Gary Taubes on Nightline: Carbohydrates Make You Fat, and Perhaps Sick 9/27/2007

Gary Taubes PBS interview
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/interviews/taubes.html

You're not talking about a diet with no carbs, just a reduced amount?

The underlying philosophy is this kind of Paleolithic diet theory. It's what we ate during the 2 million years that we were hunter-gatherers on this planet. The fact that we were hunter-gatherers for 2 million years suggests it was an extraordinarily successful evolutionary adaptation. The question is: What did we eat during these 2 million [years] when we left the jungle, the trees, went down into savanna and started surviving on whatever we could hunt or gather? That's the philosophy. The answer is, probably considerable meat, very low glycemic index, hard-to-digest roots and starches, and fruits and berries that look nothing at all like the beautiful Fuji applies you can buy at your local market now. Some carbohydrates, but whatever it was, it wasn't refined. It wasn't sugar. It wasn't flour. It wasn't easy to digest. That's my going theory. If this theory's right, the diet we evolved to eat is probably the correct diet.


Story from:
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3658957&page=1
By VICKI MABREY
Sept. 27, 2007
In a world of fad diets and ever-changing ideas on how to get thin, Gary Taubes is not just another diet guru but a journalist who has covered science for the past 30 years.
Could everything we know about dieting and exercise be wrong?

It was Taubes who wrote the eye-opening -- and controversial -- New York Times magazine cover story five years ago that asked the near-blasphemous question: "What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?"

Now he's at it again. He's expanded that article into a new book, "Good Calories/Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease." In the book, Taubes looks back at some 50 years of scientific research on why we get fat. He blames the bread.

"My wife likes to refer to me as the Grinch who's trying to steal Christmas," Taubes said.

And not just the bread, but the whole family of complex carbohydrates. So "Nightline" took Taubes to lunch, and what better place to discuss the dangers of carbohydrates than Raffaele's, an Italian restaurant on Manhattan's East Side, where we could talk -- over bread and pasta -- about carbs and fat, good science versus bad.

Carbohydrate Chemistry

Taubes said that after rereading years of scientific research, he has found proof that for the last half century, science has just gotten it wrong: It's not fat that is making Americans fat, he said, it is the base of the food pyramid, the complex carbohydrates, foods such as bread, pasta, potatoes. It's the starches we were told we needed that make us pudgy.

It's simple chemistry, said Taubes. Carbs spike insulin. Insulin creates sugar. And sugar packs on the pounds.

"The grains are carbohydrates," Taubes said. "They're refined carbohydrates. You take off the shell and all the protein and the vitamins, and you refine it down, and you end up with something that its primary effect on the body, immediate effect, is to raise insulin levels. And if you raise insulin levels, what that does is drive calories into your fat tissue. Raising insulin literally works to make you accumulate fat. This is one of these phenomena that for some reason the medical research establishment has chosen to consider irrelevant to why we get obese."
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[spiceylawnmower]

What terrible journalism.

[TheAmericanWaySeries]

Taubes has never said that insulin converts to sugar! What a misquote. Boy, she really loves her pasta and bread. I'd break though a wall of bread and leap over a mountain of pasta to get to a juicy prime rib. Notice the restaurant owner was fat and out of breath. Yeah, pasta's the food of life. He's one muffin away from a heart attack. Don't know about you, but Carol's dinners didn't look too tasty. Remember, "Mother nature wouldn't put arsenic here, if it was a killer".

[shannondangc]

fruits and vegetables. that simple.

[LuckynumberSlevin11]

Dumb people all round

[puddleg]

I don't see any pasta in the cave paintings, do you?

[puddleg]

Humans became human in the pliestocene, the ice ages, when paleolithic man butchered mammoth, rhino, and other fat meat, and fruit and veges were usually unavailable. Hunter-gather lifestyles are actually more mesolithic, when the ice melted, the seas rose, and such big game became a bit harder to catch.

[puddleg]

Regardless of the crap journalism, Taubes makes sense and comes across as sober.

Rather than the strident women. Trust them to root for the gatherers over the hunters. There's a gender war subtext going on here; the mum as the instinctive over-feeder, gatherers demanding respect.

[0ddzZz]

@hurlman03 I've tried all diets, so I'm actually speaking from experience. When it comes to gaining weight, its hard to get fat on a raw food diet. And I know he was talking mostly about bread, pastas and stuff like that. I was just assuring everyone that carbs from fruits and vegetables does not spike your insulin as much, and does not make you fat. I've always been able to gain weight easily, and I've been raw vegan for about 2 years now and I'm at 7% body fat.

[hurlman03]

@0ddzZz Doesn't matter how much water is in potatoes or boiled carrots, you're insulin is going to skyrocket if you eat them. It's all about insulin and insulin resistance. Some fruits are fine such as berries and avocados, some vegetables are fine, such as leafy greens and tomatoes. Notice the carbohydrates that nutritionist was advocating was lettuce, cucumber and tomato. Taubes has no problems with those vegetables, so why on earth was she presented as an opposing viewpoint?

[hurlman03]

I like how she presents two people that agree with each other as opposing viewpoints. And also totally misquotes Taubes.

[ch72105]

The pharmaceutical industry should be paying royalties to the food industry.

[ch72105]

The idea that grains are foundational to the human diet is just absolutely insane. It is indefensible, it's refuted by everything we know about nutritional science and human history.

This is why it'll never change:

-powerful people would have to admit that they've been wrong for half a century, and take responsibility for the obesity and diabetes epidemic

-the science isn't easy to understand

-food is the biggest industry in the world, and grains have the highest profit margins