PNTV: Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes (#219)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. TV today, you have guessed it. Another great book, why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. Why We Get Fat. GARY Taubes, Philosopher's Note, Bunch of big ideas, unpacking a fascinating look at the underlying scientific cause of why we get fat. And then subtitle the book is what We Can Do About It. So Gary Taubes is an award winning scientific journalist and he wrote a thick book called Good Calories, Bad Calories. We're going to do an episode on that as well. It's the 600 page tome on all the research over the last couple hundred years that elucidates why we get fat, which runs counter to a lot of what we're taught and conditioned to believe to be true. And this book basically distills that 600 page book into a much still robust, but much easier to read 200 and something page book. So five big ideas I'm excited to explore. We'll start with the first big idea, hormones versus calories. So why do we get fat? He says the short answer to the question is carbs. It's carbs that make us fat. Now, as a former thoroughly conditioned American low fat, high carb, vegan, that seems rather odd to me. Fat makes us fat, right? He says, well, you need to look at it in this whole myth that we live in. He calls it calories in, calories in, calories out. We're taught that that's the equation, energy balance. Most governmental agencies say that, hey, if you want to lose weight, you just need to expend more calories than you consume. We hear it all the time from everyone. He quotes the US Government, the World Health Organization, all these international governments basically saying that, that the issue with why we get fat is an energy imbalance. Too many calories. You just need to reduce the amount of calories you're eating or increase your exercise and burn more. That's how you're going to optimize your weight. And he says that just is silly, it's nonsensical, it does not work. And he gives you and us in the book a ton of different examples and research scenarios that outline why that is not true. He says the real issue is a hormonal imbalance. It's not an energy imbalance, it's a hormonal imbalance, particularly insulin. Insulin is what regulates the blood sugar in our bloodstream, the amount of glucose in our bloodstream, and it's what dictates whether we get fat or not. Fascinating stuff. Obviously a ton more we can talk about on it, but it's not a caloric imbalance, Taubes tells us. It's a hormonal imbalance. And if you want to correct that, you need to look at what creates insulin surges. It's not fat, it's not protein, it's carbs that jack up your blood sugar, that jack up the insulin, which creates the fat that you may want to get rid of. First big idea. Second big idea is fascinating. David Perlmutter in Grain Brain referenced Taubes, as do a number of other authors, and inspired me to go out and read it. And he actually pulls a quote that I'm going to talk about right now comparing Taubes does cigarettes and lung cancer and carbs and obesity. And he says some of us are more sensitive to carbs than others and are more predisposed to be fat. Now, I'm a pretty lean guy. That's not a big thing in my life. I tend to run the other way and get too lean. But he says just like with smoking, not everyone who smokes is going to get lung cancer. Right? It's just a fraction of the people who smoke get lung cancer. But if you do get lung cancer, which was a very rare disease before cigarettes were invented, if you do get lung cancer, the cause is almost certainly that you smoked. He says the same thing can be applied to carbohydrates. Not everyone who eats a ton of carbohydrates is going to get obese. But if you do get obese, the cause is almost essentially going to be your carb intake. So if you want to reduce your risk of lung cancer, don't smoke. If you want to reduce your risk of obesity, eat less carbs. It's a big idea. And again, it throws flies counter to what we've been taught. And if you had told the five year ago version of me what I'd be eating in five years, I would have laughed at you. I mentioned that in my note on Perlmutter, but here we are. So second big idea is that third big idea, there are greater offenders in the carb realm and this is kind of the most important practical idea here. You may disagree with everything I've said so far. You may be open minded, you may already be doing this stuff, but on a spectrum of carbs. And we have the worst ones over here and the best ones over here. The worst ones we all know, and we're going to benefit from removing them from our diets. And it's the sugars and the refined flours which we're going to talk about in a moment in more depth. When we look at the occurrence of Western diseases and cultures that didn't used to have Western disease, what was different? It was the introduction of these two things. So if you're drinking a lot of colas with calories in them from high fructose corn syrup and from other sugars, etc. Get rid of those, get rid of your fruit juices, those, those are not helping your cause in optimizing your weight and your overall vitality and well being. He throws starches and grains into the spectrum as well. And if you are sensitive to carbs, meaning if you are obese, you need to pay attention to those. And then you have the good carbs, if you will, which are the green leafy vegetables or leafy greens, I should say, and green vegetables, those have carbs as well. But those are wrapped in fiber and they're wrapped in water and they're assimilated in a much more pleasant way that doesn't jack up your insulin like the refined grains and sugars