Saturday, October 4, 2008

Food fight. Round One

People have been fighting for years about what foods make a person fat or slinky, sick or healthy.
Here's the latest surprise from the food fight front:
What's a food that does NOT make a person obese?
One journalist spent five years looking into this full time. He reviewed tens of thousands of pages of research findings, and interviewed numerous doctors and nutrition folks. Here's his first (of seven) conclusions about what does NOT make a person fat.
"1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization." Taubes
Dietary fats include coconut oil, the fat on a Porterhouse steak, butter and bacon. They do NOT make you fat or obese after all.

Before you gasp in disbelief, here's what Andrew Weil, the well known MD said about Taubes' stunning and revolutionary book on Larry King Live:
“I think this is a very important book. I’ve been recommending it to my medical colleagues and students. There are some very big ideas in this book…[Gary Taubes] has done a meticulous job of showing that many of the assumptions that are held by the conventional medical community simply rest on nothing

"It’s very important to get these out to the medical community because a lot of the ways we try and prevent and treat obesity are based on assumptions that have no scientific evidence.”
-Dr. Weil, speaking on Larry King Live, 2008
Gary Taubes was as surprised by his conclusion as you might be right now.

So what, did he find, really DOES make a person fat?

Food fight. Round Two, next.

2 comments:

Nancy Edmonds Hanson said...

Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories is must reading for all of us who are skeptical about the "common wisdom" about calories, weight loss and dietary recommendations. It just came out in paperback, too.

Unknown said...

Kim,

Thanks for the article. I really have enjoyed reading Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book reminds me of many of the things my grandmother used to say to me about food.

Doris