
Gary Taubes: The Inanity of Overeating  - cwan
http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/
======
mkn
_Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you
accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by
365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never
burned roughly 19 calories. Let’s round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice
round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called "The
Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.")_

He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and
every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your
weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial)
20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day
to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an
average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain
it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond
to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an
organism's weight is a feedback mechanism _in which the mass of the organism
appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term._

Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for
example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through
diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not
an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever
it is--help us all--taken seriously.

I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so
obviously wrong right out of the gate.

~~~
defen
I'm not sure how the maintenance expenditure is relevant to his point - the
point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the
amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the
weight. The fact that the baseline changes is an irrelevant detail. Regardless
of what the baseline is at any given point, how does the system (meaning the
person's body+brain) know when to stop eating?

~~~
mkn
_the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the
amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the
weight._

The point is that you won't ever gain the 40 lbs if you only eat the 20
cal/day extra.

Imagine you start eating the 20 cal/day extra. Initially, your weight climbs
at 1 lb/year. However, by the time you gain that one pound, you have to spend
an additional 11 cal/day to maintain that weight, so now you're gaining at a
bit less than 1/2 lb/year. By the time you (asymptotically) approach having
gained 20/11 ~ 1.9 pounds (which really only happens at infinity, but let's
imagine you splurged to put yourself over), then you're at maintenance for
your new weight. In order to gain more, you have to increase your uptake
again.

As you gain weight, you accumulate metabolic load, so it takes a serious
surplus of calories to continue to gain in the long term.

The steady-state condition of obesity requires a _large ongoing surplus_ of
calories to maintain.

Plausible fixes are incorporating more fiber in the diet to increase the
feeling of satiety, reduce portions generally, cut out high-calorie drinks,
and start exercising, even if only moderately but consistently.

Succinctly, the amount you "should" eat is not the amount to maintain your
current weight, but the amount you need to maintain a healthy weight.

~~~
nkurz
This is all true, but I'm wondering if you are mistaking a strawman for Taubes
actual argument. The bit about '20 calories/day' is his attempt to explain the
current philosophy, which he feels is fatally flawed, in the way you mention
among others. He's setting up this argument merely to tear it down. Despite
being the simplified version of the standard wisdom, he agrees with you that
it's wrong.

His actual point is at the end: 'Maybe when we get fat it’s because those
physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating
our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat'. He might be wrong
about this, but his point is that the difference between an obese and non-
obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories
per day over a lifetime. There must be something else in play.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...his point is that the difference between an obese and non-obese person
cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over
a lifetime..._

If that's his point, it's wrong. The intake difference between the obese
person and the non-obese person is just shy of 1 big mac/day after 40 years
(440 cals maintenance + 20 cals excess).

------
tptacek
Worth mentioning, maybe, because I was surprised by this factoid when I
learned it: Gary Taubes is not one of the 10,487 "nutrition experts" hawking
diet books; his best-known book, _Good Calories, Bad Calories_, is a serious
pop-sci look at the scientific controversies behind nutrition; prior to
writing it, Taubes was already a science writer of no small repute.

Interesting to see him take the "laws of thermodynamics" meme head on.

~~~
dsdfsdf
This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being
incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous
work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's
distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about
being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or
nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's
about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people
who don't know how to dissect an argument.

~~~
rkalla
Was it hard writing this comment while waving your arms so wildly about?

How about some of your own facts/links/corrections showing where he "clearly
doesn't know what he's talking about".

------
waterhouse
It occurs to me that I haven't seen this question addressed anywhere: Is
everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally
efficient at extracting energy from food? (Rhetorical question.)

To illustrate with an extreme example, lactose is a sugar and carries energy,
but some people can digest it (and their bodies will get the full complement
of calories from it), and some people can't (it'll get digested by bacteria
and they'll get gas and feel unpleasant; I'm pretty sure they don't get
calories from it). It is incorrect and stupid to say that an item of food with
significant lactose component carries "N calories" without specifying whether
the person who eats it can digest lactose. Likewise, with cellulose, I think
cows get a lot more energy out of cellulose than humans can.

Also, it seems likely to me that people's digestive systems' performance
varies with "outside" conditions in the body. For example, I've heard that
being pumped full of adrenaline puts digestion on hold; and subjective
experience suggests to me that if you eat a lot of food (over a period of,
say, a day), your system will send it through pretty quickly, without
digesting it fully.

I suspect there are a lot of other situations in which one's body doesn't get
all N calories from an "N-calorie" item of food. I suppose that if that
happens, then the remaining part probably will be digested by bacteria, and
one may notice symptoms of... oh, hey, there's a name for this, "indigestion".
(Though if the amount of left-over energy is really small, then the symptoms
are probably too slight to notice. If 10 or 20 calories a day matters, then
this may make things unpredictable.)

I suppose one could count the bacteria digesting the food that you didn't as
"calories burned", but then that means you may be burning a bunch of calories
without doing any physical activity.

Does someone more knowledgeable than me know a) whether these things are
really significant and b) whether these researchers take them into account?

