Gary Taubes

I mentioned Taubes' earlier bona fides because it was presumably his track record with articles and books on cold fusion and particle physics research that convinced the editors of _Science_ to give him the go-ahead on his 2001 journal article that preceded the 2002 NY Times article and the 2007 book. I think his track record demonstrates his concern for both good science and good journalism.

I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field.

Oh dear. Even if you had data to back that up, are you really going to embrace science as a popularity contest?

I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.

I'm not as interested in scientists' opinions as I am in the underlying science. I'm unaware of any studies that show the Atkins diet is really a disaster, but feel free to cite away. But to repeat myself, don't conflate warnings on the dangers of carb consumption with being a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Taubes' focus for most of his career is about how good science is perverted for not-so-good human motives. So for example when some of your "real scientists" offer a "real controlled scientific study"[1] showing that people lost weight on both low-fat and low-carb diets, Taubes asks[2] the rather logical question, how is that a weight-loss study would restrict total calorie intake on only one (low-fat) of the…

Off the top of my head no, most of my insight came from observing addiction in others, and experimenting over the course of a decade. However, the two books which I guess started me on this journey are Why We Get Fat by Garry Taube [0] and The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris [1]. Both of these books take a scientific approach to diet (which is governed by habit and addiction, after all).

I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions, all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad.

For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist. And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK.

If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee, pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold…

I would say that the message of the article is "we need more regulations". My reaction was, basically, "you haven't shown that; at best you've suggested we need better enforcement of existing regulations'. So while I disagree with the original linked article, I'm not sure you and I disagree. :)

As for the studies, this is winding far afield, but there's two main ways you can do a study: Controlled and observational. Controlled is hard, but gives good data. Observational is easy, but gives unreliable data, especially when relating to people.

To a first approximation, a controlled study can prove things about human health, while an observational study can suggest areas where a controlled study would be useful.

It's not that these studies have methodological errors (as far as I know, they don't). It's that they're observational studies, and best case, they can't prove things in the way a controlled study would.

If you want a good primer on "what are observational studies and why are they problematic for human health"...I don't actually have one handy. But there was some very good discussion floating around about the "Red Meat Consumption and Mortality" recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

A lot of headlines said, basically, "science proves meat will give you cancer", but again, it was an observational study, and it simply didn't show what people who didn't understand statistics thought it did. Some links discussing…

This is trash of the worst kind: fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience. Please tell me this is a parody and it's gone over my head.

I was just talking to my sister about kitsch, camp, and punk, and how all of those scenes were misunderstood by a certain subpopulation who didn't catch the irony. "Animal House" was pure parody. I can tell you that a lot of fellow undergrads emulated it, and not everyone caught the joke. And sometimes, some people are so enthusiastically applying irony to everything, they forget about basic decency. (I admit to making mistakes in both directions.)

I suspect that a study of what people actually read would reveal that "fatuous nonsense wrapped in pseudoscience" is about par for the course. Most diet movements fit this description, yet how many billions of dollars have been wasted on them? One can't even get the general public to apply something as basic as the laws of thermodynamics without making huge mistakes. A lot of people are no better off applying basic physical laws than thinking they should make more sacrifices to Zeus.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567081

http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/

The takeaway here is that we're evolved to deal with the problems and lives of cavemen. It's only through some accidents of talent and diligence that some of us are able to understand things above and beyond that level.

> But if a fat person simply eats less, no matter the macronutrient content, he or she will lose weight. This is well documented, and even Taubes doesn't disagree with that.

A low-carb diet doesn't have to be intentionally low calorie. That's the point. Eating very low carb allows the body to adjust hunger levels to match existing fat stores. If you're fat and you allow your body to do its job, you won't be as hungry because you have plenty of energy stored up and the body is eager to use it. In other words, we've evolved to survive times of plenty and times of famine, and our modern diet with extremely high carb intake throws this system out of whack.

Low calorie is just forced starvation and although you will always lose weight this way, it's an uphill battle because you're fighting the body's fat regulation mechanism. You might be eating high-carb but low calorie, causing insulin spikes, extreme hunger, and protein wasting. It's not an easy diet to follow and it might even be counterproductive.

This is the theory anyway. This queston has been posted to Taubes many times over though, and he himself can explain it a lot better than I can. If you're interested in the topic, this is definitely worth a read: http://garytaubes.com/2012/11/what-would-happen-if-thoughts-and-thought-experiments-on-the-calorie-issue/

It would probably a very good idea if you can keep to it.

Doing so with mild T2 diabetes could lead to complete remission (as long as the diet is kept).

In more advanced T2 diabetes it could lead to significant improvement, and reduction of required medication.

People with T1 diabetes simply don't produce enough insulin. External insulin is required.

Management of T1 diabetes is also way more complicated and mistakes are immediately life threatening.

Are you familiar with Dr. Richard K. Bernstein's approach? It is a very low carb diet (he doesn't call it Keto as Ketosis is not the aim) combined with a lifetime of experience managing it.

See his book The Diabetes Solution, his Youtube channel, and the Type1Grit facebook group. There are a lot of type 1s running <5% HbA1C on his program.

He's definitely very contreversial, but I always found his reasoning extremley presvasive. Not to mention that he's a 90 year old with T1 from childhood, still practicing medicine and seeing patients (or at least he's been practicing up to a few months ago).

https://www.diabetes-book.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@DrRichardKBernstein/videos

https://www.facebook.com/Type1Grit/

There's also the great Gary Tabues and his books, especially Rethinking Diabets

https://garytaubes.com/rethinking-diabetes/