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*123 Fat synthesis and accumulation.
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*124 The progressive addition of carbohydrates was similar to a common treatment of diabetics in the pre-insulin era: Diabetics would be fasted to lower their blood sugar to healthy levels; then protein and fat calories would be increased gradually, until glucose appeared in their urine. That would be considered the critical calorie level, and the diabetics would never be allowed to eat any more than that.
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*125 Van Itallie, Stunkard, Bray, Cahill, and Dwyer.
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*126 Van Itallie attributed this ineffectiveness, as was common at the time, to the fact that “a varied diet reduced in energy content remains highly palatable” and so too tempting. “Even the Lord’s Prayer does not call for resisting temptation,” he would say; “it asks that the supplicant be not led into temptation.”
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†127 This does not include several texts specifically on the psychology and behavioral treatment of obesity.
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*128 According to Novin, when he wrote up his presentation for the conference proceedings Bray removed the last four pages, all of which were on the link between carbohydrates, insulin, hunger, and weight gain. “I couldn’t believe he would make that kind of arbitrary decision,” Novin said.
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*129 Indeed, Mayer would divide those who endorsed carbohydrate-restricted diets into those who were sincere and misguided, and those who were simply insincere.
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*130 It was not “even remotely true,” Stare wrote, “that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health.”
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*131 In treating obese children, Sidbury noted, there is “concern that a low calorie diet will be harmful to growth.” On this low-carbohydrate diet, however, the children experienced “continued normal linear growth,” even though it was also very low in calories.
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*132 Four glands that lie either behind or embedded in the thyroid gland.
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†133 Adolph’s studies were also noteworthy because, if humans are anything like rats, they contradict the popular notion that we gain weight by eating energy-dense foods or can lose weight and keep it off by decreasing the density of our diets—by eating soups, for instance, in which the calories are diluted by water, or fiber-rich greens and salads rather than calorie-dense meats—and so learning how to “feel full on fewer calories,” as the Penn State nutritionist Barbara Rolls has advocated.
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*134 Rats are nocturnal.
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*135 Because diabetologists and clinical investigators typically measure insulin in humans or laboratory animals at longer intervals—say, thirty minutes or an hour or two after a meal—they pay little attention to the details of what’s happening in between, which means missing this first great wave of insulin secretion.
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*136“Of or about the head,” referring to the fact that these reflexes are not mediated by the peripheral organs themselves—just as the two waves of insulin secretion are an inherent property of the pancreatic cells that secrete insulin—but are stimulated by nerve signals sent directly from the brain.
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*137 The USDA’s standard nutrient database says eleven hundred calories. The Center for Science in the Public Interest puts the number at sixteen hundred.
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*138 After a year, subjects participating in the lifestyle-modification trial had reduced their total food intake, on average, by 450 calories a day. They ate more fruits and vegetables (one to two servings more a day); they decreased their grain consumption by four servings a day and “sweets” by five. The calories from all carbohydrates increased, on average, by over 5 percent, but because of the decrease in total calories, the total amount of carbohydrates consumed decreased.
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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Gary Taubes
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Publishing Division of the Massachusetts Medical Society to reprint an excerpt from “Diet, Serum Cholesterol, and Death from Coronary Heart Disease: The Western Electric Study” by R.B. Shekelle, et. al from The New England Journal of Medicine, January 8, 1981, copyright © 1981 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Publishing Division of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taubes, Gary.
Good calories, bad calories: challenging the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control, and disease / Gary Taubes.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Borzoi book.”
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Low-carbohydrate diet. 2. Reducing diets. 3. Weight loss. 4. Carbohydrates, Refined—Physiological effect. 5. Nutritionally induced diseases. I. Title.
RM237.73.T38 2007 613.2'63—dc22 2007006794
eISBN: 978-0-307-26794-8
v3.0