Posted: Mar 10, 2011 1:19 pm
Just A Theory wrote:..
If you're referring to Taubes, his pet hypothesis is crap - as has been pointed out.
I would not be so positive about that. Since we can agree that neither one of us is an expert or professional researcher in this area, we are both at a disadvantage. All we can do it look at research and use logic and clues to help get at the real story.
In the following blog entry, Taubes and Dr Oz are on Larry King live in 2007. Dr Weil basically affirms exactly what Taubes said with his first book, and explains that the assumptions medical folks are working off of are false. They go on to discuss the insulin resistance issue in terms of how some people are affected, and some are not.
Many of the assumptions that are held by the conventional medical community simply rest on nothing. There is no scientific evidence for it… I don’t agree that the way to process this is to eat a diet that is mostly meat and no carbohydrate. I think it is very important for people to understand how carbohydrates affect them, and the differences in carbohydrate food…
Not everybody is in this spectrum. There are some people who are not sensitive to carbohydrates and won’t get fat no matter how much they eat. His (Taubes) basic ideas are very important. A lot of the ways that we try to prevent and treat obesity are based on assumptions that have no scientific evidence.
http://dietforhumans.com/2011/03/10/test/
This guy Dr Oz is no dummy. Taubes ideas are a threat to him. Was just told (2007 clip) on a national broadcast that he was full of shit. He better come up with some evidence.
Just recently, Oz had Taubes on his show, and Taubes just told him point blank that what he learned in med school was false, about what he heard in 2007. Oz has had 3 years to counter this, and he can't do it. When challenged over the good calories/bad calories, he changes the subject. (see the longer vid clip on the blog above). In a later part, which is on Oz's website, he and Taubes go at it again over exercise. Again, Oz can't counter and changes the subject to the "other benefits" of exercise.
This is getting a bit off topic from the OP, but it is interesting and relevant I think.
Weil again in the 2007 clip-
A lot of us have genes that predispose us to have obesity if we are exposed to the kinds of foods that trigger these hormonal problems. Our diet is now flooded with those. It’s all of those sweetened drinks, high fructose corn syrup, things made from flour or starch. All things things that kids are eating in huge quantities are reacting with their genetics to produce this disorder.
This is relevant to the discussion just above, in the previous posts. Taubes is not the only one saying it.
It seems to me that it may just be true that this insulin resistance is not a yes/no switch. Everyone fits into the spectrum somewhere in between. The people on one end eat all they want, including cake and cookies, and weight doesn't change.
The people on the other end don't handle carbs well, insulin goes up, and hormonal changes affect weight more than anything else. These are the people Taubes is talking about, not everyone. He makes that clear in the first clip. Tell these people to exercise more, or "just count calories" and it doesn't help. The issue is what the carbs are doing to their metabolism. This is not a small group of people.
I would suggest this may very well account for a lot of difference of opinion in the low fat/low carb wars. People are not paying attention to the spectrum, and assuming that everyone's chemistry is the same as everyone else's.