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Adam and Mike and guest host, InForm Fitness instructor, Neil Holland, interview Gary Taubes to reveal his simple message: The widespread theory of caloric intake exceeding expenditure leading to obesity is flawed, and instead, our focus needs to be on the amount of carbohydrates consumed.
Now listened to in 100 countries, The InForm Fitness Podcast with Adam Zickerman is a presentation of InForm Fitness Studios, specializing in safe, efficient, High Intensity strength training.
Adam discusses the latest findings in the areas of exercise, nutrition and recovery with leading experts and scientists. We aim to debunk the popular misconceptions and urban myths that are so prevalent in the fields of health and fitness and to replace those sacred cows with scientific-based, up-to-the-minute information on a variety of subjects. The topics covered include exercise protocols and techniques, nutrition, sleep, recovery, the role of genetics in the response to exercise, and much more.
Inform_Taubes 1_April 3.mp3
Introduction [00:00:01] The inform fitness podcast with Adam Zuckerman and co-host Mike Rogers is a presentation of informed fitness studios a small family a personal training facility specializing in safe efficient high intensity strength training on our bi monthly podcast Adam and Mike discuss the latest findings in the areas of exercise nutrition and recovery with leading experts and scientists. We aim to debunk the popular misconceptions and the urban myths that are so prevalent in the fields of health and fitness. And to replace those sacred cows with scientific base up to the minute information on a variety of subjects will cover exercise protocols and techniques nutrition sleep recovery the role of genetics in the response to exercise and much more. On this episode Why We Get Fat. With national best selling author. Gary Taubes.
Gary [00:01:06] In the 60s. Diet books took up this idea that carbohydrates are fattening and you going to lose weight you don't eat them so you remove the carbohydrates from your diet replace it with fat. of all things. The infamous example of this was the Atkins diet and what I'd been doing in my book is just arguing that basically these diet book doctors got it right.
Adam [00:01:31] Hi welcome to the show. I have with me here co-host Michael of course. And I'm really excited to have this next guest Gary Taubes journalist author.
[00:01:40] He is the co-founder of Nutrition Science Initiative and author of The Case Against Sugar Why We Get Fat and the tome Good Calories Bad Calories. He's a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award and health policy research and has won numerous awards for his journalism including the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization. He is the first print journalist to be a three time winner of the National Association of Science Writers science and society journalism award. And we have with us today one of our instructors Neil Holland. And he's joining us this episode because as I understand it Neil your Gary is high intensity training instructor for a while so welcome to the program. Thanks Adam. Gary welcome.
Gary [00:02:25] Nice to be here. Thank you.
Adam [00:02:27] We're going to talk about the book that pretty much summarized your tome Good Calories Bad Calories. I assume you wrote why we get fat because well how many people were actually getting through the whole group calories calories.
Adam [00:02:43] Just want to get this message this important message across.
Gary [00:02:46] Yeah I mean this is I spent five years reporting my first book and I wanted to put in most of what I found. It's not even all of what I found. I had to leave stuff out and you end up with a 500 page book with another 150 pages of end notes and bibliography and that was a difficult read. And there were some. What I thought were extremely significant messages that had to be conveyed to you I would. Then I wrote Why We Get Fat. I get a lot of e-mails from people saying Would you please Your book changed my life. Now would you write one that you know my husband could read or my doctor could read or my father could read or so I did.
Adam [00:03:22] That was why we get in my case when I'm training so many people and I want to get your research across to them. I'm not going to hand them Good Calories Bad Calories that I'm losing the list of people that that really welcomes Why We Get Fat which is such an easy read and so on. It's so clear to me. What's come out so that's we're going to talk about let's talk about this but won't you please. First of all maybe tell us the elevator pitch if you will of Why We Get Fat OK.
Gary [00:03:51] Their elevator pitch.
Gary [00:03:53] So I have to preface this as I'm a investigative journalist who became a de facto historian doing this book and I realized that in order to understand what we believe you have to understand what we why we believe it and when we decided to believe in what we might have believed instead. So with that context.
