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>>Taubes isn't taken seriously by most dieticians and nutrition researchers we talk to (I work at a nutrition startup).

That's because most dietitians and nutrition researchers follow conventional wisdom, which was established back in the 50s and 60s. Taubes himself included an amazing commentary on how conventional wisdom is incredibly difficult to dislodge in medicine and related fields. He had no illusions about his book being enough to do it, especially since he's a science writer rather than a scientist.

But his work is very valuable, and his dissection of why we believe what we believe is spot on. He goes a little overboard in blaming carbs, but does an excellent job vindicating fats.

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>>That's because most dietitians and nutrition researchers follow conventional wisdom

Sadly, you hit the nail on the head, 100%. That is exactly the problem, most dietitians will still try to sell you on the CDCs protein intake recommendation of 50g and and a diet that consists of 80% carbohydrates - which just plain contradicts mounting scientific evidence.

Furthermore, most people will just say you need a "balanced" diet, having taken absolutely no thought to consider why they consider certain diets balanced to begin with.

If you move past your comfort zone, to the point where you can draw your own conclusions, without needing to refer to government guidelines to validate your every belief, you will see that in a few years we will look back on our current recommended diets and laugh.

Taubes does a more than adequate job of trouncing the old thermodynamics, calories in, calories out argument. The guy does have a masters in Physics from Stanford, after all. I leave it to you to look it up.

Edit: Feinman on a calorie is a calorie and why it violates the second law of thermodynamics

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC506782/

"The guy does have a masters in Physics from Stanford"

???

I've got a Ph.D. in CS from UTAustin, but I don't think you would want to take medical advice from me.

The point was to show that Taubes has the education and training to critically review scientific literature. Not that he is an expert on medicine.

I disagree with Taubes reasoning for other reasons, but the point the poster made was that someone who studied physics at Stanford will understand how the Laws of Thermodynamics work.

>> Sadly, you hit the nail on the head, 100%. That is exactly the problem, most dietitians will still try to sell you on the CDCs protein intake recommendation of 50g and and a diet that consists of 80% carbohydrates - which just plain contradicts mounting scientific evidence.

In nutrition there is never ever (never ever) such a thing as a "scientific evidence".

All the nutrition research around is a pile of conflicting information. Just as an example, a short time ago in HN was pointed a research where "a calorie is a calorie" was proven, in the context of a diet.

I still remain convinced that having a basic clean nutrition and a decent amount and consistent of sport would turn any healthy individual (9x% of the population) into a fit one. People keeps feeling attracted to nutrition religions just because they think they can get in shape without changing their unhealthy habits.

Yes, the advice of all these old guard dietitians is working fantastically for us.

Looks around at all the diabetic, morbidly obese people.

Yep, working great.

How many of those people do you think follow the advice of a dietician even 25% of the time?

It's weird. Often times you'll hear people saying they ate an apple for desert instead of that chocolate souffle the waiter recommended, when their main meal was a 2000-calorie monster full of breaded chicken, onion rings and french fries. And then they will tell you their dietitian told them to eat more fruits, so they are following his/her advice!

First, it is my experience that most people do, religiously so, for a short amount of time (a month or so seems common). And then, the 20% for which this advice produces the expected result continues practicing it, and the 80% for which it doesn't work start following less and less religiously, until they don't at all.

That's mostly evidence that dieticians are solving the wrong problem. To borrow from another poster in this thread, if the composition of what you eat was enough to solve obesity, it is likely that saying "don't drink alcohol" would be enough to solve alcoholism. And yet, hundreds of years of experience show that it is wrong for the latter.

A diet that is easy to follow (such as Roberts' Shangri-La and Asprey's RFLP) is what dieticians should be striving for, but instead most of them recommend a regime that their clients are unlikely to follow (and then blame the clients).

I'm not sure I believe that most overweight people have even had the advice of a dietician.

I suppose things like the food pyramid sort of count, but even the old one didn't endorse the empty calories evident in shopping behaviors (i.e, chips and pop).

Sorry, I assumed you were in referring to people who have dietetic advice in general, but I now see you referred specifically to the morbidly obese.

> but even the old one didn't endorse the empty calories evident in shopping behaviors (i.e, chips and pop).

But it made the (now) classic "calorie is a calorie" mistake, so it implicitly okayed them.

Portion control is actually one of the primary issues, less so than the actual food being eaten.

Many people will eat relatively healthy, but due to poor satiety or portion control, still gain weight.

Lets roll in the science-mobile and discuss real, concrete things.

1. Not eating carbs has nothing to do with our hunter-gatherer origins, there are no over-arching truisms that can be made about the macronutrient distribution of how hunter-gatherers used to or currently eat. Concordantly, paleo "proper" insofar as it resembles utilizing our understanding of hunter-gatherer diets to eat healthier than a Standard American Diet is not necessarily low carb.

2. Eating carbs doesn't cause you to turn into the Stay-Puft man like magical fairy dust, even if they're relatively unhelpful to sedentary people as a nutritive calorie source. Sedentary people should get more protein and fat than carbs relative to what an athlete would.

Moving onto 'keto', which is the more GI/ketosis focused variety of low carb/paleo:

High-fiber and whole-grain calorie sources should be preferred to the opposite. The only thing that makes an apple not "junk food" is the fiber. Fiber has been shown to blunt the glycemic impact of carb-bearing foods. Apples are otherwise useless unless you really need the carbs to survive/fuel your activities.

>http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

>Determining which aspects of the Western lifestyle are truly aberrant for our species and pose the greatest risk of obesity is complicated by the conflicting and limited data on diet and metabolism in non-Western populations. For example, while Western diets are certainly more sugar-rich and energy-dense than more “traditional” diets and wild foods [4], [8], [9], many hunter-gatherers seasonally consume a large portion of their daily calories as honey [10], [11] (Fig. S2), which has high concentrations of glucose and fructose [12].

>As is typical among traditional-living Hadza, over 95% of their calories during this study came from wild foods, including tubers, berries, small- and large-game, baobab fruit, and honey [17] (Fig. S2).

>The only thing that makes an apple not "junk food" is the fiber.

This is an oft-repeated mantra among proponents of low-carb paleo-style diets, but it largely ignores the role of micronutrients and particularly phytochemicals in human health. An intelligent choice of fruits can provide a bevy of phytochemicals that lower the risk of a wide variety of ailments. Looking at the macros when talking about the role of fruit in diet is largely missing the point.

Also, hunter-gatherers may get a lot more calories gathering than hunting. Women often gather more food than male hunters, collecting things like tubers, fruits, honey, etc.

IIRC, Homo erectus evolved to eat a lot more carbs than homo habilis. It's only if you pick specific points in human evolution that you can say we didn't eat carbs.

Bit of a strawman, nobody takes the pritikin diet seriously either. The place and purpose of healthy fats is well understood.

It sounds like you haven't actually read Taubes' book. He makes the case that no fat is actually "unhealthy." Saturated fats, which have been demonized, are harmful if and only if they are consumed with a large amount of carbs. That happens to resemble the average American's diet, which is why saturated fat consumption is correlated with heart disease - but it does not cause it.