Gary Taubes

I wanted to get in one more blog post before we head off to visit family. I had mentioned that I would say more about Gary Taubes and his take on obesity. Here he is speaking at the Walnut Creek Public Library at a talk put on by Rivendell Bicycle Works:



I do agree with some of what he has to say. However, I feel that he oversimplifies things. He mentions in the video, and in his book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, that the people attempting to justify the colories in vs. calories out theory are only looking for evidence to support their theory. I feel that he is doing the same.

On the other hand, I do feel that we get in more trouble with processed carbohydrates, and sugar particularly, than we do with other food types.

However, the stories of weight loss I know best are not heavily skewed toward a meat-based diet. Scott Cutshall, whom I knew as a bicyclist and fellow at-home-parent before I found out just how large the "Large Fella On a Bike" was, eats, I believe, a vegan diet. He brought his weight down from over five hundred pounds to a normal weight. He did so mainly by eating vegan and bicycling. I'll see if I can get him to weigh in on the comments section.

Leo Baubata, of Zen Habits, also lost his weight through switching to a vegan diet, and exercising. He also quit smoking. I'm sure that helped. (Though now that I think about it, I recall Leo has a fondness for pizza, and he still eats it sparingly, so there's probably some cheese in there somewhere.)

The one time in my life where I really lost weight was a few short months where I was eating raw food. My weight dropped from my normal stable weight of 185 to about 155 in three months. I was, however, eating a lot, and much of what I was eating was dehydrated "breads" made from sprouted grains, orange juice, cayenne and cilantro. I ate a lot of hummus made from sprouted chickpeas and raw tahini as well. My problem with the raw diet is that I felt very weak much of the time, in spite of a massive, and expensive, intake of food. I was clear-headed, thinner, and my allergies where better, but in some sense, I felt like I was starving, and we were spending twice what we budget a month for food.

And speaking of expense. Gary Taubes in the video mentions a time when a scientist he was interviewing claimed the Atkins diet was boring. "It's not boring," he exclaims, and then he goes on to list a long variety of meats and cheeses. I don't know what planet he's from, but though we're not poor, we still couldn't afford to feed a family of four on a diet that made use of meat on a regular basis. Even cheddar cheese seems a little out of there in the price department some days. And so, we do eat spaghetti more than we eat steak, and if it were up to me, we'd be eating brown rice with dal and cooked greens most days, but the kids won't eat that, so the compromises tend to run toward food that I don't feel is quite as healthy as I would like, but I'm reducing my intake.

And even if carbs are turned into fat more easily than proteins, you still can't create energy. You can't get more calories out of the food than is there.

I do agree that the high-carb nature of our diets may possibly be frying our insulin regulation system, and that may be leading to many of the problems our nation is having with obesity. However, it's not just that we eat some carbs, but that we are a nation of carboholics. I think most of us are in denial about that, and I think there's some amount of not even noticing how many low-quality carbs we consume. All I know is that if I bake a dozen blueberry muffins in the morning, they'll be gone by noon. It's like we have elves that creep out of the woodwork. I don't normally buy rice cakes because I think they're probably awful on the glycemic index, but I bought some the day before yesterday, and my kids tore through them in two days. I had to be mindful myself not to reach into the package and grab one to munch as I wandered around. My biggest challenge, as always, is to have food that the kids will eat, that is healthy. I'm still constantly bombarded by complaints that there's nothing to eat in the house. "Eat some hummus and carrots," I say. "We don't like that," they reply. "Pressure cook some beans," I suggest. "No," they say. "Dad," they add, "don't buy the peanut butter from the coop that is all oily on top. Get the smooth kind from the grocery store." "That's all sugary," I tell them. "Yes," they say, with a gleam in their eyes.

The entire issue, most probably, is so complicated that there is no easy answer. I think Taubes is trying to provide his own easy answer. He has some good points, but I think he discounts other theories out of hand and ignores the pieces of underlying complexity that don't fit into his idea of the puzzle.

Oh, I should add that, out of the goals that I wrote about in the Wait Weight post, I've stopped finishing my kids' food, I'm doing a little better at not finishing off the pad thai when I make it, and I'm browsing in the kitchen during the day a little less. I also started running a short distance in the morning. It looks like my weight is about to dip back below 200 pounds, so I've lost about ten pounds. For myself, I see it, thanks to Leo's habit-based ideology, as being about changing my habits rather than dieting. I still have the occasional coffee and croissant. I'm just being more mindful about it. It's the unconscious, carboholic gorging that gets me. Eating peanut butter off a spoon can almost be like an unconscious nervous tick that goes on all day.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of veganism, though I am not, myself, a vegan. Eating a diet with no animal products, and alas, for pure vegans that includes honey as well, would go a long way in cutting back on human cruelty to animals, and would help mitigate the negative environmental impact caused by meat farming. I have never, however, done a thorough study of veganism. It's another one of those things that is given as a simple solution to a complex problem. For my part, when I was eating vegan and raw, I felt I was coming off as a little too self-righteous. "No, no -- no salmon for me thanks. I'll just have the salad." Occasionally -- and not often -- I crave meat. Is that because my body really needs something from it at that point? Or is it just some memory or whim of the mind? For now, I'm going to trust my cravings, as long as they are not for a box of cookies or a third beer.

Veganism, however, should be explored further by folks like Gary Taubes. It seems to be working for many people, at least for those with the sense to avoid processed foods.

I'm dropping into this post one last time to say that I finally got around to reading "Is Sugar Toxic?", his recent article in the New York Times. I enjoyed the article more than the book, and I agree with his assessment of sugar. I do believe he needs to expand his area of consideration to cover other types of diets that exclude processed carbs. He is a thorough researcher and an enjoyable writer. In some ways, his ideas are similar to those put forth in Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook I love, but she too is dedicated to the idea that vegetarianism or veganism is not a sustainable diet. I'm not ready to accept that idea.