Good Calories/Bad Calories

Gary Taubes wrote the interesting and thought provoking Why We Get Fat-it’s all about the Carbs, the highly processed Carbs.  In Good Calories, Bad Calories he picks up where he left off, continuing to put forth his theory about why the Western Diet is the greatest act of evil in human history.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health reads like the footnotes from most other books.  He talks at length about the many Diet Trials and the many doctors and the many government agencies who set out to prove how bad things like fat and cholesterol are.  Only, they kept finding out that fat and cholesterol are not all that bad-and naturally they reported that fat and cholesterol are very bad indeed, they just couldn’t prove it in that Trial.

Dr Taubes goes out of his way to give everyone in his story the benefit of the doubt.  He sees everyone as a good person trying to help people live longer and better lives.  I’m more of a conspiracy buff myself.  Following the money clearly shows that a fat, sick population addicted to highly processed foodstuff not to be found in nature is a golden-egg-laying-goose that never takes a break.  Doctors, Lawyers, and every Corporation cranking out tons of nonfood items so well disguised that you can’t tell them from real food make billions and billions of dollars.  This is why there are no laws against white flour, white sugar, and corn syrup-the big three on the EAT THIS AND DIE list.

Of course, Gary Taubes is doing what he says all the other Scientists in the past did, he’s telling us what is bad for us.  The big difference is that he has a butt-load of proof to back up his case and disprove the cases of everyone else.

Dr Taubes also mentions the simple matter of Common Sense.  If we go back in time a couple of hundred years, we find a world that had remained pretty much unchanged since the dawn of time.  People all over the world ate what was close by and easy to grow or catch.  This often involved a lot of physical labor.  Then there was Progress and Science.  Again, we can give the people who striped the vitamins and nutrients from wheat and rice-and every other food vitamins and nutrients can be striped from-the benefit of the doubt.  People where hungry and here was a way to cheaply feed them.  But it was also a way to make massive profits.

Gary Taubes doesn’t give us any cute sayings like Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants, but he does tell us that eating highly processed food is a very, very bad thing.  All the worse because cutting out refined carbohydrates and starches is a daunting task.  On the plus side, fats are plentiful. Just don’t eat the refined ones.

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