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Good Calories, Bad Calories | 
 enlarge | Author: Gary Taubes
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  178 reviews
Sales Rank: 4113
Format: Roughcut
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 640
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400040787
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.283
EAN: 9781400040780
ASIN: 1400040787
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking book, the result of seven years of research in every science connected with the impact of nutrition on health, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.
For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) and sugars–via their dramatic and longterm effects on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation–and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. There are good calories, and bad ones.
Good Calories
These are from foods without easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. These foods can be eaten without restraint.
Meat, fish, fowl, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy vegetables.
Bad Calories
These are from foods that stimulate excessive insulin secretion and so make us fat and increase our risk of chronic disease—all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. The key is not how much vitamins and minerals they contain, but how quickly they are digested. (So apple juice or even green vegetable juices are not necessarily any healthier than soda.)
Bread and other baked goods, potatoes, yams, rice, pasta, cereal grains, corn, sugar (sucrose and high fructose corn syrup), ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fruit juices, bananas and other tropical fruits, and beer.
Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then –wrongly–were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.
With precise references to the most significant existing clinical studies, he convinces us that there is no compelling scientific evidence demonstrating that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, that salt causes high blood pressure, and that fiber is a necessary part of a healthy diet. Based on the evidence that does exist, he leads us to conclude that the only healthy way to lose weight and remain lean is to eat fewer carbohydrates or to change the type of the carbohydrates we do eat, and, for some of us, perhaps to eat virtually none at all.
The 11 Critical Conclusions of Good Calories, Bad Calories:
1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, does not cause heart disease.
2. Carbohydrates do, because of their effect on the hormone insulin. The more easily-digestible and refined the carbohydrates and the more fructose they contain, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.
3. Sugars—sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup specifically—are particularly harmful. The glucose in these sugars raises insulin levels; the fructose they contain overloads the liver.
4. Refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are also the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the other common chronic diseases of modern times.
5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.
6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter any more than it causes a child to grow taller.
7. Exercise does not make us lose excess fat; it makes us hungry.
8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is a tour de force of scientific investigation–certain to redefine the ongoing debate about the foods we eat and their effects on our health.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 173 more reviews...
 remarkable results in men, not so much for the ladies September 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Read the whole book, loved it. Not overweight myself or high cholesterol, but I am interested in the food I eat. The nation is getting heavier becasue of the quality and quantity of the food we eat. Refined white flour and sugar have to be bad for you, his research seems right on. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a big factor in type 2 diabetes, don't you agree? I recommended cutting out carbs to 3 friends- all male, slightly heavy and their weight dropped and cholesterol went from the 220's to the 180's. Great amateur-science results. For the women, recommended it to 2 women and weight didn't change at all over the same time period of 2-4 weeks. I wonder what the difference is.
 The Order Process August 30, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
The book was good. However, Amazon.com doubled my order and sent me two copies and even though I got credit on the cost of the second book I returned, I had to pay the shipping on the second copy both ways. I believe the order process could be improved.
 For Physicians Only August 29, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
I simply could not digest all this quote 'wonderful research'!
It was like eating at a smorgasboard and ending up feeling unsatified not knowing what you had tasted.
I was anticipating some direct information such as
A. these are the good carbs
B. these are the bad.
I am giving my copy to my Dr. to digest and perhaps he can in turn give me the A & B information.
Nobel Prize quality August 26, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is intellectually dazzling and of critical importance. It demolishes all the ideas of nutrition and health we are being fed by the current crop of 'experts'. Mr Taubes demolishes the high fat theory once and for all and points out sugar causes diabetes. Fat is by and large irrelevant. A little fat, a lot of fat, heaps of fat, no fat. It doesn't matter. The author quietly and efficiently takes a rifle and comprehensively shoots and kills every little "dietary fact" that you and I have been taught.
His arguments are devastating. He is shooting down so many things that I would strongly recommend him for a Nobel Prize as one critic on the backcover blurb suggests. But it takes time to understand the book because he is literally shooting one argument at a time. Think of the enormity of it. Diabetes is caused by suger which increases the supply of insulin to pathological levels. Insulin in pathological levels is a cardiac toxin. And it also causes diabetes. (High levels of insulin are bad for the heart, the breasts, the prostate and the colon).
So how do the diabetologists treat diabetes? With insulin.
That is, they keep the pathology going on and on. You would think that it would be sensible to treat diabetes with a no suger and low carb diet - right? Go to a diabetes website and download the dietary recommendations - and they will talk about fat. Fat has no effect on insulin.
How did they get themselves into such an horrendous state of affairs??
Mr Taubes outlines how we got into this mess with a clear head. He knows how to read scientific studies and understands how the different personalities in research affect which theory is taken up. That is the charismatic often win through - no matter how scant the evidence. The book should be read by everyone who cares about their health.
He should also be rewarded with something as significant as the Nobel Prize.
This book motivated me to look for myself.... August 17, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book was a real eye-opener for me. I highly recommend it. It is tough to be told that you have been mislead by people you trusted. It's even harder to accept that what you have been eating to improve your health has been causing your problems; and even harder to believe that the food you were told not to eat is exactly what you need to eat to be healthy.
So I was very curious to see if Gary Taubes was correct about scientists in nutrition being less than forthright with their datasets. I found a copy of the China Diet Study (Dr. T. Colin Campbell) and analyzed the dataset for myself (http://www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/~china/monograph/chdata.htm).
I correlated Body Mass Index (BMI) to diet. I found that animal protein and animal fat correlated to lower BMI, and vegetable oil, starch and sugar correlated to higher BMI. (The worst offender was wheat flour). I also checked heart disease and stroke; and found basically the same result. The data supported Taubes' thesis 100%.
This dataset from China has nothing to do with Gary's book other than to serve as an independent check on his conclusions. Using this dataset I personally verified (to my satisfaction) Taubes' point that what the scientist's tell us about our diets is just plain unreliable; and specifically verified that eating a diet of meat and vegetables will both lower your weight and suppress heart disease.
Taubes' book is worth reading if you want to find the truth of the matter yourself. The extensive reference list is highly "internet friendly", enabling you to check and follow up on any detail of specific interest. He isn't preaching at you, trying to convert you to his diet plan. His book teaches, with an entertaining emphasis that highlights the disparities between what we have been led to believe vs what the experts actually knew (and when they knew it).
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