The Diet Delusion [Paperback]

After several decades of complete confusion - thanks to the bumbling incompetence of the scientific community and our government masters - I am now beginning to understand the relevant aspects of human metabolism, through reading Gary Taubes' groundbreaking book "The Diet Delusion". Not only do I now know that your body weight does not depend purely on how many calories you eat and how many you use - I also know exactly why.

Believe it or not, our mothers were right: starchy foods do make you fat! It turns out that eating fewer than 2000 calories a day of carbohydrates can make you very fat regardless of how much exercise you do, while cutting right back on carbohydrates and eating more fat - even if you exceed 3000 calories - can make you slimmer (and quickly too) without getting hungry. If you would like to understand how these things can be true, in spite of all we have been told, then read this book. I promise, you will understand.

There are no "new miracle diets" in here - just conscientious, accurate, painstaking explanation of the facts. Taubes himself is a journalist, not a scientist or doctor, so he has no axe to grind and no tenure to chase. He contents himself with reporting what has happened in nutrition research, ever since Mr Banting found he was unaccountably obese in the 1860s and was eventually restored to slimness and health through a diet that eliminated starchy foods. Then we had Ancel Keys and his cholesterol theory, and a gentleman named Newburgh who insisted that fatties simply have no will power. (Neither of those theories has ever stood up in experimental tests, which usually prove exactly the opposite).

A word of warning - "The Diet Delusion" is a fairly massive book, both in length and content, and will take several days to read. That's purely because Taubes lays the groundwork properly, gradually building up his explanation in simple terms that any lay person can easily follow. There turns out to be a lot of groundwork, but by page 400 you will be reading about the chemistry of insulin, triglycerides and fatty acids - and enjoying the intellectual stimulus.

Bottom line: Taubes has showed me that all my own empirical observations and experiences have a reasonable explanation, and I have not been going mad when the calorie sums didn't even begin to add up. The reason is one I hardly even dared to think of: the scientific establishment has failed utterly in its duty to inform us lay people of what is good and bad for us. Much of what governments tell us to do is not only useless, but positively harmful.

Of course this is still a great book, but why did the UK paperback version not include the interesting 8 page "afterword" that the US paperback edition (published under its original title of "Good Calories, Bad Calories") did? The implication is that it is also not as up to date as the US version - it is also printed on smaller sized and slightly less good quality paper.

Having said all that, it is still a fantastically good read.

It is just a pity that this excellent author is not served as well as he could be by his UK publishers.

I bought this book after reading a review in the British Medical Journal as the influence of diet on health is a subject of great interest to me. This book is not a light-weight journalistic book but a work of scholarship going in great detail into the background history as to how some supposed firm truths about, for example, the deleterious effects of dietary cholesterol have become entrenched despite much evidence to the contrary. The author has done a prodigious amount of work ferreting out research papers, interviewing scientists and presenting some of the complex biochemistry that underlies why some of the entrenched ideas are wrong from first principles. In the latter regard I've known for years that ingested cholesterol, say in eggs of prawns, will not increase circulating cholesterol because, as a biochemist, I know that blood cholesterol levels are controlled by a feed-back system so that synthesis in the liver is reduced if cholesterol is provided in the diet. What I didn't know was that data from the Framingham Heart Study, that didn't fit the received wisdom that cholesterol is bad news, has been buried, for example, that cholesterol levels in women over 50 years has no bearing at all on heart disease. Similarly, propaganda that saturated fat intake is linked to breast cancer is the reverse of the truth, and the repeatedly found inverse correlation between blood cholesterol level and risk of various cancers (in other words the lower cholesterol level the higher the risk of cancer) has been constructively ignored because the scientists doing the research were so convinced that saturated fat and cholesterol were the culprits in the search for a causative factor in heart disease. Yet time and time again when research has been done where similar populations are studied (i.e. not comparing different countries) the results find little or no association. As a medical research scientist myself I know that one has to avoid becoming so attached to beliefs that research is done to prove that one is right rather than what should be the case to test to the limit that the belief is wrong.

I suppose it's because dietary fat has the same name as the thing that pads out our adipose tissue that it's popularly assumed that it's the fat in the diet that makes us fat, whereas all food is potentially laid down as fat in the tissues. Similarly because metabolic energy is generated from glucose it's assumed that carbs are what are needed for energy, but again that's not the case, protein, carbohydrates and fat are all energy sources. Athletes don't need to stock up on carbs for energy, their fat stores are there for that purpose.

The wealth of research linking insulin (and the triggering of insulin secretion by carbohydrates in the diet) to fat deposition is comprehensively and convincingly presented by the author is both unsurprising from first principles but it is shocking that it has been side-lined by the "fat is bad " brigade in the field of obesity and heart disease. Lay persons may wonder how false hypotheses can prevail but may not realize that important international conferences are overwhelmingly funded by pharmaceutical or food companies and the influential "thought-leaders" are often on retainers from these industries or at the very least the research is funded by the latter and support given to present their findings at conferences. "Thought-leaders" tend to be the editors of journals and thus wield power over what gets published. Also there's an inherent publication bias in favour of papers finding positive associations between factors because negative findings (i.e. reporting no association) are less likely to be published or secure further funding as there's no money to be made out of research that finds no benefit in to weight-reduction of manufactured low-fat foods; or questions the importance of cholesterol in the genesis of heart-disease in the vast majority of cases, then the wholesale prescribing of statins, to reduce cholesterol, one of the biggest money-spinners of all time would be under threat.

The author is to be commended for this monumental and thought-provoking book.