Gary [00:04:12] Since the Second World War we believed that obesity is caused by eating too much. Very simple gluttony and slaw mild or you take in more calories than you expend in the excess are stored as fat. And everything we do to treat obesity is based on this premise. We tell people if you want to lose weight you've got to eat less and exercise more. Got to get into negative energy balance. And the message that came out of my research was that that's nonsense almost nonsensical. And it's the product of some very naive thinking of physicians in the post-World War 2 era who just assume that fat people got fat because they eat too much and that nothing else has been known. And there was always this alternative hypothesis which is that obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation and that's caused by a sort of dis regulation and the hormones and enzymes that determine how much fat we carry on our bodies and how much fat we store or how much fatty acids we burn as fuel and the hormone that dominates that is this hormone insulin and if insulin goes up we store calories as fat and when insulin comes down we mobilize those calories and we use them for fuel and we secrete insulin in response to the carbohydrates in our diet. And until the 1960s the conventional wisdom was that carbohydrates are fattening. Bread pasta potatoes rice beer sweet if you eat them you got fat women would say they go right to my hips just prior to the 60s and this is this is common note this was common knowledge and in the 60s a sort of pioneering work or diet books took up this idea that carbohydrates are fattening and you don't want to lose if you want to lose weight you don't eat them so you remove the carbohydrates from your diet you replace it with fat the ball things the sort of infamous example of this was the Atkins diet. And what I've been doing in my books is just arguing that basically these diet book doctors got it right and the medical community got it wrong. But the problem is we've been claiming the diet book doctors were quacks for since the early 1970s and the medical community just refused to accept what was a very simple message backed up by very profound physiology. That's actually textbook medicine.
Adam [00:06:47] All right guys so so this is it the bottom line is this. Watch your carbs and don't be afraid of fats.
Gary [00:06:52] Yeah basically it's a very simple story. I mean there are complications and all these stories.
Adam [00:06:58] So don't calories count at all. So you're saying for example you eliminate your your carbohydrates. I mean this is this is a question I get all the time. OK. So I can. I'm with you on this low carb thing. I can buy that the whole incident response and what you just said Gary. So does that mean I can eat as much fat as I want and not gain weight. I mean is there still a limit to the calories you you ingest.
Gary [00:07:23] Well let's think of it this way. And it's interests one of the ways that critics always attack these books is they said Oh yeah sure you any low carb diet. So the ultimate example of a very low carb diet is a ketogenic diet that Kito Atkins with a ketogenic diet. Now it's a huge fad and you get rid of all the carbs you replace with fat. So the idea is when you do that this medical community. Yes sure it gives you quick weight loss gets waterlogged but that's all it does. And I don't think these people have any clue what people with obesity really want how they want their bodies to work. So the way they want that we want our bodies to work like lean people's bodies work and lean people can eat is meat to satiety at every meal and not get fat. And the idea with these very low carb diets where you replace some of that is you are allowed to eat to satiety and to eat when you're hungry and eat to satiety and not get fat. A lot of people. Can eat as much fat as they want and. They're fine although some people can. So in some sense some people are still going to have to kind of consciously restrict how much they would like to eat if they want to get leaner but other people don't. Other people like the first time I ever tried Atkins is an experiment back going on 20 years ago now I was writing my first magazine investigative piece on the dietary fat dogma and I tried Atkins and it's an experiment and for me I was then a 40 year old man physically active I could eat as much food as I wanted to and I lost weight anyway. I can explain it physiologically but I wasn't trying to obey. I wasn't force feeding myself. I was just eating until I was done. You know I was doing the lean people though I was eating to satiety. So that's kind of the argument. My problem with this idea about calories is as soon as you start thinking about calories you get into this energy balance thing and you go just the wrong way to think about fat accumulation. So you're your fat cells don't even know they don't have no way of knowing how much you're eating and exercise your fat cells are responding to the presence basically of insulin in the bloodstream if there's a lot of insulin their fat cells take up fat if there's not a lot of insulin they're fat cells deposit fat and if you think about it as the calories you're going to end up with the wrong way to think about obesity. If you think about in terms of carbohydrates in insulin you can solve the problem. I argument I've been make this. Calories in calories out is just the wrong way to think about it though Gary.
Neil [00:10:01] Just tying into that there were two things I believe you've said both in Good Calories Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. I always found very compelling and that's something I always say to my clients when explaining how this works and I'd love to get your input or what you mean by this but two things you said. One was we don't get fat because we eat too much we eat too much because we're fat and the other thing was in terms of calories in versus calories out. You said it's like comparing a room talking about how a room gets crowded because more people are there. But the real question is why are they there. So I always like those too kind of metaphors and explain it to clients and I love to kind of hear what you mean by that.