~~~
cincinnatus
It is pretty clear that digestion varies dramatically from person to person,
and from moment to moment for the same person. You hit upon two major things
in your question; what flora are in your gut, and how the rest of your body
is.

Anecdotally I've noticed I can change my stomach on purpose by what I eat, and
rebalance the flora. For example I used to eat Tums all the time to deal with
acid indigestion. Then I did a 3 day fast at the suggestion of my mother in
law, and found I was free of indigestion for months after that. Now whenever I
find myself getting heartburn more than a couple times I do a fast and it
clears up for awhile.

There is increasing evidence the balance of flora also contributes to how you
process food, and can contribute to greater development of fat when out of
whack.

------
fingerprinter
When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of
things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as
modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science.

1\. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather
than, say, how much you workout or your genetics.

2\. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more
important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad
food.

3\. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense.

#1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses
(genetics).

#2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is
basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and
cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case
but we are just now catching up to that science.

For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone: 1\. Eliminate
grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think
watermelon) 2\. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat
(high fat meat is great...no worries) 3\. No oils other than coconut or olive
4\. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet
potato etc) 5\. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them. 6\. some fruit, but only
of the berry/cherry variety 7\. minimal diary

<http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/> is a great place to start.

#3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your
metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the
activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36
hours.

I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet
and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern
conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+
years.

~~~
sliverstorm
That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic
behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric
man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are
actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy.

 _10\. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of
sugar like apples. Stick with berries._

This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I
realized that modern fruit is often _not the same fruit from 500 years ago_.
It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for
example, used to be small, sour & bitter.

I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been
eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on
grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.

~~~
fingerprinter
Yeah, grains are a tough one. We have to love grains as they basically helped
humans take over the world! I firmly believe that without grains we wouldn't
have 6 billion people today.

That being said, I don't think eating grains is optimal for our bodies. Most
of what is coming out of science today shows that we still haven't evolved to
eat grains and use them very efficiently in our body. We use them, but they
cause an inflammatory response and that is obviously suboptimal for overall
health and nutrition. We get some nutrition out of them (nothing that we
couldn't get from veggies or meat), but it also damages at the same
time...catch-22.

I think of it this way: at the zoo, you see the handlers feed tigers raw meat
and pandas bamboo because that is what they evolved to eat. What did we evolve
to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health.
Personally I believe what I wrote earlier is what we evolved to eat and I
believe most of the science supports that.

~~~
roadnottaken
_"What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve
optimal health."_

I hate this sort of blind naturalism. We evolved to be susceptible to polio,
tuberculosis, and plague and to live to ~30. Just because it's _natural_
doesn't mean it's optimal -- science and technology can, when judiciously
applied, add a lot to the quality (and length) of life.

Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35
(child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from
most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your
"evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with
modernity.

~~~
rue
> _[…] and to live to ~30._

People used to die younger because of injuries, illnesses and poor nutrition,
not because the body is only "supposed" to live for 30 years.

> _Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age
> ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us
> from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc)._

That's absolutely not true. It seems likely that older people have played an
important role in society throughout, helping take care of children while the
more able work, sources of wisdom &c. While evolution hasn't eliminated all
diseases of the old age (because it doesn't work actively like that) longer-
lived genes have provided some survival advantage.

~~~
roadnottaken
I'm willing to bet that 10,000 years ago you wouldn't have been able to find a
homo sapien on this planet that was older than 50. The vast, vast majority of
evolutionary pressure occurred well before then.

------
roadnottaken
Boy it took him a long time to NOT get to the point... I want my 10 minutes
back.

~~~
rkalla
Noticed that as well; about half way through he introduces the thermo-dynamics
issue and the implied (but useless) truth-ly-ness of fat people eating more
than non-fat people, then spends the entire remainder of the article stating,
re-stating and re-phrasing that _same point_ again and again and again with
different analogies, examples and mock conversations.

It was about 2 paragraphs away from the end (before the last mock
conversation) that I realized he was baiting for his book OR doesn't have a
conclusion strong enough to share.

I absolutely could be wrong, but I can't stand being lead around by my chin
with arm-waving tomfoolery and flashing lights just to find out there is
nothing there.

If he had made his compelling point, or at least hinted at it more than the
very last comment -- "Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological,
metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue,
driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and
appear" -- I would have been more interested.

I don't know that what I quoted there was even the correct "hook" at his book
premise as it starts "when we get fat..." talking about AFTER someone is
already fat, when the premise of his book is "why we get fat" which is the
before... the cause.

