Well, I'm into chapter 2, and I'm really enjoying this book. It has some real "meat", not any fluff & nonsense. It's slow going, though, just due to lack of time to sit down and take time to read. (Actually, most of my reading on it has been in the "little reading room", if you catch my drift.)

Can't wait to wade through the rest of it, bit by bit.

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Nita

I agree - definite "meat" in this book. And because of that I am reading slower in order to digest it all. Really packed with great information! But I'm also in the same situation as Nita - finding chunks of time to sit down with the book is a challenge.

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Mada
221.6/193.8 <--- ONEderland! /sz 8

Mada, I think we ought to do a book review here. As we find nuggets we really like, post a synopsis of it, maybe whet the appetite of those who haven't yet decided to get the book.

I found the Eisenhower Paradox very interesting. How many people try to get healthier by eating less, cutting out fat, getting grumpy and testy because they're hungry, and see their blood work, which was normal to begin with, shoot sky high? The fact that he had perfect weight and cholesterol and still had a heart attack should be an indication that perhaps cholesterol isn't such a bad thing, after all.

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Nita

Great idea, Nita!

I agree, the Eisenhower story was really interesting. I wonder, if it had happened now (this decade), would the same thing had happened?

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Mada
221.6/193.8 <--- ONEderland! /sz 8

I'm enjoying this book a lot. But have to agree it is slow going. I find myself rereading many paragraphs because i forgot who a certain person was. But that's okay since it's so enjoyable I don't really want it to end. Usually i set a goal of 100 page a day when i read a book. but that's for novels. for GCBC I'm happy with a chapter or 2 a day.

Nita - excellent idea about mini reviews of his different topics. I enjoyed his criticisms of Ancel keys studies, like the 7 country study. Taubes claims Keys chose the countries because he knew in advance what the results would be. Keys was probably the most influential person leading us to our current low fat dieting mentality. A mentality that ignores any science that contradicts the staus quo.

I love some of his quotes like "Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler" . Albert Einstein.

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I'm about half way through chapter 13. I can tell you that I found it easier to keep track after the first couple of chapters. As he takes separate issues and follows them through, from early research to recent work, all the information overload of the first few chapters starts to fall into place.

What is so overwhelming to me, big picture wise, is the danger of science by consensus. Once most people are on the "band wagon", they're too "invested" to jump off. Consequently, the work of those who declined to get on board is marginalized or written off. (This is currently the situation with the whole "global warming" issue. To anyone who is interested, I recommend "Unstoppable Global Warming ... Every 1500 Years" by S. Fred Singer & Dennis T. Avery.)

Taubes is painstaking in his analysis, which is what makes this book "work." I'm overwhelmed by how much work HE did, to compile this wealth of information.

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Good to know, Maggie. I'm working my way through Chapter 3. I'm thrilled at the amount of data he references, as well as his analysis, but it does make for tough sledding right now--plus my flea-like attention span

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BC
LC Since 1998
Highest Weight 172
Current 104-108

I scored a copy at the bookstore today. I can definitely tell it will take me awhile to get through it...LOL! Oh well...it will be like a weight loss journey...take it slow, do it right, and savor being at the goal line, and never go back to old ways. Well, something like that...

off I go...

s

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Shelley
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Visit Kassie's Korner



Life deserves a treat now and again, but life also deserves being healthy[with required disipline] to make it worth living!

Thank for letting us know it does get easier Maggie. It did and I'm zooming along at 10 minutes a page. LOL

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Do any of you read the Junkfood Science blog? Today she tells about a major clinical trial, started in 1993, using postmenopausal women, putting them in 2 groups, one that ate their normal diet, and the other on a "healthy" diet, low fat, low calorie. This was to prove, once and for all, that a low fat, low calorie "healthy" diet would lower the risk of heart disease, cancer, and other ills, The results were what you and I might have expected, but not what the proponents of low fat low calorie did. And it's interesting that this study never made headlines......wonder why????

