33 Quotes by Gary Taubes

Despite decades of obesity research, and billions of dollars spent in the laboratory and on clinical trials, the bedrock fundamental concept underlying all nutrition and dietary advice is that fat and lean people are effectively identical physiologically, and that our bodies respond to what we eat the same way, except that the fat people at some point in their lives ate too much and expended too little energy and so became fat, while the lean people didn’t.

The simplest way to look at all these associations, between obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and Alzheimer's (not to mention the other the conditions that also associate with obesity and diabetes, such as gout, asthma, and fatty liver disease), is that what makes us fat - the quality and quantity of carbohydrates we consume - also makes us sick.

We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we're getting fat

We don’t get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we’re getting fat.

The simple answer as to why we get fat is that carbohydrates make us so; protein and fat do not.

The evidence suggests that nicotine induces weight loss by working on fat cells to increase their insulin resistance, while also decreasing the lipoprotein-lipase activity on these cells, both of which serve to inhibit the accumulation of fat and promote its mobilization over storage, as we discussed earlier.

In 1960, fewer than 13 percent of Americans were obese, and diabetes had been diagnosed in 1 percent. Today, the percentage of obese Americans has almost tripled; the percentage of Americans with diabetes has increased sevenfold.

Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward center” – technically, the nucleus accumbens – as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Addiction.

The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century.