Transcripts

Gary Taubes:
In effect, the evidence shows that those kinds of diets have no real beneficial effect and that there was no real reason to believe that that was a healthy diet to begin with.

Gary Taubes, author of the book Good Calories, Bad Calories, is a science writer who decided to take an objective look at the research on diet and health.

And what you find is it's not that there are certain foods that make us healthier, there are just certain foods that you add to any baseline diet and they make us unhealthy.

And those foods are carbohydrates; things like sugar, flour, potatoes, and rice - they raise insulin levels and insulin levels make the body store fat. What's fascinating says Gary, is that up until the mid 1960's it was widely believed and had been scientifically proven that eating these foods causes weight gain.

But the people who studied human obesity (and again there was actually only about a half a dozen of them who controlled the entire field) were so convinced that obesity was a sin in fact. It was the result of gluttony and slough - they simply refused to pay attention to what the biochemist and the physiologist had discovered about the regulation of fat tissue. And for the forty years since, we've continued to believe that obesity must be caused by over-eating.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.