by Gary Taubes is the UK version of his book which goes under the title “Good Calories, Bad Calories” in the US. It’s a huge book, 600 pages, of which 40 pages are notes and 65 pages are references. It took him 5 years to do the research and he says it would have been essentially impossible to write if we hadn’t been living in the age of the internet.

Taubes is a journalist with a specialism in science – he has also written about Nobel Prize winners. I get the impression that before writing the Diet Delusion, he had no particular axe to grind, but this book is nothing if not controversial.

Conventional wisdom has it that we can lose weight by reducing calories in, or increasing calories out by exercising, or a combination of the two. Taubes argues that until the middle of the century many researchers and clinicians believed this was inaccurate, but for various reasons this strand of research hit the buffers. One reason being it that was largely German research and after WWII nobody took German research seriously. The dietary establishment was taken over by some strong-minded individuals with pre-conceived ideas and by the 1970s the low-fat diet was on a pedestal.

Taubes suggests that we need to take a completely different view of the mechanisms of weight loss. The conventional equation, weight change = calories in – calories out, assumes that calories in and calories out are independent variables, but there is a lot of evidence that they are not. Put people on very low calorie diets and their calories out adjust accordingly – they become lethargic and cold, and vice versa. Thus on a low calorie diet you’re engaged in a battle against your own body which you’re not going to win.

The alternative approach is to look at the cellular level. He argues that fat people have a disequilibrium in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue. The fat cells are taking in too much fat and not releasing it when they should. This is caused by too much insulin, which is caused by too much carbohydrate. As one researcher puts it, “carbs drives insulin drives fat”.

There is an amazing photo on p.361 of a woman who is suffering from lipodystrophy, which is a disorder of fat regulation. Her top half is emaciated, but her bottom half is incredibly fat. It is really quite a disturbing photo. Taubes says “if emaciation above the waist is followed by obesity below it, can the quantity of calories consumed have anything to do with it?” Hormones drive us to put on weight in particular areas. We have to rethink the causation – we don’t get fat because we eat too much (this is a tautology), but we eat too much because we are getting fat – for another reason. As someone who needs to lose weight, I like this approach because for once it doesn’t blame fat people for being fat. It sees a tendency to become obese as a genetic disorder which is switched on by too many carbs. Essentially we weren’t designed to eat cereals, sugars and high fructose corn-syrup.

This is a dense read and quite hard-going. G read a few pages the other night and gave up! It certainly isn’t your average diet book, it is a science book. I stuck with it because it’s a subject I’ve been interested in since 2001 when I did a low-carb diet and lost 30lb. Since then I moved to London and lost focus, and now I’m a low-carb dilettante, largely because I worry about not eating fruit and vegetables. But Taubes says once you start adding even small amounts of carbs to the diet, it stops working.

Obviously this has a lot of negative implications from the point of view of vegetarianism and the world population, and I’m sheepish about advocating a low-carb diet because it feels awfully selfish and uncaring about animals and the planet. I’m lucky that I can afford to eat free-range meat and ethically-sound fish and salve my conscience that way. So I’ll probably be low-carb as possible from now on except when in company!

A couple of shorter articles which he has written are on exercise and why it doesn’t make you lose weight, published in the Observer here, and on his central hypothesis, an article from the New York Times here. I do recommend them.