I am interested enough to want to pick his book up, but also annoyed enough to
take my sweet time doing it in case it's hollow.

\---- EDIT ----

I was critical above of Gary's blog post so I did some more reading to see if
I would be interested in his book and his ultimate point being made.

I found this review on Amazon that completely sold me on it:
[http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0307272702&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=)

While I haven't read the book yet (downloading on iPad now) and proposition
that Gary is making (according to this reviewer) is fascinating to me and
jives with the way I feel at times.

Gary talks about how sugars and the insulin response feed your fat and your
fat itself takes on a self-sustaining role in your body, not the passive
storage-mechanism we understand it to be.

~~~
roadnottaken
Agreed. In stark contrast, I appreciate Michael Pollan's pithiness:

 _"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."_

It's not that complicated, folks.

~~~
jdminhbg
No offense, but that's complete bullshit, and the sort of tautological
reasoning he's mocking. Of course you should eat "not too much" -- eating "too
much" is too much!

~~~
Vivtek
The key word in that quote is "food", though; the "not too much" is an
afterthought.

~~~
mike_organon
It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be
criticized?

~~~
Vivtek
Not if the criticism is a blanket "this is total bullshit".

------
yummyfajitas
I'll start with one messed up point in this article: _One way to get around
this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on
end and then we realize we’ve put on five or ten pounds...and then we decide
to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it...But then
how do animals do it?_

Easy: most animals have weight which fluctuates significantly depending on
food availability. In the wild, many are undernourished. Overeating is a real
problem for domesticated animals. <http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet-
obesity-fact-risks/>

But now I'll argue against his real thesis. Based on other articles on this
same topic, I get the impression Gary Taubes is an opponent of the "personal
irresponsibility" theory of obesity - see this article for instance:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&#...</a><p>But
unfortunately, he proposes to replace it with a much higher entropy theory.
Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which
explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low
education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only
one of these outputs. Occams Razor suggests he is probably wrong, and from
what I've seen, he doesn't even try to address this.

~~~
tbrownaw
> Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which
> explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low
> education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains
> only one of these outputs.

I could go pick a bunch of correlated things and ascribe them all to "magic"
or "Zeus" or what-have-you, but stuffing all the entropy into a black box like
this shouldn't make it count as a "low-entropy theory".

~~~
yummyfajitas
It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several
correlated things.

------
pamelafox
I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat"
yesterday(both available on Kindle!).

GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science
in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the
carbohydrate theory.

Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :)

[I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]

------
dsdfsdf
This article is inane. Just a sample:

"Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely
trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll
have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot
by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an
accuracy of better than 1 percent."

The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who
has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers.
If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full
meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously
decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake
with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific
weight.)

Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you
burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying
to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain
weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give
people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god,"
"you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The
link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically
trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and
reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get
pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because
you're gaining weight.

It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what
he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science
that he doesn't understand.

P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat

~~~
nkurz
_He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't
understand._

That's odd. You would have thought that an undergraduate physics degree (even
from a liberal arts institution) and a masters in engineering (OK, that one's
from a real school) would have given him at least a _basic_ grasp of the
issues. :)

His "20 calories a day" explanation is not the argument he is making. Rather,
he's pointing out that it's absurd to think that the sole difference between
an obese 70 year and his svelte wife is the one sugar cube per day the fat one
added to his morning coffee. Are you arguing that it is indeed this simple,
and that all we have to do to have a thin and fit population is to drink black
coffee?

p.s. Why the new account?

~~~
dsdfsdf
What's more important, the two pieces of paper he received or the fact that
his own arguments clearly depict he doesn't understand? He says:

" Does anyone – even Jonah Lehrer or the neuroscientists he consults – think
that the brain, perhaps in cohort with the gut, is making decisions about how
much we should eat, on how long we stay hungry and when we get full, so that
we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. That’s matching intake to expenditure
with an accuracy of better than 1 percent. (We consume, on average, about 2700
calories a day, so matching energy in to energy out and not overshooting by 20
calories requires better than one percent accuracy.)"

"...we actually have to be perfect in our matching of intake to expenditure or
we’re going to get inexorably fatter (or leaner, if we err on the side of
going hungry), or at least we have to average perfection over decades."

His argument is that the body is not accurate to within 20 calories a day. He
appears unaware of the fact that this kind of regulation, which I agree isn't
possible on a day-to-day basis (the brain never says "don't eat that last 1/12
of a candy bar"), is unremarkable when amortized over time. That is where his
scientific inexperience shows. "Averaging perfection over decades" happens all
the time and is perfectly unremarkable. He is oblivious to this fact.

This is a fatal error. Regardless of how it fits into his larger argument, he
gets this basic and fundamental point wrong. When an author can't get facts
like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments. And
indeed, a random sampling shows they are fundamentally broken. I would not
trust him to explain any kind of complex science.

