I think Taubes is clear that many people do fine on a high carb diet.
Ha
You are a little more ecumenical than I am. That is, I'm less accepting of other causes of obesity, attracted instead to a single theory that explains most people's obesity. Namely: although many people can eat lots of carbs without getting fat, those who are quite overweight or obese are that way because of carb consumption.
Here's a relevant excerpt from the
Why We Are Fat book:
Why Diets Succeed and Fail
The simple answer to the question of why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not. But if this is the case, why do we all know people who have gone on low-fat diets and lost weight? Low-fat diets, after all, are relatively high in carbohydrates, so shouldn’t these fail for all the people who try them?
Most of us know people who say they lost significant weight after joining Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, after reading Skinny Bitch or French Women Don’t Get Fat, or following the very low-fat diet prescribed by Dean Ornish in Eat More, Weigh Less. When researchers test the effectiveness of diets in clinical trials, like the Stanford University A TO Z Trial that I’ll discuss shortly, they’ll invariably find that a few subjects do indeed lose considerable weight following low-fat diets. Doesn’t this mean that some of us get fat because we eat carbohydrates and get lean again when we don’t, but for others, avoiding fat is the answer?
The simple answer is probably not. The more likely explanation is that any diet that succeeds does so because the dieter restricts fattening carbohydrates, whether by explicit instruction or not. To put it simply, those who lose fat on a diet do so because of what they are not eating—the fattening carbohydrates—not because of what they are eating.
Whenever we go on any serious weight-loss regimen, whether a diet or an exercise program, we invariably make a few consistent changes to what we eat, regardless of the instructions we’re given. Specifically, we rid the diet of the most fattening of the carbohydrates, because these are the easiest to eliminate and the most obviously inappropriate if we’re trying to get in shape. We stop drinking beer, for instance, or at least we drink less, or drink light beer instead. We might think of this as cutting calories, but the calories we’re cutting are carbohydrates, and, more important, they’re liquid, refined carbohydrates, which are exceedingly fattening.
We’ll stop drinking caloric sodas—Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr Pepper—and replace them with either water or diet sodas. In doing so, we’re not just removing the liquid carbohydrates that constitute the calories but the fructose, which is specifically responsible for making the sodas sweet. The same is true of fruit juices. An easy change in any diet is to replace fruit juices with water. We’ll get rid of candy bars, desserts, donuts, and cinnamon buns. Again, we’ll perceive this as calorie cutting—and maybe even a way to cut fat, which it can be—but we’re also cutting carbohydrates, specifically fructose. (Even the very low-fat diet made famous by Dean Ornish restricts all refined carbohydrates, including sugar, white rice, and white flour.* This alone could explain any benefits that result.) Starches like potatoes and rice, refined carbohydrates like bread and pasta, will often be replaced by green vegetables, salads, or at least whole grains, because we’ve been told for the past few decades to eat more fiber and to eat foods that are less energy-dense.
If we try to cut any significant number of calories from our diet, we’ll be cutting the total amount of carbohydrates we consume as well. This is just arithmetic. If we cut all the calories we consume by half, for instance, then we’re cutting the carbohydrates by half, too. And because carbohydrates constitute the largest proportion of calories in our diet, these will see the greatest absolute reduction. Even if our goal is to cut fat calories, we’ll find it exceedingly difficult to cut more than a few hundred calories a day by reducing fat, and so we’ll have to eat fewer carbohydrates as well. Low-fat diets that also cut calories will cut carbohydrates by as much or more.*
Simply put, any time we try to diet by any of the conventional methods, and any time we decide to “eat healthy” as it’s currently defined, we will remove the most fattening carbohydrates from the diet and some portion of total carbohydrates as well. And if we lose fat, this will almost assuredly be the reason why. (This is the opposite of what happens, by the way, when food producers make low-fat products. They remove a little of the fat and its calories, but then replace it with carbohydrates. In the case of low-fat yogurt, for instance, they replace much of the fat removed with high-fructose corn syrup. We think we’re eating a heart-healthy, low-fat snack that will lead to weight loss. Instead, we get fatter because of the added carbohydrates and fructose.)
The same is likely to be true for those who swear they lost their excess pounds by taking up regular exercise. Rare are the people who begin running or swimming or doing aerobics five times a week to slim down but don’t make any changes in what they eat. Rather, they cut down their beer and soda consumption, reduce their sweets, and maybe even try to replace starches with green vegetables.
When calorie-restricted diets fail, as they typically do (and the same can be said of exercise programs), the reason is that they restrict something other than the foods that make us fat. They restrict fat and protein, which have no long-term effect on insulin and fat deposition but are required for energy and for the rebuilding of cells and tissues.
