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Good Calories, Bad Calories | 
 enlarge | Author: Gary Taubes
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  169 reviews
Sales Rank: 1971
Format: Roughcut
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 640
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400040787
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.263
EAN: 9781400040780
ASIN: 1400040787
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking book, the result of seven years of research in every science connected with the impact of nutrition on health, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.
For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) and sugars–via their dramatic and longterm effects on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation–and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. There are good calories, and bad ones.
Good Calories
These are from foods without easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. These foods can be eaten without restraint.
Meat, fish, fowl, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy vegetables.
Bad Calories
These are from foods that stimulate excessive insulin secretion and so make us fat and increase our risk of chronic disease—all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. The key is not how much vitamins and minerals they contain, but how quickly they are digested. (So apple juice or even green vegetable juices are not necessarily any healthier than soda.)
Bread and other baked goods, potatoes, yams, rice, pasta, cereal grains, corn, sugar (sucrose and high fructose corn syrup), ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fruit juices, bananas and other tropical fruits, and beer.
Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then –wrongly–were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.
With precise references to the most significant existing clinical studies, he convinces us that there is no compelling scientific evidence demonstrating that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, that salt causes high blood pressure, and that fiber is a necessary part of a healthy diet. Based on the evidence that does exist, he leads us to conclude that the only healthy way to lose weight and remain lean is to eat fewer carbohydrates or to change the type of the carbohydrates we do eat, and, for some of us, perhaps to eat virtually none at all.
The 11 Critical Conclusions of Good Calories, Bad Calories:
1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, does not cause heart disease.
2. Carbohydrates do, because of their effect on the hormone insulin. The more easily-digestible and refined the carbohydrates and the more fructose they contain, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.
3. Sugars—sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup specifically—are particularly harmful. The glucose in these sugars raises insulin levels; the fructose they contain overloads the liver.
4. Refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are also the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the other common chronic diseases of modern times.
5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.
6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter any more than it causes a child to grow taller.
7. Exercise does not make us lose excess fat; it makes us hungry.
8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is a tour de force of scientific investigation–certain to redefine the ongoing debate about the foods we eat and their effects on our health.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 164 more reviews...
 This book changed my life. July 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Good Calories Bad Calories is a book about science, not a diet book. But armed with Taubes' insights and research, I made some obvious changes to my eating habits, and dropped 30 pounds in 5 months. With not so much effort and, with the help of Pollan et al, with fine, diverse, tasty food.
One criticism that Michael Pollan makes (in In Defense of Food) is that the critical skepticism Taubes brings to the low-fat/low-calorie hypotheses that have become conventional wisdom is not as evident in his treatment of the "carbohydrate question." A real criticism, but one that doesn't detract from the value of the book for me personally.
Paradigm Shift June 26, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Reading this remarkable book has caused a paradigm shift in the way that I look at diet and health. This book is dense to read, but at the same time it doesn't tell you what to believe, but rather what all of the evidence is that lead the author to present his case.
In the first part of the book I was shocked and angered. Sometimes I had to put it down because I was so disappointed in the behavior of various researchers and government entities as portrayed in the book. I feel that the book was slanted in its writing style, but not in an overhanded way. It is hard not to be slanted when the main characters of the books seem to have such obvious flaws when it comes to objectivity.
The book settles in, however, in the second part, as the author navigates not only what is postulated about human diet, nutrition, and especially metabolism, but what scientific experiments led us to these theories.
In doing so, he also presents a case. That high-carb diets are bad for many people. That refined grains and especially sugar are the causes of many diseases that we have blamed on fat, and that there is no real evidence out there implicating fat as bad for you. And finally, that the obese are not really to blame for their condition, at least from the standpoint of having some sort of personality flaw that causes them to eat too much.
Why is this? Taubes presents a very compelling case that it is not how much you eat that affects how fat you are, but rather what you eat. Someone isn't fat because they are gluttonous and lazy; they are fat because they are eating the wrong types of food for their genotype. Moreover, if they try to go on a low calorie diet, they will most certainly fail, but if instead they permanently reduce the number of carbs in their diet and remove sugars and refined grains completely, they will almost certainly loose weight.