Anyway, here's the link to the blog:

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/

I check every day or so. She puts up a lot of info, and a lot of it is right up Gary Taubes alley.

I'm in chapter 3 (I think!) of Gary Taubes' book, and found it interesting that those who followed a cholesterol-lowering diet and took cholesterol-lowering drugs had higher incidence of cancer. And stroke. Looks like we need to put a disclaimer on that kind of diet, Warning, eating "healthy" can be hazardous to your health!

Bring on the butter!

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Nita

Thanks for the link Nita! That blog is definitely going in my favorites.
The studies mentioned are certainly an eye opener or would be if the information was widely disseminated. imagine if low carb were implicated un the same way as this "healthy" eating was. You couldn't turn on the tv or radio without a special bulletin about it. BAH.

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Finally finished the book yesterday. I'm impressed with the thoroughness of Gary Taubes research. as he put it, a decade ago this book would have taken the better part of a lifetime. Thanks to the internet it "ONLY" took 5 years.

Taubes made an interesting point that I have raised myself but have never seen in print before.

"The fat content of the diets to which we presumably evolved, however, will always remain questionable. If nothing else, whatever constituted the typical Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet, the type and quantity of fat consumed assuredly changed with season, latitude, and the coming and going of ice ages. This is the problem with recommending that we consume oils in any quantity. Did we evolve to eat olive oil, for example, or linseed oil? And maybe a few thousand years is sufficient time to adapt to a new food but a few hundred is not. If so, then olive oil could conceivably be harmless or even beneficial when consumed in comparatively large quantities by the descendants of Mediterranean populations, who have been consuming it for millennia, but not to Scandinavians or Asians, for whom such an oil is new to the diet. This makes the science even more complicated than it already is, but these are serious considerations that should be taken into account when discussing a healthy diet."

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another amazing paragraph from this must read book

"There is no such ambiguity, however, on the subject of carbohydrates. The most dramatic alterations in human diets in the past two million years, unequivocally, are (1) the transition from carbohydrate-poor to carbohydrate-rich diets that came with the invention of agriculture—the addition of grains and easily digestible starches to the diets of hunterepilogue gatherers; (2) the increasing refinement of those carbohydrates over the past few hundred years; and (3) the dramatic increases in fructose consumption that came as the per-capita consumption of sugars—sucrose and now high-fructose corn syrup—increased from less than ten or twenty pounds a year in the mid-eighteenth century to the nearly 150 pounds it is today. Why would a diet that excludes these foods specifically be expected to do anything other than return us to "biological normality"?

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Did anyone see Larry King Live last night? Joy Behar was hosting and had Gary Taubes on as the guest. Also, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Andrew Weil (sp?) were there making comments on Gary's research and book. I watched about 15 min of it and then taped the rest to watch later today. If you missed it, hopefully you can catch it on a re-run... I checked his website and didn't see it as a video archive, but maybe it will be? Can't wait to watch the rest...

ETA: Here is the link to the show's transcript: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...19/lkl.01.html

I have "heard" that Dr. Oz kind of monopolized the conversation and Gary didn't get to promote his book very much.... will let you know what I think after I watch it.

And here is a link to a video on YouTube of a Charlie Rose show w/ Dr. Oz, Dr. Ornish and Gary Taubes. Apparently Taubes gets to have his say on this show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPyme62niYM

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Mada
221.6/193.8 <--- ONEderland! /sz 8

I've gotta say, this has been the "quietest" roll out for a new book I've seen for some time. The common thing nowadays, from most publishers anyway, is to start the "tour" even before publication date. Apparently Knopf is not into a big budget for publicity ... for this one anyway.

***sigh***

Too bad, too. It's probably the most important book on diet & metabolism to date. I covers (as far as I can tell) every relevant piece of research in the last 150 years or so.

Thanks for the links!

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