food” is because they are not illiterate. There is knowledge, it’s just not accompanied by behavior. Why not? I think the most potent reason among Cummins’ list is “lack of money.” I won’t even say lack of time because if you have enough money you can buy others’ time. You can either purchase prepared food or arrange to have someone at home doing the food preparation.
As to his first reason, I think sales of processed foods with nefarious ingredients would decline if demand for them declined, which becomes possible when people are able to purchase what they say they prefer.
The solution for lack of money? Cummins said:
“But in fact U.S. organic and grass fed foods (especially non-processed organic foods) would not be that “expensive” if we lived in a society where there were meaningful and sustainable jobs for everyone willing to work; where the minimum wage was $15 an hour, rather than $7.25 (federal); where healthcare costs were not double what they are in other industrialized nations; and where rent, mortgage, educational and transportation costs were more affordable.
The solution to the relative “high costs” of organics in comparison to so-called conventional food is not to pay organic farmers, ranchers or food chain workers less money, but rather to raise the standard of living of everyone, so that Americans can afford to go organic and take control of their health.”
There’s a multitude of factors that affect people’s food choices. Even though Cummins says the majority of consumers prefer organic, I don’t think increasing their standard of living will in and of itself cause them to buy organic. It would, however, remove an obstacle.
The economist, best-selling author, and former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich says reducing income inequality would benefit not just the currently strained and slowly disappearing middle class (who want to buy organic, and a lot of other things, but can’t), but those at the top too. Increasing the middle class’ purchasing power would create jobs, generate tax revenue, and grow the economy … everything that’s good for business.1
Obama was correct in December when he called widening inequality “the defining challenge of our time.”
The USDA Economic Research Service publishes a magazine on issues related to farming and food called Amber Waves. In a 2010 issue, they reported that people in lower-income households spent more time preparing food than people in higher-income households. I blogged about it back then. Here’s a graph:
The report they put out in 2011 added a year to the data range, 2006 to 2008. It continued to find that those with low-income (less than 185% poverty threshold) who prepared food spent more time doing it, on average 70.8 minutes a day (in food prep and cleanup, not including eating or food shopping) than those with higher incomes, who spent just 56.4 minutes a day (Table 7):
And, consistent with the older data in the graph above:
“Lower income Americans, those with household incomes less than 185% of the poverty threshold, spend less time engaged in eating and drinking activities than those with higher incomes.”
I thought this was interesting. Older people spend more time preparing food than younger people:
“Those who were 65 and older spent the most time in food preparation (42 minutes), had the highest rate of food preparation (61 percent), and had the longest time spent by those who prepared food (68 minutes). This is consistent with the finding that those age 65 and over were more likely to grocery shop on an average day than those in other age groups, spent the longest amount of time in primary eating and drinking, and spent less time in secondary eating/drinking than other age groups. Clearly those age 65 and over are preparing and having meals, as opposed to just eating/drinking food.”
The next two charts are conversation worthy. This one says that Americans eat two major meals, one around noon, another at 6:00 pm. There’s a breakfast blip around 7:00-8:00 am but it’s no where near the importance of the other two meals. Americans aren’t big on breakfast.
And this. I can’t get over this. Secondary eating means there is an activity that is not eating (like watching television), and we eat while doing it. I often eat while preparing food. But “washing, dressing, and grooming oneself”? How do you do that? By the looks of this chart, a lot of people are doing it.
So, who is doing most of the cooking in America? People with not a lot of money, women, and the elderly. There’s where the cooking expertise is.
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A good diet is important. Having a reason to get up in the morning, feeling useful, might be just as important.
Here’s Herman “Hy” Goldman celebrating his 101st birthday last weekend.
Mr. Goldman has refurbished light fixtures at Capital Lighting in New Jersey for 73 years. He still does, driving himself to work 4 days a week. Imagine the expertise he has?
Look at that workshop! He looks so content. Like me in my kitchen.
Gary Taubes, author of “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” and “What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie?” is an advocate of low-carbohydrate diets. He posted the results of his blood test on his site about 3 years ago, along with this description of his usual diet:
Fanatic Cook 