Why We Get Fat

After fighting with type 2 diabetes, I started feeling better after starting to lose weight, but I wanted to learn more about why. I thought this book sounded like it might help, but I had no idea how much. Reading this introduced me to a whole new way to think about food and has changed my life ever since. This was the first book that introduced me to the role of hormones with obesity. This book was comprehensive and did a great job explaining his case. This book should be required reading for anyone who eats.

One of the original Keto proponents. I saw a study on my Facebook feed about the backgrounds of authors of bestselling nutritional books: in the top 100 bestsellers, out of 83 unique authors, 33 had a MD or PhD - which doesn't even mean they specialized in nutrition or exercise science or wtv. Taubes for example has a Master's in aerospace engineering, a Master's in journalism, and worked for science magazines like Discover and Science.

Food stuff seems real baked into our hard opinions. I think the pendulum between low fat and low carb is fascinating. Low carb might work for folks but you'd have to do it forever which, honestly, sounds like it would get a bit boring. Like many diets it's the long-term adherance that gets you in the long run.

Anyway! Taubes explains the history of the American low-fat craze, how insulin works to deal with carbs that you eat and why insulin resistance is bad. Lots of mice studies. He posits that it's all the “bad carbs” in our diets that are making us fat and tired and causing metabolic disease from the Western Diet. He claims that those traditional diets that are healthy for populations but include much more carbs work because they are low sugar in comparison to US diet. He advises a strict Keto diet to start and then phasing in “slow carbs” to see what your body will tolerate without gaining weight. Or maybe you'd have to give up coffee? Who knows.

One interesting theme in the text was being fat was still bad, but bad in a symptom kinda way vs a personal morality and willpower kinda way. Fat is the fault of bad carb vs inability to “just eat less!” Which I can see would be much more appealing.

I've never done Keto or Paleo or low carb, but a few of my friends have (I think more of them are veg) and nobody still is (except for one who just started so we'll see in a few years hey?) The veg people are mostly still veg depending on the underlying motivation.

Pretty good on the topic. It was very interesting for me to learn about the history of dietetics and how the concept of ‘why we get fat' evolved. The second part of the book reiterated on things about the influence of insulin and your sensitivity to it as the main factor of fat accumulation in the body. Can't judge this, as I am not a scientist, but the research seems sound ;) For those who did not hear about how insulin shapes us, this is definitely a valuable read.