Talk Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you didn’t read Good Calories, Bad Calories because you are not into reading nonfiction books or you didn’t want to buy it, then I recommend you watch Gary Taubes talk The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care at University of California Berkeley.  It’s a free webcast and he makes some really good points.

1. It’s an undisputed fact that it takes insulin to store fat.  No insulin, no fat.  That’s why undiagnosed diabetics lose weight.
2. Another undisputed fat: carbohydrates cause insulin, not fat or protein.
3. In many poor societies, the women are obese and the kids are undernourished.  (He gave almost 20 examples.)  Either the women are starving their kids (unlikely) or it doesn’t take a lot of calories to be fat.  Those women are fat because they are eating the wrong foods not because they are eating too much.
4. Lack of will power, gluttony and sloth are not the causes of obesity.
5. Kids eat because they are growing.  They don’t grow because they eat.  Vertical and horizontal growth are not so different.  People eat because something is telling them to grow horizontally.  They don’t grow because they eat.

Gary Taubes’ talk is well worth listening to.