Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
Gary Taubes
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0307474259
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Building upon his critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, Gary Taubes revisits the urgent question of what’s making us fat—and how we can change.
He reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century—none more damaging or misguided than the “calories-in, calories-out” model of why we get fat—and the good science that has been ignored. He also answers the most persistent questions: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Persuasive, straightforward, and practical, Why We Get Fat is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management.
those conclusions were interpreted. The authors were Paul Williams, a statistics expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and Peter Wood, a Stanford University researcher who has been studying the effect of exercise on health since the 1970s. Williams and Wood collected detailed information on almost thirteen thousand habitual runners (all subscribers to Runner’s World magazine) and then compared the weekly mileage of these runners with how much they weighed
You’re always putting fat into it, and you’re always taking fat out. You get a tiny bit fatter (more fat goes into our fat cells than comes out) during and after every meal, and then you get a tiny bit leaner again (the opposite occurs) after the meal is digested. And you get leaner still while sleeping. In an ideal world, one in which you’re not getting any fatter, the calories you store as fat immediately after meals during the day are balanced out over time by the calories you burn as fat
have consistently reported that triglycerides, HDL-C [HDL cholesterol], blood pressure and measures of insulin resistance either were not significantly different or were more favorable for the very-low-carbohydrate groups. The point man on this trial was Christopher Gardner, director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. Gardner presented the results of the trial in a lecture that’s now viewable on YouTube—“The Battle of Weight Loss Diets: Is Anyone Winning (at
consume fewer calories than we expend—and thus all fail in the same way. But this isn’t true. If a diet requires that you semi-starve yourself, it will fail, because (1) your body adjusts to the caloric deficit by expending less energy, (2) you get hungry and stay hungry, and (3), a product of both of these, you get depressed, irritable, and chronically tired. Eventually you go back to eating what you always did—or become a binge eater—because you can’t abide semi-starvation and its side effects
on the Sante Fe Trail. With the California gold rush, the relative paradise of the Pima came to an end and, with it, their affluence. Anglo-Americans and Mexicans began settling in large numbers in the region. These newcomers—“some of the vilest specimens of humanity that the white race has produced,” wrote Russell—hunted the local game near to extinction, and diverted the Gila River water to irrigate their own fields at the expense of the Pimas’. By the 1870s, the Pima were living through what