"The reason for this book is straightforward: despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount."
Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other met
"By the 1920s, insulin was discovered and found to be essential for the utilization of carbohydrates for energy. Without insulin, diabetic patients could still mitigate the symptoms of the disease by restricting the starches and sugar in their diet. And yet diabetologists would come to reject categorically the notion that sugar and refined carbohydrates could somehow be responsible for the disease—another example of powerful authority figures winning out over science."
"All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon."
"In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture."
"Von Noorden’s focus on metabolic expenditure set the science of obesity on the path we still find it. The evolution of this research, however, proceeded like a magician’s sleight-of-hand. By the 1940s, common sense, logic, and science had parted ways."
"Children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing."
"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations."