Gary Taubes

I’m going to argue that this calories-in/calories-out paradigm of adiposity is nonsensical: that we don’t get fat because we eat too much and move too little, and that we can’t solve the problem or prevent it by consciously doing the opposite.

Fifty years ago, one in every eight or nine Americans would have been considered obese, and today it’s one in every three. Two in three are now considered overweight.

The message of Adiposity 101 is simple enough: 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.

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.

The fewer the carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be. This is clear.

The simple answer to the question of why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not.

Ultimately and obviously, the question of how much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide as adults what levels of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we’ll ingest. I’ve argued here that enough evidence exists for us to consider sugar very likely to be a toxic substance, and to make an informed decision about how best to balance the likely risks with the benefits.

‘The human understanding,’ wrote Bacon, ‘once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted and believed or because it likes them draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that the authority of those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed.

‘It would be an extraordinary coincidence,’ as Peter Cleave wrote and we’ve already quoted, ‘if these refined carbohydrates, which are known to wreak such havoc on the teeth, did not also have profound repercussions on other parts of the alimentary canal during their passage along it, and on other parts of the body after absorption from the canal.

As this book will argue, sugar appears to be a substance that causes pleasure with a price that is difficult to discern immediately and paid in full only years or decades later.

By now, the message should be clear if insulin is involved in a disease process, then insulin resistance—i.e., metabolic syndrome—is likely to make it worse, and perhaps even initiate the disease process to begin with. This directly implicates sugar as a potential cause, a dietary trigger of the disease.

‘We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of 200 years ago ate in a whole year,’ as the University of London nutritionist John Yudkin wrote in 1963 of the situation in England.

When Isaac Newton paraphrased the concept of Occam’s Razor, he did so by saying, ‘We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.’ This was rule number one of Newton’s ‘rules of reasoning in natural philosophy’ in his Principia. So is it necessary to posit multiple aspects of diet and lifestyle—multiple causes—to explain the presence of these chronic diseases that associate with Western and urban lives, or will one suffice? Sugar, for example.

If the conventional thinking and advice worked, if eating less and exercising more were a meaningful solution to the problem of obesity and excess weight, we wouldn’t be here.

When you cut out carbohydrates, you lower insulin sufficiently, mobilize and burn fat, and lose weight. Because you burn your own fat for fuel, your body remains well fed, and you feel no hunger.

All diets that result in weight loss do so on one basis and one basis only: They reduce circulating levels of insulin.

Ultimately, your success will depend on your commitment. ... As selfhelp and management advice books will often say, setting a goal and committing to it are vitally important. Without the commitment, we never find out if the goal is achievable. By diluting the commitment and allowing us to compromise, we never know.

Most of the physicians whom I’ve interviewed for this book now recommend intermittent fasting or timerestricted eating along with LCHF/ketogenic eating.

While the basics of LCHF/ ketogenic eating are obvious— abstain from grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars, replace those calories with fat— individual variation is where the plateaus come in, and tweaking or massaging or finetuining what we eat (and don’t eat) is necessary.

One guarantee can be given, though: If one day you determine it’s not worth it and you go back to eating sugars, grains, and starches, the benefits you accrued will be lost. A lifetime of benefit will come only from a lifetime commitment.

She wants them to understand that commitment doesn’t preclude falling off the wagon on occasion. The important thing is remembering that the next step is to get back on the wagon. It’s to go back to abstaining from sugars, grains, and most starches.