Obviously, the reason I tried and am trying multiple diets is that the experimental result is always that nothing actually works. Except that the Shangri-La diet worked for twenty pounds and then mysteriously stopped doing anything (i.e., abrupt cessation of the diet did not result in any significant change in weight trends) and Seth Roberts couldn't get it working again. Paleo was among the diets tried, and it didn't result in any weight loss or other detectable differences. Non-US-approved, powerful, dangerous drugs like clenbuterol, which are supposed to cause weight loss on the order of a pound a day, produced standard side effects but no weight loss in me.

I figure that metabolisms vary at least 10% as much as minds, which is a HUGE amount of variance. It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end - you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population - but you don't know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.

Michael Rae--Aubrey de Grey's co-author and the most knowledgeable person about matters of nutrition and supplementation that I know--doesn't have a high pinion of Gary Taubes. Most of his remarks are spread over several messages on the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list; here's a representative sample:

More Calories cause people to gain weight and develop metabolic disruptions. Nothing Taubes presents meaningfully challenges this. And even if loading up on lard really didn't cause one to gain weight and doing the same with green veg (or even Wonder Bread) did, that wouldn't make loading up on lard healthy.

Taubes is very good at picking apart the weaknesses in the epidemiological case against saturated fat (tho' the recent meta-analyses, particularly in the breakdowns by poly:sat ratio, significantly beat back much of the case there); what he hasn't done is either make a good case to the contrary, or even propose a credible alternative means of establishing the truth. You can only rely on the evidence you have, not the fifty-year, thousand-subject, randomized metabolic-ward diet-heart clinical trial on which Taubes wants to insist before he'll drop the pork rinds.

Well, in my case I've found that The Hacker's Diet pretty much works for me: the number of calories I get seems to be way more important than where I get them from (provided I get them from something reasonable, as opposed to 2000 kcal's worth of Coke per day or something like that).

Good calories, bad calories is a good read and it makes a rather compelling argument for limiting carb consumption; however, mainstream nutrition science does not unanimously agree with this view. Hard to say who's right.

Indeed, it's sad (from my armchair-observer perspective...) that something as important as nutrition science seems unable to say something conclusive about low-carb vs high-carb diets.

I have no weight problems, but low-carb seemed to correlate somewhat with loosing weight; I can't say I'm convinced though. I just make sure to excercise so much that I don't have to worry too much about dietary details. After all, physical excercise is as much a 'paleo' thing as the diet.