ABC News Nightline: Carbohydrates Make You Fat, and Perhaps Sick
- From: jeissner777@xxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:59:28 -0700
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story?id=3658957&page=1
Carbohydrates Make You Fat, and Perhaps Sick
Journalist Takes on the Conventional Wisdom About Diet and Disease
By VICKI MABREY
Sept. 27, 2007 -
In a world of fad diets and ever-changing ideas on how to get thin,
Gary Taubes is not just another diet guru but a journalist who has
covered science for the past 30 years.
It was Taubes who wrote the eye-opening -- and controversial -- New
York Times magazine cover story five years ago that asked the near-
blasphemous question: "What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?"
Now he's at it again. He's expanded that article into a new book,
"Good Calories/Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on
Diet, Weight Control, and Disease." In the book, Taubes looks back at
some 50 years of scientific research on why we get fat. He blames the
bread.
"My wife likes to refer to me as the Grinch who's trying to steal
Christmas," Taubes said.
And not just the bread, but the whole family of complex carbohydrates.
So "Nightline" took Taubes to lunch, and what better place to discuss
the dangers of carbohydrates than Raffaele's, an Italian restaurant on
Manhattan's East Side, where we could talk -- over bread and pasta --
about carbs and fat, good science versus bad.
Carbohydrate Chemistry
Taubes said that after rereading years of scientific research, he has
found proof that for the last half century, science has just gotten it
wrong: It's not fat that is making Americans fat, he said, it is the
base of the food pyramid, the complex carbohydrates, foods such as
bread, pasta, potatoes. It's the starches we were told we needed that
make us pudgy.
It's simple chemistry, said Taubes. Carbs spike insulin. Insulin
creates sugar. And sugar packs on the pounds.
"The grains are carbohydrates," Taubes said. "They're refined
carbohydrates. You take off the shell and all the protein and the
vitamins, and you refine it down, and you end up with something that
its primary effect on the body, immediate effect, is to raise insulin
levels. And if you raise insulin levels, what that does is drive
calories into your fat tissue. Raising insulin literally works to make
you accumulate fat. This is one of these phenomena that for some
reason the medical research establishment has chosen to consider
irrelevant to why we get obese."
It's a theory that Taubes claims is simple -- and anthropological. It
evolved from our days as hunter-gatherers, before we ate refined
carbohydrates and sugars.
"And all we're saying [in the book] to do is, 'Don't eat these foods
we didn't evolve to eat.' It's conceivable that switching to a diet
absent these foods, making the transition has side effects that we
have to deal with, that doctors have to deal with," he said. Click
here to read an excerpt of Taubes' book.
Carb-Eating Cavemen
"Carbs are not killers," said New York nutritionist Carol Forman
Helerstein. "Mother Nature would not have put carbs on the face of the
earth if they were killers. If you go back to our ancestry and you
look at the caveman, what did he eat? He ate carbs."
He ate carbs in the form of fruits and vegetables, said Helerstein,
and not all carbs are created equal. "[T]he difference is that today
the carbohydrates, because they're processed by the food
manufacturers, are very high in sugar. And the scientists have a name
for that: high gylcemic index -- it just means that it has a lot of
sugar in it. So there's a difference between a Milky Way bar and a
lettuce leaf, but they are both carbohydrates. So if you are eating
the right carbohydrates, the ones that come from the natural sources,
the fruits and the vegetables, then you will have a healthy diet."
Helerstein is the chief nutritionist for Diet Chefs, a multimillion
dollar company that delivers prepared meals to customers' homes, meals
based on the company's 40-30-30 formula: 40 percent low-glycemic
"good" carbohydrates, 30 percent lean protein and 30 percent "good"
fat. Standing at a table filled with Diet Chefs meals, Helerstein
points to a typical Diet Chefs dinner.
"This would be a typical, wonderful meal that any scientist would be
happy to eat," Helerstein said. "You have got your basic protein in
your chicken. Now that's a lean protein chicken. Your carbohydrates
are coming to you from the natural carbohydrates, which in this
particular case is salad and vegetables, and then in your dressing
here there's a little bit of olive oil and some flavoring that you're
able to pour over your salad and you have each of the protein, the
carbohydrate and the fat. That keeps your insulin levels stable and
that's what health is all about."
Controversial Theories
Helerstein and Taubes agree that the low-fat proponents got it wrong.
Fat supplies much of the taste in food, which leads to satiety, the
feeling of being full. In a way, eating fat helps us know we've had
enough and it's time to get up from the table. Surprisingly,
Helerstein and Taubes agree on another theory: that bad carbs can
kill. Taubes contends that carbs cause heart disease, cancer, even
Alzheimer's disease. "These diseases cluster together in populations,"
Taubes said. If you get fat you increase your risk of all these
diseases. The obese have a higher risk of Alzheimer's than do the
lean. So the natural, simplest possible hypothesis is that what causes
one causes all."
Helerstein goes further: "If you are eating sugar, and lots and lots
of sugar and pasta and bread and white rice and white grains and white
bread and white cereal, then you are initiating, after you eat, an
insulin response," she said. "Insulin is an inflammatory hormone and
it is a storage hormone. And I don't disagree with him. Where I
disagree is, what carbohydrates are you eating? If you're eating the
low-sugared, natural carbohydrates, they do not contribute to any
degenerative diseases. If you are eating the wrong carbohydrates, I
agree with him 100 percent."
Taubes' most controversial theories in the book are these: that
there's no evidence saturated fat and cholesterol do anything for us,
either positive or negative. They don't cause heart disease, he
claims. Nor does salt cause high blood pressure and hypertension. He
says fiber is not a necessary part of our diet, especially if we cut
out the carbs. And perhaps most controversial of all, Taubes said
exercise does not lead to weight loss.
"Exercise makes us hungry," he said, which causes overeating, and
leads to the buildup of insulin mentioned earlier. He posits that thin
people aren't thin because they exercise, rather, they exercise
because being thin gives them the energy to work out.
'Everything in Moderation'
Helerstein said Taubes is wrong about exercise. "I don't think that
you have to wake up and exercise for four hours a day," she said. "But
the answer to health is really keeping your lean muscle mass strong.
And the older we get, the harder that is to do. So each year we lose a
little muscle mass, and it's really harder to stay thin and healthy.
But I think that again, if a person exercises in moderation and
doesn't overdo it, it's a really important factor in health. "
Taubes said he isn't touting any particular diet (though he does say
"Atkins was right"). He said he's just trying to get scientists to
test the work of the researchers he quotes in his book and see if
their theories are correct. But he's expecting a large helping of
criticism when the book is released.
"First, they'll shoot the messenger," he said. "And then over the next
10 or 15 years, they'll debate the message and a good portion of it
might be accepted. I'd say 70, 80 percent. But you don't thank people
for pointing out your mistakes. It's not human nature, in general."
But for most people the bottom line is, our tastebuds and our hearts
control what we eat. Raffaele Esposito, owner of the restaurant where
we took Taubes to lunch, says pasta is the heart of life. "It's pasta
and life," Raffaele said. "You know? If you stopped the heart, you
die." Everything in moderation, he said. Everything in moderation.
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