The Diet Delusion: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Loss and Disease

"It confirmed what I suspected. I ve spent years eating whole grain healthy stuff with pretty low fat intake and I still put on weight - even though I was going to the gym daily. It s only in the past 3 months by eating low carbs (always accompanied by some fat and protein) and a lot more fat (olive oil, coconut oil as well as meats and full fat dairy products) that I ve lost over 3 stone. I haven t exercised more or starved - just lost weight.
Everyone is different of course - but try eating along the lines this book suggests and CHECK IT OU BY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
The book is a must have - it certainly taught me never to trust any scientist completely, especially dieticians/nutritionists - they ve all got an agenda and a reputation to make."
~ Written on 2008-09-19

"This book is one of those books which once you read you cant really put down!
He has facts & evidence to support the truth that the LOW FAT DOGMA IS WRONG! With even evidence showing that the Government spent a fortune trying to flaw the Low Carb against the Low Fat dogma but failed (and so badly!) so it was all hushed up and forgotten.
But they can continue to say that they're right. But with more and more people following the low-carb hypothesis, and seeing overwhelming results, pretty soon they'll have to admit they're wrong.
This book is a great read but it'll make you angry as all the scientific evidence, with facts and proof, will make you question what you've been told by the medical profession. "
~ Written on 2008-08-29

"Thank you, Mr Taubes, for presenting a critical analysis of the evidence published so far, for although my own researches had drawn me to similar conclusions as your own, you have argued the case more eloquently, thoroughly, and accurately than I can.

The only distressing aspect about reading this book is that if one has to deal subsequently with so-called professionals and experts - such as my wife's 'diabetes team' - one discovers what Mr Taubes illustrates so well, namely that most of them appear to be blissfully ignorant of either the historical facts or the latest research.

I could write at some length extolling the value of this book, but other commentators have done the job for me. Apart from which, I doubt that I could find sufficient superlatives to do Mr Taubes justice.

Suffice to say, for anyone who is suffering from a chronic, life threatening disease, such as Type II diabetes, I cannot stress enough that reading this book will be of more benefit to you than the advice you are likely to receive from your medical team, since they are still pushing the high-carb, low fat and low-protein diet that they know simply does not work for over 95% of their patients. Any other so-called 'scientist' who persisted in performing the same unchanged experiment that had proved itself to have only a 5% success rate (with a better than 95% confidence limit), yet proclaimed that this was the 'answer' to the problem, would have his claims dismissed out of hand.

Take control of your life. Read this book so that you can defend yourself from the ignorance, prejudice and political bias you will undoubtedly encounter from the medical establishment when it comes to dealing with your diabetes and its complications. After all, it's not their life they are jeopardising, it's yours.

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~ Written on 2008-07-22

"All I can say is FAB, much needed and scientific. Also confirms the 'ridiculousness'of the cholesterol hype and furthermore the good cholesterol bad cholesterol rubbish.

A must read for any health professional.

Thanks Mr Taubes!

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~ Written on 2008-07-10

"This is an incredibly thorough, fully referenced and painstakingly detailed book. Sometimes it was hard going through all the science but I could not stop, because the story it tells is so eye-opening. So many unanswered questions I had about how to be healthy are answered in this book.

Taubes presents an extremely convicing challenge to the orthodox ideas of low-fat and low-cholesterol - hence high-carb - "healthy diets" that cannot be ignored. At the very least, those who believe in low-fat diets need to finally put forward some actual science that shows they are effective for health. But in fact the evidence that exists shows little, no or even negative correlations between health outcomes and "healthy" low-fat diets.

While called "The Diet Delusion" in its UK edition, Taubes actually exposes multiple delusions. The main delusion is the delusion that calorie-restriction diets work at all - they demonstrably don't, and this is the guilty secret of all those peddling them. Taubes, it should be pointed out, is advocating no specific diet or supplement, and has no stake or gain in convincing us of his position other than for the sake of our health.

Another delusion debunked comprehensively in the book is the "a calorie is a calorie" dogma. He exposes the weak understanding of thermodynamics used to promote this delusion. Thermodynamic laws allow, and indeed require, that activities may generate waste, transformation and other work as well as energy. No process is 100% efficient - different metabolic processes have different efficiency, and the body changes its processing of nutrients dynamically in response to its conditions. So the body is not a simplistic "input - output box" whose activity can be described by primary school arithmetic.

