Carbohydrates produce insulin, insulin causes us to store fat. It's not complicated. There have been scientific studies out since the 30's entirely dismissing calorie counting as being effective.
"There is no consistent pattern to how people in the registry lost weight — some did it on Weight Watchers, others with Jenny Craig, some by cutting carbs on the Atkins diet and a very small number lost weight through surgery."
"Fat, sugar and carbohydrates in processed foods may very well be culprits in the nation’s obesity problem. But there is tremendous variation in an individual’s response."
The article isn't about good vs bad calories. It's about your body's fundamental changes in response to weight loss.
"For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place."
Read the article. Don't skim it. Actually read it.
I thought the article wasn't very good. It goes on at length with the only takeaway being that fat people have a very hard time maintaining weight loss and we're not sure why.
And note, your synopsis is not even correct. It's that people who have lost (a certain amount of) weight have a hard maintaining weight loss. There's data to indicate what some causes might be, but nothing conclusive yet.
The linked pdf makes a number of factual errors. it incorrectly suggests that ketogenic don't encourage eating lots of vegetables and low-sugar fruits. It also trys to twist "not all calories are the same" into "you can eat as much as you want". and of course, trans fats should always be avoided.
The key driver of modern obesity is the high availability of varied and intensely pleasing flavors. Even thirty years ago food was more bland, and there was way less variety in the grocery store. 100 years ago cooking with spices was a rare treat. Animals get fat on what is called the "cafeteria" diet, where they are presented with the choice of a high variety of flavors and nutrients. They do not get fat when presented with a monotonous diet.
Low carb dieting works because you are reducing food reward by removing pleasant starchy and sweet flavors, so people eat less. Low fat dieting also works for the same reason; people have had success by eating mostly plain potato.
What is a low carb diet? Who sets the baseline for the ideal amount of grams of carbs consumed per day? I never understood this. I can see how people may argue for and against "low carb" diets, but what I fail to understand is how anybody can argue _for_ a diet higher in carbs supplied by cereal grain-based products like breads, cookies, cakes, muffins, pasta, etc and sugar. Following this logic, isn't every diet that consists of real food -- not heavily processed -- low in carbs? Honestly, how many cups of broccoli and kale can one eat to reach even 100g of carbs per day?
Note: by heavily processed, I mean foods like sugar and refined flours that are borne out of taking a whole plant, extracting only the palatable component, and repeating this process millions of times until you have enough of the component to package it. I wonder how those who eat higher carb diets rich in starchy tubers and rice fare versus those who eat high carb diets rich in dinner rolls, glasses of OJ, cereal, and flavored low fat yogurt.
There are a few different thresholds, and the quality of the carbs (glycemic index / glycemic load) also matters.
Generally a good starting point is the Zone Diet macro split: 40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fats, by calories. On a 2000 cal/day diet, that's roughly 800 calories (or 200g) carbs. Low carb is generally anything less than that, with < 100g being fairly seriously constrained, and ketogenesis generally requiring ~50-100g.
And yes, most unprocessed diets are reasonably low in carbs, or at least have slow carbs. Though there are some relatively high-carb indigenous diets, particularly among Pacific Islanders eating manioc and breadfruit, though fish and seafood are also staples.
> This brings us to a core concept that Taubes fails to incorporate in his thinking: the idea that insulin signaling in fat tissue depends both on the concentration of insulin around, and on the sensitivity of cells to that insulin. In obesity, fat tissue is insulin resistant.
Did the author of the article read another Taubes book?
In the mentioned book, insulin resistance was a very important point. And the reason I cringe when I hear someone is injecting even more insulin into their body to combat diabetes.
Insulin resistance is Type 2 Diabetes, whereas insulin injections are a treatment (not a cure) for Type 1 Diabetes. Despite the common name of diabetes, they're actually completely different diseases that share many symptoms. It's also possible to have both.
I struggled for years trying to get in shape unsuccessfully before going on a ketogenic diet and losing ~100 pounds. It was kind of like switching from programming with memory to programming with values. It still takes hard work, but it feels like the odds are not as stacked against you anymore.
If it has been known for so long, why isn't it something that mainstream science tells us?
Remember there is plenty of people who believe all kinds of things which still have (like thinning medicine with water makes it more effective) no basis in reality.
And your claim doesn't pass the bullshit filter: there are millions upon millions of people who were starved to death in Hitler and Stalins camps. If fat and calories don't matter, why is it that there isn't a single fat (or even close to normal weight) prisoner of the third rich? Or from the Gulags?
But we don't even need to go there, you can just look at basic themodynamics: energy cannot be created from nothing, so when the people take in less food, they grow thinner and eventually die.
Straw man. Of course calorie restriction (starving yourself) works. Nobody in their right mind would claim otherwise. Taubes argues that starving yourself is just a very inefficient (and unpleasant) way to lose weight.
Good Calories, Bad Calories: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Challenging-Conventi...