39 quotes
The bulk of the science is no longer controversial, but its potential significance has been minimized by the assumption that saturated fat is still the primary evil in modern diets.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
This notion that fattening is the cause and overeating the effect, and not vice versa, also explains why a century of researchers have made so little progress.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
Despite myriad attempts, researchers were unable to establish that patients with atherosclerosis had significantly more cholesterol in their bloodstream than those who didn’t.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
Skepticism, however, cannot be removed from the scientific process. Science does not function without it.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
This era began with a handful of naïve assumptions…The forty years of research that followed would overturn them all—but it would have effectively no influence on the mainstream thinking about human obesity.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles of themselves.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
That the toxic-environment hypothesis is deeply immersed in moral and class judgments is evident by the observation that few or none of the condemnations of fast-food restaurants included a coffee chain such as Starbucks, despite the copious extra calories it peddles.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
We should not be surprised that dieting is difficult, as Keith Frayn of Oxford University says in his 1996 textbook, Metabolic Regulation. “It is a fight against mechanisms which have evolved over many millions of years precisely to minimize its effects.”
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
“It appears that efforts to promote the use of low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful,” Weinsier noted, but the reduction in fat intake did “not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population.”
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
Von Noorden’s focus on metabolic expenditure set the science of obesity on the path we still find it. The evolution of this research, however, proceeded like a magician’s sleight-of-hand. By the 1940s, common sense, logic, and science had parted ways.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
“Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power,” as Susan Sontag observed in her 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor, “are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” This is certainly the case with obesity.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
When I interviewed Grundy in May 2004, he acknowledged that metabolic syndrome was the cause of most heart disease in America, and that this syndrome is probably caused by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. Yet in his three reports—representing the official NIH, AHA, and ADA positions—all remained firmly wedded to the fat-cholesterol dogma.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
It’s hard to avoid the observation that at least some individuals lose weight on carbohydrate-restricted diets while eating considerably more calories then would normally be consumed in a semi-starvation diet.… Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with calories.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet—unrestricted in calories—than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)
From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day…. The facts did not support these claims, but the myths served a purpose, and so they remained unquestioned.
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007)