

The Inanity of Overeating (calories and thermodynamics) - scottshapiro
http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/

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MikeOfAu
"Good Calorie, Bad Calories" was a pivotal book for me. It freed me up. I
realised that much of what we're told about nutrition is backed by bad
science.

Since then I've spent the last few years reading everything I can lay my hands
on and I wrote up what I'd found in a document for friends and family:
<http://bit.ly/cxZNG9>

I await Taubes' next book with interest.

~~~
deadmansshoes
\- You need to be off grains. Permanently. Forever. Sorry, but they are toxic.
That means no bread, no pasta, no oatmeal, etc.

\- No legumes, with the exception of white rice.

\- No milk forever

\- But do take other supplements.

So just the crazy pills then?

~~~
khafra
I think this is true for a limited subset of "you." I personally watched a
friend adopt the "no-grain, etc." diet, and immediately drop 15lbs and mostly
clear up his psoriasis. I, on the other hand, don't have psoriasis or 15lbs of
extra weight from systemic inflammation; so I wouldn't expect to see similar
benefits from dropping grains.

~~~
deadmansshoes
It would be more likely your friend has gluten intolerance -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatitis_herpetiformis>

If this is the case then cutting down on cereals would be standard medical
advice rather than a wonder effect of an unsound diet.

~~~
khafra
I have a few other friends who'd experienced similar improvements in health
just by cutting out wheat and the surprisingly many foods containing gluten.
For the no-grains guy, this was insufficient.

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deadmansshoes
He contradicts his argument in the first paragraphs.

1) Obese people tend to be weight stable for long periods of their life, just
like lean people. So when they’re weight stable, the obese and overweight are
obviously in energy balance.

2) If you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds
of excess fat accumulation every year. Since a pound of fat is roughly equal
to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat
every two years. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of
fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories.

~~~
eldenbishop
There is no contradiction. The second paragraph is just paraphrasing the
standard calorie-in->energy-out theory of weight gain and averaging the
'graph' of weight gain for analytic purposes. Ie. he never states that you are
storing exactly 19 calories per day, simply that over 20 years, you are
storing an 'average' of 19 calories per day. This is a very normal way to
discuss these numbers. For example, a scientist might describe the PHV
(pubertal height velocity) of a typical male as 9cm/year but these are growth
spurts and are not actually continuous.

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nopassrecover
I think I might just buy Good Calories, Bad Calories after reading this. It
might not tell me anything I haven't learned indirectly through other writers
but if it's written as well as this blog post that will justify its value
alone.

Looking forward to the new book incidentally, and hoping it isn't a content-
less and repetitive discussion of magazine clippings as this kind of book can
often be (I have no reason to suspect it will be, beyond bad experiences with
other books).

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retroafroman
TL:DR;

Instead of just stating that overeating causes our obesity, we should be
asking ourselves why we overeat, which is a much more complicated question.

I was disappointed it took that long of a post to reach that point. I was
hoping to learn something interesting about thermodynamics in the body.

