Good Calories, Bad Calories

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue A Brief History of Banting

Part One

THE FAT-CHOLESTEROL HYPOTHESIS

1 The Eisenhower Paradox

2 The Inadequacy of Lesser Evidence

3 Creation of Consensus

4 The Greater Good

Part Two

THE CARBOHYDRATE HYPOTHESIS

5 Diseases of Civilization

6 Diabetes and the Carbohydrate Hypothesis

7 Fiber

8 The Science of the Carbohydrate Hypothesis

9 Triglycerides and the Complications of Cholesterol

10 The Role of Insulin

11 The Significance of Diabetes

12 Sugar

13 Dementia, Cancer, and Aging

Part Three

OBESITY AND THE REGULATION OF WEIGHT

14 The Mythology of Obesity

15 Hunger

16 Paradoxes

17 Conservation of Energy

18 Fattening Diets

19 Reducing Diets

20 Unconventional Diets

21 The Carbohydrate Hypothesis I: Fat Metabolism

22 The Carbohydrate Hypothesis, II: Insulin

23 The Fattening Carbohydrate Disappears

24 The Carbohydrate Hypothesis III: Hunger and Satiety

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

A Note About the Author

Also by Gary Taubes

Copyright

FOR

SLOANE AND HARRY, MY FAMILY

Prologue

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BANTING

Farinaceous and vegetable foods are fattening, and saccharine matters are especially so…. In sugar-growing countries the negroes and cattle employed on the plantations grow remarkably stout while the cane is being gathered and the sugar extracted. During this harvest the saccharine juices are freely consumed; but when the season is over, the superabundant adipose tissue is gradually lost.

THOMAS HAWKES TANNER, The Practice of Medicine, 1869

WILLIAM BANTING WAS A FAT MAN. In 1862, at age sixty-six, the five-foot-five Banting, or “Mr. Banting of corpulence notoriety,” as the British Medical Journal would later call him, weighed in at over two hundred pounds. “Although no very great size or weight,” Banting wrote, “still I could not stoop to tie my shoe, so to speak, nor attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty, which only the corpulent can understand.” Banting was recently retired from his job as an upscale London undertaker; he had no family history of obesity, nor did he consider himself either lazy, inactive, or given to excessive indulgence at the table. Nonetheless, corpulence had crept up on him in his thirties, as with many of us today, despite his best efforts. He took up daily rowing and gained muscular vigor, a prodigious appetite, and yet more weight. He cut back on calories, which failed to induce weight loss but did leave him exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding horseback, and manual labor. His weight increased. He consulted the best doctors of his day. He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight increased.

Luckily for Banting, he eventually consulted an aural surgeon named William Harvey, who had recently been to Paris, where he had heard the great physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes. The liver secretes glucose, the substance of both sugar and starch, Bernard had reported, and it was this glucose that accumulates excessively in the bloodstream of diabetics. Harvey then formulated a dietary regimen based on Bernard’s revelations. It was well known, Harvey later explained, that a diet of only meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic. This in turn suggested that complete abstinence from sugars and starches might do the same. “Knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals,” Harvey wrote, “and that in diabetes the whole of the fat of the body rapidly disappears, it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, although widely diverse in its development; and that if a purely animal diet were useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable diet as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat.”

Harvey prescribed the regimen to Banting, who began dieting in August 1862. He ate three meals a day of meat, fish, or game, usually five or six ounces at a meal, with an ounce or two of stale toast or cooked fruit on the side. He had his evening tea with a few more ounces of fruit or toast. He scrupulously avoided any other food that might contain either sugar or starch, in particular bread, milk, beer, sweets, and potatoes. Despite a considerable allowance of alcohol in Banting’s regimen—four or five glasses of wine each day, a cordial every morning, and an evening tumbler of gin, whisky, or brandy—Banting dropped thirty-five pounds by the following May and fifty pounds by early 1864. “I have not felt better in health than now for the last twenty-six years,” he wrote. “My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.”