Gary [00:10:43] OK. So this is the problem with this energy balance idea this calories in calories out. Thing is the people who talk about it will talk about it too. This is determined by the laws of physics so the laws of physics tell you the first law of thermodynamics is that if somebody gets fatter they get heavier. Their take in more calories than they expect and it's to use the example and they'll just use it like if a room gets more crowded that room is taking in more people than are leaving. You know if I get rich another metaphor I've been using lately is well. If you asked me why Bill Gates got so rich I can tell you that he took in more money than he spent but that doesn't answer the question of why he got rich at just the a condition. It's saying the same thing in two different ways. That's a tautology. So if somebody got fatter they took in more calories than they expand and then you say well how do you know they took in more calories and they expanded and a person will say well because they got fatter. And so then you get back to others. That doesn't tell me how they got fatter than just taking in more energy being spent as a condition that's fulfilled. It's saying the same thing. Physicists would have called it spiritually senseless. It doesn't really make any sense. No matter how you look at it what you need is an explanation and then the room example when I lecture about this and I say let's say you wanted to know why this room was so crowded there could be a lot of reasons for it. You know there's an interesting lecture going on there's free food in the room. Maybe there's a fire alarm went off and the fire extinguishers outside the the sprinkler system has gone off in every room outside. People have come into the room to hide from the y you know because it's the only room that's dry. Maybe it's 95 degrees outside. This is the only room with air conditioning. Maybe we slept with me.
Gary [00:12:42] You know it's a party going on.
Gary [00:12:44] Could be that you know I hired the offensive lineman from the football team to stand at the door and pull people in. A lot of explanations for why the room got crowded that have to do with the conditions inside the room and the conditions outside the room and the conditions at the barrier. The membrane like these big football players standing at the door like bouncers dragging people in and not letting them leave but the fact that more people ended than left is irrelevant. You know clearly more people aren't that the left the room is crowded. You know why. And it's the same thing when we talk about obesity so rather than ask why a person gets fat.
Gary [00:13:21] You could ask why does a fat cell get fat. This is how I like to think about it because basically you're the the integration of all your fat fat cells. And so then you ask the question why did more fat enter the fat cell than leave it. Because of more fat enters of fat cells and leaves it that fat cells gonna get fatter. We know that. And now you've got a very now you've got the fat cell itself you've got the membrane of the fat cell and you've got. The outside you know the equivalent of outside the room which is the circulation in the bloodstream and you can start asking question What factors have to happen to make the fat cell take up fat. And the answer is insulin has to go up. I mean it has to be fat in the bloodstream but there's always fat in the bloodstream. Triglycerides in these particles called lipo proteins or fatty acid but insulin has to go up or the fatso isn't going to take up fat. And if you want to get more fat out of the fat cell insulin has to go down. And in fact fat cells happen to be what the researchers who studied this called exquisitely sensitive to insulin. So if you've got a fat cell that's exquisitely sensitive insulin that means the insulin has got to be really really really low for the fat cell to let the fat out. And when it's really really really low basically that means you're in ketosis. And now you're back to the keto diet plan. And now you have the rationale why the ketogenic diet works because that's a diet that you know maximally lowers insulin and maximizes the chance that the fat cells are going to let it out. So just more calories coming in than leaving doesn't tell you anything. You know when if I say somebody got fat because they took in more calories than they expend that they may aid too much and they exercise too little and the eating too much is a behavior and exercising too little sedentary behavior is a behavior. And now you've taken a physiological problem which is somebody is getting fatter or is burdened with obesity and you blamed it on their behavior. And there's a whole science now neurobiology and neurology that's trying to understand what's happening in the brains of people with obesity.
Gary [00:15:34] That makes them eat too much and exercise too little. Because they're hoping they could explain it via some you know in grain neurological mechanism that.
Gary [00:15:45] Doesn't require them to blame the obese person for basically poor behavior for causing their own problems. They're never going to solve the problem as long as you believe obesity is an energy balance problem you believe it's a behavioral issue.
Adam [00:16:00] Can we survive without carbohydrates.
Gary [00:16:02] No. Yeah they can might have an Eric Westman and the low carb world. So there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. There a central fat. You need a minimum protein. This is one of these again the nutrition community gets this wrong. They will say we need one hundred twenty five or 130 grams of carbs a day to fuel the brain because if you're eating a carb which diet your brain Milburn carbs for fuel and it'll burn about 120 to 130 grams a day I don't know where that number comes from but I'll trust it. If you're not eating carbs your brain to work perfectly fine on ketones on glycerol released from fat molecules when they're used for fuel. It's there the world is full of people now especially when only Taubes and seemed to do exceedingly well.
Adam [00:16:52] There are metabolic functions that utilize glucose and can't utilize a ketone.
Adam [00:16:57] So where we get into glucose from for certain metabolic functions.
Gary [00:17:02] Well you'll get glucose from the amino acids in the protein liberal convert that into glucose. So you'll always have enough glucose if you're getting enough protein you have enough glucose to satisfy whatever requirements the body has.
