With the holiday season upon us many people will be looking at how to avoid gaining too much weight, and probably in the new year how to lose some weight. Then the question turns to how to lose weight: exercise, exercise and reduce calories, low-fat diet, low-carb diet, then which of the many diets out there trying to give you a detailed prescription of what to eat.
Gary Taubes the author of the book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (where he rattled the scientific establishment and challenged the low fat dogma that has dominated diet theory), and soon to be released, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, has a new blog. He had some interesting things to say in this blog post. It is a long post and worth reading, but here are a few nuggets.
Simply put, anyone who tries to diet by any of the more accepted methods (i.e., Weight Watchers), and anyone who decides to “eat healthy” as its currently defined, will remove the carbohydrates from the diet that may be — if the carbohydrate/insulin hypothesis is correct — the most fattening. And if they’re trying to cut calories, they’ll be removing some number of total carbohydrates as well. And if these people lose fat on these diets, this is a very likely reason why.
The above quote is after a long discussion on which diet is best to lose weight.
So here’s the lesson, the moral of this story: before we assume that low-carbohydrate diets are just one tool in the dietary arsenal against overweight and obesity, and before we assume that everyone is different and that some of us lose weight and keep it off because we eat less fat (and more carbohydrates) and some because we cut carbs (and so eat maybe more fat), we should make an effort to understand the concept of controlling variables and look to see which variables are really changing and by how much. Because it’s quite possible that the only meaningful way to lose fat is to change the regulation of the fat tissue, and the science of fat metabolism strongly implies that the best way to do that, if not the only meaningful way, is by reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed and/or improving the quality of those carbs we do consume.
This line of thinking would be consistent with some form of a paleo diet, I have written about previously.
Some food for thought going into the high weight gaining period, and maybe something to keep in mind if your goal is to lose weight starting in the new year.
