Good Calories, Bad Calories (112 page)

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*108 In reference to the islets of Langerhans, the pancreatic cel s that secrete insulin.

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*109“Diet therapy and weight loss are extremely important in reversing this process,” Rosenzweig added, “but the long-term results of these therapies have general y been disappointing, even in patients not receiving insulin.”

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*110 In which the pancreas had been removed.

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*111 Schoenheimer and Rittenberg worked in Harold Urey’s lab at Columbia. Urey had recently discovered deuterium and won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.

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†112 Wertheimer began his career at the University of Hal e in Germany and was expel ed from his position in the same purge that sent Schoenheimer to New York. Wertheimer immigrated to Jerusalem, where in the 1940s he became head of pathophysiology and biochemistry at the Hebrew University.

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*113 ATP gives up a phosphate molecule, becoming adenosine diphosphate, or ADP, and releases energy in the process.

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*114 Synthesis of the enzymes required to convert carbohydrates into fat wil also increase and decrease in proportion to the carbohydrate content of the diet.

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*115 The VLDL particles we discussed when we talked about heart disease.

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†116 The addition of a phosphate molecule to glycerol to make glycerol phosphate is said to “activate” the glycerol so that it can now be used in this process.

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*117 For this reason, vagotomy, as this surgical procedure is known, was later considered a potential treatment for obese humans with various syndromes of hypothalamic obesity.

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*118 Of Neel’s two primary papers on thrifty genes, this is the one that is rarely read or referenced.

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*119 Brunzel and Bierman fed mildly diabetic patients a diet of 85 percent carbohydrates and no fat, and compared their glucose response with that of patients on a more typical American diet of 45 percent carbohydrates and 40 percent fat. Those on the carbohydrate-rich diet had a slightly lower blood-sugar response, and insulin secretion remained unchanged. Brunzel and Bierman interpreted this to mean that a carbohydrate-enriched diet “increase[s]

the sensitivity to insulin of tissue sites of insulin action.”

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*120 This explains why preventing estrogen secretion in female rats—by removing the ovaries—wil make them obese, hungry, and sedentary, as we discussed in the previous chapter, whereas replacing the estrogen wil make them lean again.

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*121 He told me that I could confirm this observation by simply going to an airport and noticing, as he always did, that it was the overweight who took the escalators and the lean who walked up the stairs.

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*122 From 1990 to 1996, Keen was chairman of the British Diabetic Association. He was also elected honorary president of the International Diabetes Federation in 1991, and was chairman of the WHO Expert Committee on Diabetes in 1980 and 1985.

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*123 Fat synthesis and accumulation.

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*124 The progressive addition of carbohydrates was similar to a common treatment of diabetics in the pre-insulin era: Diabetics would be fasted to lower their blood sugar to healthy levels; then protein and fat calories would be increased gradual y, until glucose appeared in their urine. That would be considered the critical calorie level, and the diabetics would never be al owed to eat any more than that.

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*125 Van Ital ie, Stunkard, Bray, Cahil , and Dwyer.

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*126 Van Ital ie attributed this ineffectiveness, as was common at the time, to the fact that “a varied diet reduced in energy content remains highly palatable” and so too tempting. “Even the Lord’s Prayer does not cal for resisting temptation,” he would say; “it asks that the supplicant be not led into temptation.”

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†127 This does not include several texts specifical y on the psychology and behavioral treatment of obesity.

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*128 According to Novin, when he wrote up his presentation for the conference proceedings Bray removed the last four pages, al of which were on the link between carbohydrates, insulin, hunger, and weight gain. “I couldn’t believe he would make that kind of arbitrary decision,” Novin said.

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*129 Indeed, Mayer would divide those who endorsed carbohydrate-restricted diets into those who were sincere and misguided, and those who were simply insincere.

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*130 It was not “even remotely true,” Stare wrote, “that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health.”

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*131 In treating obese children, Sidbury noted, there is “concern that a low calorie diet wil be harmful to growth.” On this low-carbohydrate diet, however, the children experienced “continued normal linear growth,” even though it was also very low in calories.

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*132 Four glands that lie either behind or embedded in the thyroid gland.

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†133 Adolph’s studies were also noteworthy because, if humans are anything like rats, they contradict the popular notion that we gain weight by eating energy-dense foods or can lose weight and keep it off by decreasing the density of our diets—by eating soups, for instance, in which the calories are diluted by water, or fiber-rich greens and salads rather than calorie-dense meats—and so learning how to “feel ful on fewer calories,” as the Penn State nutritionist Barbara Rol s has advocated.

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*134 Rats are nocturnal.

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*135 Because diabetologists and clinical investigators typical y measure insulin in humans or laboratory animals at longer intervals—say, thirty minutes or an hour or two after a meal—they pay little attention to the details of what’s happening in between, which means missing this first great wave of insulin secretion.

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*136“Of or about the head,” referring to the fact that these reflexes are not mediated by the peripheral organs themselves—just as the two waves of insulin secretion are an inherent property of the pancreatic cel s that secrete insulin—but are stimulated by nerve signals sent directly from the brain.

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*137 The USDA’s standard nutrient database says eleven hundred calories. The Center for Science in the Public Interest puts the number at sixteen hundred.

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*138 After a year, subjects participating in the lifestyle-modification trial had reduced their total food intake, on average, by 450 calories a day. They ate more fruits and vegetables (one to two servings more a day); they decreased their grain consumption by four servings a day and “sweets” by five. The calories from al carbohydrates increased, on average, by over 5 percent, but because of the decrease in total calories, the total amount of carbohydrates consumed decreased.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2007 by Gary Taubes

Al rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Publishing Division of the Massachusetts Medical Society to reprint an excerpt from “Diet, Serum Cholesterol, and Death from Coronary Heart Disease: The Western Electric Study” by R.B. Shekel e, et. al from The New England Journal of Medicine, January 8, 1981, copyright © 1981 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. Al rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Publishing Division of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taubes, Gary.

Good calories, bad calories: chal enging the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control, and disease / Gary Taubes.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“Borzoi book.”

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Low-carbohydrate diet. 2. Reducing diets. 3. Weight loss. 4. Carbohydrates, Refined—Physiological effect. 5. Nutritional y induced diseases. I. Title.

RM237.73.T38 2007 613.2'63—dc22 2007006794

eISBN: 978-0-307-26794-8

v3.0