Why the Campaign to Stop America's Obesity Crisis Keeps Failing

When I read pieces like this latest one from Gary Taubes, he's preaching to the choir.

The idea is to “sound the alarm” and motivate the nation to act.

At its heart is a simple “energy balance” idea: we get fat because we consume too many calories and expend too few. If we could just control our impulses—or at least control our environment, thereby removing temptation—and push ourselves to exercise, we’d be fine. This logic is everywhere you look in the official guidelines, commentary, and advice. “The same amount of energy IN and energy OUT over time = weight stays the same,” the NIH website counsels Americans, while the CDC site tells us, “Overweight and obesity result from an energy imbalance.”

The problem is, the solutions this multi-level campaign promotes are the same ones that have been used to fight obesity for a century—and they just haven’t worked. “We are struggling to figure this out,” NIH Director Francis Collins conceded to Newsweek last week. When I interviewed CDC obesity expert William Dietz back in 2001, he told me that his primary accomplishment had been getting childhood obesity “on the map.” “It’s now widely recognized as a major health problem in the United States,” he said then—and that was 10 years and a few million obese children ago.

There is an alternative theory, one that has also been around for decades but that the establishment has largely ignored. This theory implicates specific foods—refined sugars and grains—because of their effect on the hormone insulin, which regulates fat accumulation. If this hormonal-defect hypothesis is true, not all calories are created equal, as the conventional wisdom holds. And if it is true, the problem is not only controlling our impulses, but also changing the entire American food economy and rewriting our beliefs about what constitutes a healthy diet.

His two books on the topic (Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat [the former is a better book, the latter is a much easier read]) are brilliant, and it's not an exaggeration to say that they changed my life, significantly, for the better. Is he 100% right on every point that he makes? Is he presenting a complete and final model of all aspects of human physiology related to weight and health? No, I'm sure he's not. But his models are, if imperfect, at least close enough to the way that the world actually works to be extraordinarily valuable.

And I hope that he continues to fight the good fight...

Is Sugar Toxic?

For some of us, the answer is clearly, "yes." The real question is, is that true for just some, or is it true for all?

Gary Taubes, whose work I wish I had discovered before last December, continues to publish important information.

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

It's a long piece, but it's important. Read it...


And here's the Lustig lecture that he references. It's definitely worth watching...