33 Quotes by Gary Taubes

The point to keep in mind is that you don’t lose fat because you cut calories; you lose fat because you cut out the foods that make you fat-the carbohydrates.

For some of these populations, the word for “hunger” in their native dialects translated to “when we have to eat plants.

The most fattening foods are the ones that have the greatest effect on our blood sugar and insulin levels.

Making LDL the “bad cholesterol” oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades’ worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients.

Any diet can be made healthy or at least healthier – from vegan to meat-heavy – if the high-glycemic-index carbohydrates and sugars are removed, or reduced significantly.

By the 1830s, when the British emancipationists finally put an end to the slave trade, some twelve and a half million Africans had been shipped off as slaves to the New World; two-thirds of them worked and died growing and refining sugar.

No such ambiguity existed about sugar consumption. “We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of 200 years ago ate in a whole year,” as the University of London nutritionist John Yudkin wrote in 1963 of the situation in England. “Sugar provides about 20 percent of our total intake of calories and nearly half of our carbohydrate.

Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides.

You don’t get fat because your metabolism slows; your metabolism slows because you’re getting fat.