Living Well

Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you have ever tried to lose weight or just eat healthy, you must read this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  This book changed my thinking about food, health, nutrition and exercise.  I didn't realize how much of what doctors said that I just believed.  I didn't realize that what they recommend is based on little proven evidence.  Or how much contradictory evidence is just ignored. 

This isn't a diet book.  It's a book about the history of nutritional advice.  Our understanding of food and obesity, how it's come about and how it's changed over the past century.  I'll be writing more in future posts but here's what I've definitely taken away:

1. A calorie is not a calorie.  A lot of other factors matter like what kind of calorie, what kind of person, metabolism, exercise, external environmental factors, ...
2. Calories in does not always equal calories out.  Or we are not measuring all the calories in and out correctly.
3. Dietary fat does not make you fat.  Fat is not necessarily better or worse than protein or carbs.  It's not necessarily equal either!
4. Many of our current doctors are 100% convinced of what they know and not really willing to consider radical shifts in thinking.   Like they continue to recommend  eating less calories and exercising to lose weight when it's obviously not working for many people.  (Do you really lack the will power?)

More to come, but I definitely recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You can read a good excerpt written by the author, Gary Taubes, on ABC News.

Insulin makes you fat

I've always believed that if calories in are greater than calories out, you gain weight. But at the same time I don't think we eally understand weight gain or weight loss yet so I always study new diets with interest.   Yesterday I listened to a Science Friday interview of Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, with interest.  I liked his points well enough to order the book.  He believes we haven't proven that dietary fat or calories cause obesity.  In an article in Newsweek he writes (I edited and shortened):

1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.

2. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion.

3. Sugars [...] are particularly harmful [... because it ...] elevates insulin levels while overloading the liver with carbohydrates.

4. [...] refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes.

5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.

6. [...] Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.

7. Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism. [...]

8.[...] When insulin levels are elevated—either chronically or after a meal—we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. [...]

9. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity.[...]

10. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.

He recommends a low carb diet, similar to the Atkins diet. I'm going to read the book to learn more.

Losing weight by vibrating

A new study suggests a unique way of building more bone and less fat.  According to the New York Times, Dr. Rubin, from the State University of New York, reports that having mice stand on a vibrating platform causes them to build bone instead of fat.

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.

The theory says that impact on bones causes them to grow more so the vibrating signals the bones to strengthen and grow.  Lots of follow up research will have to be done to prove that vibration can cause bone growth and to show how it can be applied to humans.  Human studies are already being planned.