Gary [00:17:18] Now let's talk about fruit because that's always a controversial aspect of it also. And you know I've been told some people said to me if you eat fruit you know you're gonna get scurvy. I mean where are you getting your vitamin C from. OK.
Adam [00:17:33] Not to mention other viral chemicals that everyone talks about is so beneficial from fruit.
Gary [00:17:38] You know this whole fruit craze this whole fruit thing is fascinating because clearly most humans would never have eaten fruit except a few months a year max throughout even in well into the agricultural era it wasn't like you know peasants in China growing rice were sitting around eating apples and berries in their spare time on food was hard to come by and it was seasonal. I often think are no clinical trials that say you're going to be healthier if you eat food than you're knocking. You know it's. There's a lot of people who have decided that fruits and fruits go along with green vegetables like this phrase fruits and vegetables you can't separate the two and if we need vegetables we should eat fruits. Part of what we believe about how healthy fruit is apple a day story and the vitamin C and orange juice for advertising campaigns by the apple industry and the orange industry. The fact of the matter is you get all the necessary vitamins and minerals you need in animal products with the possible exception of vitamin C. And actually when I was doing my research for Good Calories Bad Calories This is one of the areas I focused on the most because I realized doing my reading I read a lot of the memoirs of explorers who were lost in the Arctic or stories about explorers who had died in the Arctic. And there was an interesting phenomena that I noticed out of an explorer one to the Arctic and his ship sunk crushed in the ice or something and they couldn't rescue the ship supplies the explorer did perfectly fine living off you know the food to the input but if they salvage their supplies from the ship which often included you know bread and sugar and they eat the bread and sugar they died of scurvy. So they won it in with diet alone no scurvy in you a diet with crackers whatever this you know and sugar or scurvy.
Gary [00:19:44] So I actually contacted the leading authority in the world on vitamin deficiency diseases who is out here at the University of California Berkeley who had written books on scurvy on Barry Barry and we talk this so I said look you know this world better than I do.
Gary [00:20:04] Is it possible that you need more vitamin C when you're eating carbohydrates than when you're not. And it turns out that basically Vitamin C competes for entry into cells with the same receptor system that glucose does wow. So when your blood sugar is high you can't get Vitamin C into your cells and it's one reason why diabetes type 2 diabetes a lot of the symptoms and uncontrolled diabetes look a lot like scurvy because your cells become depleted of vitaminC.
Adam [00:20:38] So the Brits didn't need Lyme. They needed to get rid of the carbohydrate they need.
Gary [00:20:41] Exactly. So to the scurvy is not a disease of the absence of vitamin C it's a disease of not getting enough Vitamin C when you're also getting a carb rich diet that diet with refined grains and sugars.
Gary [00:20:56] And when you actually look again in the literature it's very clear about the fact that you need more vitamin C when you were eating carbs and when you're not. And now there's this whole carnivore movement and there are these guys walking around like Sean Baker who you know if the conventional nutrition theory were right these guys would have been dead years ago. They're doing fine. None of them have gotten scurvy yet and yet they don't eat plant food they live on. I don't know. Maybe they're supplementing Vitamin C without telling us. But I've asked them about it and they swear they're not.
Mike [00:21:29] Gary you know we have a lot of clients friends of our family members who actually you know there are people we have to convert to you know this way of thinking in your era your book. But there's a lot of people actually already believe what you're saying and what we've been preaching for a while but they just can't stick to a no carb diet a low carb diet. And I mean all of our clients that they could go a week they could go to weeks they could go three weeks they get the results and then whatever the next party the next whatever they fall off the off the wagon again. And do you have any like any advice for how to get these people to like step one step two step three. I guess a behavior or whatever to to be more compliant to what they already know is the right way to go.
Gary [00:22:19] You know it's funny, I'm just finished a draft of my new book and the last chapters talk about this and in fact I have these I interviewed 100 plus physicians I wish I had interviewed you guys.
Adam [00:22:30] So all you know is anyways you're going to hear here first before your books been published.
Gary [00:22:35] And I was asking him about the challenges and he had the biggest challenge getting people to try it and then getting them to stick with it even when it works well because they fall off the wagon and one of the messages that I'm communicating which was forget at the moment which physicians said this to me it was in mind. She said the key to falling off the wagon is remembering that there's still a wagon to get back on to. Well it's an interesting problem I think you could address the issue of why they're eating might not have satisfied them. You know one of the things people don't realize is that. You really do need to may have kind of a fat rich pattern of eating you need a lot of it's the fat that brings you joy to the diet. So it's not enough to just eat a low carb diet. You have to replace those carbohydrates with fat and you kind of have to do it liberally or you end up with a very unsatisfying diet. You remove the sugar if you don't know and a lot of fat and then there's not a lot of joy in the eating.
