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Book Review: “Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It”

Journalist Gary Taubes created a stir in 2007 with his impressive but daunting 640-page tome Good Calories, Bad Calories. Now he has written a shorter, more accessible book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It to take his message to a wider audience. His basic thesis is that:

– The calories-in/calories-out model is wrong.

– Carbohydrates are the cause of obesity and are also important causes of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and most of the so-called diseases of civilization.

– A low-fat diet is not healthy.

– A low-carb diet is essential both for weight loss and for health.

– Dieters can satisfy their hunger pangs and eat as much as they want and still lose weight as long as they restrict carbohydrates.

He supports his thesis with data from the scientific literature and with persuasive theoretical arguments about insulin, blood sugar levels, glycemic index, insulin resistance, fat storage, inflammation, the metabolic syndrome, and other details of metabolism. Many readers will come away convinced that all we need to do to eliminate obesity, heart disease and many other diseases is to get people to limit carbohydrates in their diet. I’m not convinced, because I can see some flaws in his reasoning. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Weight Loss: The “Horserace” Between Low-Carb And Low-Fat

Journalist Andrew Holtz, one of our expert reviewers on HealthNewsReview.org, has some fun with a horserace-style look at low-carb versus low-fat diet research on his MDiTV.com site:

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

Which Diet Fits Your Genes?

Why do some diets work better than others? Why can your best friend lose 10 pounds with a low-carb diet and your weight just hovers? Why can some people eat just about everything and still stay skinny?

It’s all in the genes. 

Mindy Dopler Nelson, Ph.D., of Stanford University reported the results of her study at the American Heart Associate Conference. She found that a single nuceotide polymorphism caused women to loose five times as much weight on the Atkins diet compared with women who didn’t have the gene. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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