~~~
nkurz
_When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of
the rest of his arguments._

I agree that this is a pretty good standard to adhere to, but there are other
explanations: perhaps Taubes understands the issues well, but didn't do a
great job of translating them to analogies. Or perhaps you (as reader) are not
correct in your understanding of his argument. I suspect Taubes would agree
with you that given an appropriate long-term feedback method that fine
regulation is possible, thus I presume the actual issue is something else.

I'm inclined to trust Taubes because I've enjoyed some of his prior writings.
Here's an award winning article of his that was published in Science:
<http://www.junkscience.com/news3/taubes.html>. You might enjoy this earlier
article as an example of his style applied to a different topic. While it's
certainly possible he's completely wrong here, I don't think it's because he
lacks any fundamental understanding of science.

As I read it, Taubes' basic critique is that the 'calories equals weight gain'
formula is so flawed as to be almost useless. The more I look into it, the
more I agree with him. Yes, obviously at the extremes there are physical
limits involved, but presuming a purely linear response just seems silly. I
cheer him on in his attempts to come up with something better.

------
warwick
"That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call
“vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the
same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got
fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us
nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t."

I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am
fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because
there are people who are fat), it's a tautology.

I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part
of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's
premise.

EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all
eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the
statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me
being needlessly pedantic.

~~~
waterlesscloud
It's not that you ate more calories than you burned, it's that you absorbed
more calories than you burned.

I think it's worth asking why some calories are more likely to be absorbed
than others, and why some people are more inclined to absorb more calories
than other people.

------
elptacek
"We don’t know. It’s complicated." But then there's the thought bubble with
the words "Moral failure" in it:

[http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physician...](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physicians_have_less_respect_for_obese_patients_study_suggests)

------
andrewljohnson
I take issue with his statement that there are plenty of animals that have
abundant food, which don't get fat. I just don't think that's true. Even for
the animals that have plenty of food, they still have to go out and
forage/hunt. On the other hand, if you just pile up food in front of animals
everyday, they will eat it and get fat. Some examples of this are my parents'
dogs, and there are no animals but humans and domestics that have infinite
food with no work attached.

I think people and animals eat, because that's how we are wired. Any animal
gorges itself presented with work-free food. Our body wants as much fuel as it
can get at a very basic level.

However, I don't think it comes down to "personal responsibility." I think
society is successful at instilling logical discipline in many members, and
less successful with others. If you are fat, it's probably because your family
didn't raise you to have the tools to make good health decisions and follow
through with your thoughts. I also think unsatisfied people tend to over-eat,
over-smoke, and over-everything else.

It takes both luck and hard work to be happy and fit.

~~~
joe_the_user
I weight between 135-145 pounds and I'm 6' tall. I'm well past thirty.

I eat as much as I can. The only that stops from eating is stomach pain from
overeating.

Some people may get fat from overeating. But it's hard to generalize here.

~~~
rue
No, it's very easy to generalize: an overwhelming majority of people will get
fat from overeating, some quicker than others. I'd think your condition is
somewhere in the single-digit percentages.

I've always been fairly lean – 176/70ish (5'9"/155ish in SU) – a "can eat
anything" type, but taking an almost 3-month break from cycling while not
reducing food consumption has resulted in a gain of about 8kg/17lbs. (Planning
to drop to about 68kg by June).

------
DrStalker
The article is not helpful in any practical way. It simply gives the core
thesis that eating too much doesn't make you fat, and that the author knows
some secret that he will reveal in his book once you buy it.

Why should I give any more weight to this than any of the thousands of other
"buy this diet secret!" books out there?

~~~
DougBTX
_The article is not helpful in any practical way._

True, but what it does do is explain why the "thermodynamic" explanation,
although correct, is not practically useful.

------
klbarry
This is a fascinating article that uses logic really well. Of course, he
doesn't go into the answers to the question he poses: "Why do people overeat?"
I suppose you have to buy the book to figure that out.

~~~
tptacek
He definitely has a hypothesis about that (read _Good Calories, Bad Calories_
for more details --- or, Google [ucsf fructose] and watch that video again).

~~~
fingerprinter
+1 for fructose video. Awesome watch.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

------
fleitz
I think the medical establishment would be overjoyed if people on average were
putting on only 1 pound per year. The obesity "epidemic" is about 50-100
pounds of extra weight. Bariatric wards are filled with those hundreds of
pounds overweight not 20.

------
mmaunder
Not sure that I trust a thin guy's advice on why people get fat.

~~~
snth
Would you trust a fat guy's diet advice?

~~~
TGJ
Funny, people seem to trust Dr. Phil.