Adam [00:23:37] Like Emeril says fat is flavor that it's fat.
Gary [00:23:40] It's just. So this is why I mean I joke that I'm not one of these people have convinced myself that that butter and bacon are health foods and I hope that hell I'm right.
Gary [00:23:49] But hold on to the butter and bacon that bring joy to the diet. I actually had a physicist friend at Berkeley here. I used to think he was really bright until he said to me these diets work because people just get bored of eating bacon after a while and they can they eat less. And I said Well first I'm going to challenge this idea that anyone's ever gotten bored of eating bacon.
Gary [00:24:13] You know the rest we could do experiments but it's sort of...
Mike [00:24:16] You can eat a little too much at one time but you can get bored of bacon.
Gary [00:24:21] I mean the message is you know and then I keep an eye on this book I was asked to write a book. That was I wanted to write a book that was a prescriptive book that was going to be Gary's food worlds like Michael Pollan did Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and then he wrote Food Rules so I would have my good calories bad calories why we get fat.
Gary [00:24:41] And my version of food rules and I couldn't do it. And one of the reasons I couldn't do it is because the message I keep wanting to get across is you know some of us didn't just need to abstain from eating carbohydrates. And this was said back in 1825 by this Frenchman who said why do people give you the most famous book ever written about food was a book called The physiology of taste by this guy John on somebody out Sabourin he says you know he's eating 500 meals with people who are overweight or obese and they always tell him how much they like the bread and potatoes and they can't live without the rice. And if you don't want to eat if you want to be fat you can't eat. He says you need more or less rigid abstinence too starchy flowery and sugary far to the diet. And we do. Some of us just. And you got to kind of get that across to people that they're not going to find another way to lose weight.
Gary [00:25:33] However they did accept bariatric surgery. However they do it they're going to end up having to get rid of the carbs because it's the carbs that are making them fat.
Gary [00:25:40] It's a simple message. It's like cigarette if you want lung cancer don't smoke and if you don't want to be family some people can smoke their whole life and not get lung cancer some people can eat carbs to their heart's desire and not get heavy. But those of us who get heavy can do it. So you fall off the wagon you get back on. For some people it's not worth it. But I think when you learn how to eat this way and you learn how it feels to actually be healthy and to you said to have your body work like a lean person's body so that you can eat to satiety and not get fat not worry about counting your calories and walking away hungry for many people it turns out to be worth it.
Adam [00:26:23] So let me ask you one last question before we sum this up. Why do people get so angered by advocates of the LC each If diets the low carbohydrate high fat diet. Why do you think there's something that evokes so much anger.
Gary [00:26:37] Well first of all. I think about this all the time. I mean I'm not gonna be able to give you a thoughtful answer. It's different from what they've been saying. For starters nobody likes to think they're wrong. So if you spend your whole life saying the way you lose weight is eating less or the way you lose weight is by eating a Mediterranean diet or a dash diet or it's all about I don't know what. And then these other people come along and say No no no no no no no you're wrong. Nobody likes to be wrong. And nobody likes to be wrong professionally. Because you've built your whole persona your credibility. Who you think you are. Then you're respected in the world because of what you believe and then these other people are coming along and thing you don't. You're wrong. That's part of it. And then it just it really goes against virtually all of the tenets of what constitutes a healthy diet. So it's not just said were telling people to eat fat and eat saturated fat meat processed foods like bacon. You know we're saying don't eat pulses and don't eat legumes and don't eat the whole grains and don't eat. You know and you know the traditional way of thinking about that's an eating disorder if you're cutting out a whole food group. That's what people do when they have an eating disorder. So we're just running up against a whole world of panic in the conventional thinking that pushes too many button. It's like asking people to vote for Hillary Clinton even if you're a Democrat you know it's like and you're a Republican. It's like you know what. No matter what you think of Trump Hillary pushes too many buttons. Right. Right. Right. You end up with the wrong president.
Adam [00:28:21] Well I have to say Gary I just want to say thank you for I think from a lot of people because you you are challenging these tenants and you've done a great job and you've gone you've done a lot to challenge those tenants. And I want to thank you for that and you've helped you've really helped me in a lot of our clients and keep up the good work. I really appreciate what you're doing.
Gary [00:28:44] Thank you.
Extro [00:28:44] This has been the inform fitness podcast with Adam Zickerman for over 20 years in fitness has been providing clients of all ages with customized personal training designed to build strength fast.
[00:28:59] Visit inform fitness dot com for testimonials blogs and videos on the three pillars exercise nutrition and recovery.