There has been, I think, tremendous misinformation by the putout of nutritionists and medical
doctors over the past fifty years.
I think one of the huge disasters was the obsession with fat in our diet - the promotion
of the idea that fat makes us fat and that the essence of healthy food is low-fat food.
During the era when this idea was especially dominant, in the 1970s this is when the Ornish
and Pritikin philosophies became very strong and when a lot of spas started in this country,
and when I visit spas many of the menus served there are still almost all low-fat menus,
that is still the focus of what people do.
During the era of low-fat obsession, all of these non-fat and low-fat products came out
on the market and during that period Americans got fatter and fatter.
What is wrong with that picture?
Clearly something is very wrong there.
Then we had this Atkins bubble which a reaction to this was it wasn't fat, carbohydrates now
became the thing that were demonized and we had this no carbohydrate, low carbohydrate
era.
Both of these camps have some pieces of the truth and I think the Atkins camp is much
closer to the truth, but both of them also got big pieces of this wrong.
I don't know how many of you have heard of the book that has been out here recently that
is causing a lot of controversy, I recommend reading it, it's not the easiest read but
it is called "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and the author is Gary Taubes.
He is a science writer for the New York Times, a very meticulous researcher of literature,
and he has gone through the medical literature very carefully on nutrition research and some
of the conclusions he comes to are quite startling.
First of all, there is not a shred of evidence that fat makes you fat.
Secondly, he feels that all of the evidence points to a biochemical disturbance in metabolism
in which insulin is the key player.
Insulin really determines how calories are used, how energy is distributed in the body
and that disturbance of insulin-regulated metabolism is genetically influenced.
A lot of us have these genes and inherited it probably from our hunter-gatherer days
that make us very efficient at storing up calories when they are available.
It's that genetic constitution in the present environmental climate in which food is available
all the time and the kinds of foods that we have made available are particularly full
of quick-digesting carbohydrates that cause spikes in blood sugar, this provokes the disturbance
in people.
The other idea that he presents that is fascinating is that for years there has been almost a
religious-like belief in the idea that it is calories in equals calories out and that
the solution is to decrease intake and increase exercise.
Therefore, those who are obese are eating too much or not exercising enough and this
is a problem of will or motivation, he talks of how much over the past fifty years there
has been a tendency to even recommend psychiatric or psychological intervention for these problems.
The evidence that he presents is very strongly that overeating and under-activity are in
fact symptoms of an underlying metabolic disorder.
These are ways that the body adjusts its energy state by reducing activity or by increasing
intake and this is not something that is under voluntary control.
I think he's got a lot of things right in this book, also some things not quite right,
so I don't think anybody has yet put together the whole picture but I would say that all
the evidence points to carbohydrates as being the really significant piece of this.
It has been the way that we have changed carbohydrate foods that I think is the most significant
thing that we have done wrong in the past fifty years.
Particularly, we have flooded our diets with the kinds of carbohydrate foods that digest
quickly and convert to blood sugar rapidly and cause spikes in blood sugar which releases
insulin and over time, in many people, there is a sensitivity to carbohydrates.
We all know people who are rail thin who can eat anything they want in any quantity and
never gain weight and they tend to be active - they do not have this genetic constitution.
It is very annoying to see them and the only consolation is that when the famine comes,
they're gone!