This leads on to yet another delusion which is the 'overeating' delusion. As another reviewer noted, 'overeating' is a self-referential and quite useless concept as a cause for obesity. We don't accuse growing children, or pregnant mothers, of overeating. We all know people who eat rapaciously and don't gain weight, and we don't label them as 'overeaters' either. The overeating hypothesis is empirically false, because there are ample studies showing that the same people can eat the same nutrients with different weight loss/gain results, or different people eat different levels of those nutrients with the same results.

In fact Taubes exposes the whole idea of controlling weight through the quantity of nutrients as yet another delusion. He shows that the body is largely homestatic, regulating weight, metabolic processes and activity in response to environmental conditions.

The epidemiological evidence is overwhelming that the diseases of civilisation - diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and others - are epidemic, and their origin is far too recent for genetics to be the causal factor. There is an environmental change that is responsible and Taubes puts forth credible evidence both from statistics and from the biology that the environmental cause of these disease epidemics is the massive increase in the part of diets composed of refined carboyhdrate, particularly sucrose and now fructose.

In brief, obesity is caused by refined carbohydrates, causing high insulin levels that act as a biological switch to divert incoming nutrients into the fat cells, while leaving the other cells - and the person - hungry for more.

In brief, heart disease is caused by oxidative stress and glycosylation driven by high insulin and high glucose levels caused, again, by high levels of dietary refined carbohydrates, glucose and fructose.

In brief, diabetes (at least the prevalent type 2 form) is caused by chronically elevated glucose and chronically elevated insulin trying to force ever more glucose into cells that need and want no more. Again, this is caused by dietary refined carbohydrates. While the phenomena is generally described as 'insulin resistance', Taubes explains this is simply the normal action of cells in an environment where the supply of glucose in the blood is excessive.

A few more debunked delusions - dietary cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Even serum cholesterol, which is totally unrelated to dietary cholesterol, does not cause heart disease. Nor does it significantly predict (correlate with) heart disease. Nor does dietary fat. Nor does animal fat. Nor does saturated fat. Correction! Saturated fat and animal fat are shown to be preventative of heart disease. It has, as Taubes said in his original 2002 article, been a Big Fat Lie.

And one more important delusion to debunk, for good measure - eating fat is not what makes you fat. In conjuction with carbs, fat will make you fat. But fat on its own will not make you fat, while carbs on their own will. Carbs are the necessary and sufficient cause of obesity.

Finally, Taubes points out that a key reason why people consume such high quantities of refined carbohydrates is that we lack a built in regulator - unlike with protein and fat where feedback mechanisms suppress the appetite, no such mechanism exists for carbs. In turn, the probable reason is that pure carbs were so rare and such a small part of our diet for the first 2 million years of human evolution (and millions of years of mammalian evolution before that), that no inhibition mechanism was needed. For millions of years we evolved to live on fat, protein, and unprocessed seasonal vegetables such as fruits and nuts. Prior to the discovery of fire even most (non-fruit/nut) vegetables were difficult to eat. Only after the domestication of grain in the Neolithic, an eyeblink of evolutionary time, would carbohydrates become a significant regular part of a (subsistence) diet. And it is only in the last 1-2 centuries that refined carbohydrates have become amply and widely available - becoming more prevalent in the diet ever since then.

It is perfectly reasonable to associate this great expansion in the consumption of nutritionally inessential refined carbohydrates with the diseases that came with it. Taubes presents a strong body of evidence that dietary refined carbs are the causative factor, the proximate cause, of these epidemics. It is incumbent on the public health authorities, nutritionists, and the medical profession, if they disagree with this claim, to start producing some evidence. In the meantime if they had the scientific rigour that Taubes shows, they would withdraw their "healthy diet" instructions as "unproven", at best, until they can provide such scientific evidence.

In the meantime, I will be reducing my carbs and especially my refined carbs to the bare minimum, and I do expect that it might save my life. Read this book, and it may do the same for you.
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~ Written on 2008-06-22