and flours and all these other things do. So there you go. Not all carbs are created equal. And no matter what, reduce your sugar intake and your refined flour intake, if you're feeling up to it. Fourth big idea, sugar and flour. So he gives some fascinating stories and studies about. If you look at cultures who don't have Western diseases, their dietary habits are actually quite varied. You have some people that are almost exclusively or even exclusively meat eaters. The Inuit, for example, don't have diabetes, obesity, heart disease, all these other issues, right? Then you have vegetarian societies like Hindus in India who don't believe in eating meat. They don't have these issues either. And until they're introduced to certain things from the West. He mentions the Maasai and other cultures who are free of Western disease. Then you look at it and you say, well, what happened that led to the creation of, in the presence of Western diseases? Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, et cetera, used to be rare. Once they get the Western orientation, they're not so rare. But what was it about, about the Western diet that did it? He says the first things that were transported into those communities were sugar and flour. Those were the items that could be transported around the world without rotting or being eaten by rats and insects. Sugar and flour. You introduce sugar and flour into a culture that otherwise didn't have Western diseases and, and boom, they show up. They can vary, they can be a meat eating community or a vegetarian community, but you introduce sugar and flour, you're going to see an increase in Western diseases. Fascinating stuff. And guess what? Those are both carbs that fall on the not so great toxic side of the spectrum. So that's the fourth big idea. The fifth big idea is a fascinating study. A to Z was the name of the study. A to Z. They named it A to Z because they looked at four, and this is a research project out of Stanford University, legit, a Atkins. Then they had a traditional lifestyle, exercise management kind of thing, diet. Then they had a Dean Ornish diet. O A and then T for traditional, O for Ornish, and then Z for the Zone diet. They looked at these four different diets and they wanted to see, well, which one works, which one doesn't, for fat loss and overall health. And this study was run by an individual at Stanford. And I'll put a link to a YouTube talk he gave about the research. And it was done by a guy who was a vegetarian for 25 years. And he did this study because he wanted to prove and investigate and he had a hunch that the Atkins diet was not healthy. He wanted to bring this into a lab, do a clinical trial, compare it to other diets and basically prove that it's unhealthy. And he said when he looked at the results, he had a bitter pill to swallow because Atkins outperformed the traditional, the Ornish and the Zone diets in every measure that they had. They lost more weight. Their triglycerides went down, which is a good thing. Their HDL went up, which is a good thing. Their blood pressure went down, which is a good thing. More than each of the other diets. It's a fascinating study. And again, when I was vegan, that wasn't the research I was hearing about. I was hearing about everything else that proved why a certain approach made the most sense. It's eye opening to see this research and super inspiring. So that's the A to Z study. He has some questions at the end of the book which are cool too, including, okay, so if carbs create fat, why is it that cultures that exist exclusively, essentially not exclusively, but have a high carb diet, like in Southeast Asia, they're eating a ton of rice. How's that work with your theory? They should be fat, right? Because they're eating so many carbs. And he says, well, look, what might be going on there is those cultures that don't have the Western diseases also don't have sugar and flour. And once you jack your system such that you're insulin resistant from eating too much sugar and Flour, you become more sensitive to those grains as well. Not everybody, but a lot of people. But if you do not introduce the sugar in the flour like those cultures, then you can remain lean and thrive absent western diseases. Fascinating stuff. And he also addresses, well, why is it that people who are on a low fat, high carb diet can lose weight? Again, it seems to fly in the face of the theory. And his point in response to that is, when you go on almost any diet, whether it's a Dean Ornish low fat, high carb diet or anything else, what do you do first? If you're on a diet, the first thing you do and what those diets too advocate, including Dean Ornish, tells you, quit eating so much sugar. Don't eat the refined flowers. Right. Why? Because they're the worst carbs. Well, why are they bad? Because they jack up your insulin and it's not an energy imbalance, it's a hormonal imbalance. So individuals on a diet are going to tend to quit drinking sugary drinks, they're going to cut back on the beer or go to light beer, and they're going to quit eating donuts and candy bars. Well, that alone is going to drive a ton of results. May not get you where you want to go, but it will drive potentially some results. So there we go. Quick look at why we get fat A to Z. Fascinating. Sugar and flour is what was introduced to these cultures that then introduced the western diseases. Worst carbs. We talked about cigarettes and carbs. Fascinating connection between cigarettes and lung cancer and carbs and obesity. Hormone imbalance, not a caloric imbalance. That's the essence of the book. Get it to explore more and I look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See you.