Until I see a thorough rebuttal of this book, I will begin implementing its ideas into my life. I feel like I have been slowly poisoning myself with sugar, a substance that after reading this book seems just as deadly as cigarettes. Where is the "the surgeon general has warned that sugar consumption can be bad for your health" sticker on candy bars and ice cream bins? When it comes to diet and the science of human health, our leaders have failed us.
The Truth Is Out There! June 21, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book reads like a good detective story or a courtroom drama because the author has done his homework thoroughly. If you have any interest in health issues, you owe it to yourself and your family to read this fascinating report on the current western diet and its consequences.
Taubes spent five years gathering research concerning the effects of food consumption of different populations as well as individual case studies. These give us a totally different picture of what actually happens in our body when we eat the 'healthy diet' that is most frequently being advocated today. Where does he get his information? His bibliography is over 100 pages. He is not espousing an opinion, just the facts from the scientists themselves. The conclusions are so startling that the question begs to be answered, why isn't this information more widely disseminated? The author sheds some light on that, too. He is not merely expressing an opinion, but he tracks down studies done and how the results were then reported. Who said what and why?
This is not written as a motivational book on eating wisely for better health, but because the facts are so blatant, that's exactly what the end result turns out to be. It can be a little tedious sifting through the facts (case and research studies), but the implications are so paradigm shifting that I can't seem to put it down.
Looks like it WAS all a big fat lie ... June 20, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
In 2002 Gary Taubes wrote an cover article for the New York Times Sunday magazine entitled "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?" It caused an uproar among doctors and nutritionists everywhere for it stated the exact opposite of what Americans have been told--that it's not dietary fat that raises our cholesterol and causes obesity, heart diseases and type 2 diabetes, but the refined carbohydrates that have replaced fat in our diets since the 1970s. Five years later, Taubes expanded his eye-opening article to book length, and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is a fascinating look into how the American public--indeed, the world--has been sold a nutritional bill of goods dictated by politics and personality that is literally killing us.
Taubes, a scientific journalist (not a doctor or anyone shilling a diet plan despite insistence from other reviewers) lays out the interesting history of how a low-fat high-carb diet got to be the consensus cure-all for obesity and heart disease in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The opening of the book sets the tone--six days before Dr. Ancel Keys, the foremost advocate of the "fat causes heart disease" idea appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961, then-President Dwight Eisenhower was being lied to by his doctor about his cholesterol levels, which had skyrocketed after a heart attack despite following the exact regimen Keys was pushing. Taubes goes into very fine detail regarding the science involved in the role diet plays in health, and notes quite astutely that doctors as a rule are not scientists. It's astonishing how some ideas took root after only one study because they were sanctioned by the "right" organizations, while numerous studies showing an opposite effect were ignored because they didn't have the right connections. While Dr. Robert Atkins is the most famous--or notorious, depending on one's view--proponent of the low-carb diet today, the idea that keeping carbs low was optimal for both weight control and health has been around since the nineteenth century. However, an small but influential corps of doctors, whose studies were funded by such health-food purveyors as General Mills and Frito-Lay, got no less than the United States Congress drinking the high-carb Kool-Aid in the early seventies--to the detriment of us all.
This is not an easy, breezy read, but Taubes is able to make even the most esoteric terms and theories readable and understandable. The bibliography for the book is well over sixty pages, and Taubes conducted hundreds of interviews as well, all impeccably cited. If nothing else, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" will get you thinking about the absolute power organizations like the American Medical Association wield--even when they're completely off the mark.
A Must Read For Anyone Who Eats. June 19, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I highly recommend this book to anybody who eats. I teach biochemistry. I have grown children I have fed and I have struggled a bit with my weight over the years and my bad 'hemoglobin AIC' values shocked me out of my complacency a few years ago. I sat and read the entire book in 2 days and had to resist starting to re-read it because I told my co-workers (I teach at a college) about it. They asked me to return it to the library so they could start reading it. If you find this book difficult, read 'Cliff-Notes' reviews about it, because what Taubes says is critical and paradigm changing. It is spectacularly well researched and assembled. I couldn't put it down, but I am a science-phile so again, if you find it dry or incomprehensible, get someone to explain it to you. It might just positively improve and change your life. And if you are a parent feeding children, you must know about the tenets of this tome.
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