This is the kind of post that requires citations. Quote Taubes describing nutrition science orthodoxy and then quote an authoritative source from the establishment.
I say this not to just demand citations for citations sake-- it's just that it's easy to model how Taubes would respond to this post when all you're doing is asserting things. He would, at minimum, assert the opposite.
I would be much more interested in an attempted refutation of the Perfect Health Diet by Jaminet & Jaminet.
Especially as someone who hasn't read Taubes, I would have preferred this post to be longer and combined with some more substantial discussion. It feels weird that you're recapping what the mainstream nutritionists believe but not actually contrasting it with the target of your criticism: it left me with a slightly frustrated feeling of "okay, so this is the mainstream wisdom, but what about it?"
It's true. It's said that for every gram of glycogen, you need three grams of water to store it. The average person has about 500g of glycogen, so you'd have around 2kg weight loss just in glycogen and water from starting a low carb diet.
It's a psychological effect. People start the diet, immediately lose 5lbs over a week, and think "OH MY GOD, this is working, I can stick to this!" They establish the habits and systems of losing weight. Then when weight loss slows down to the more reasonable 1-2lbs per week, they aren't bummed out because they know it's working.
When they cheat, their weight immediately shoots up -- and then when they stick to it, it immediately goes back down. This helped me a lot with getting back on track when I used a low carb diet to lose weight.
FYI: I recently went to an endocrinologist to try thyroid treatment (synthetic T3).
She earnestly advised me to cut saturated fat from my diet.
This does not reflect well on your hopes for this series of essays.
ChrisHallquist claims that Taubes is attacking a misrepresentation of what mainstream nutrition experts actually believe. Eliezer met an endocrinologist, and she just happened to spout horrible advice of the kind Taubes attributes to the mainstream. This is more likely to happen in worlds in which Taubes is correct about such advice being widespread among the mainstream than in worlds in which Taubes is exaggerating the spread of such advice.
When you accuse Taubes of misrepresenting others' views, you touch on an important point. Before you can trust the expert consensus, you need to determine (1) what the proper class of experts is; (2) what exactly the issue in controversy is; and (3) how the experts actually stack up on that issue.
If it's a controversial issue, you can bet that the above 3 meta issues will also be controversial. If you have the intelligence and critical thinking skills necessary to resolve the 3 meta issues, then you can probably make a good assessment of the underlying c...
How popular is Taubes and in what kind of a crowd? Google didn't help much.
I tried to read GCBC about a year ago since it was recommended to me here but never finished it, because I wouldn't have had time to check the sources and continuing without checking would have been quite useless. I hope you do a good job with the sources and people jailbreak them if necessary.
Will this be a steelmanning? I don't much care about the quality of Taubes' arguments unless they're the best arguments to be had, and I'm pretty sure they aren't.
If you were looking for examples of expert madness to support your thesis and wrote up a counterexample instead, well done for going so far to avoid confirmation/'publication' bias.
The first post I was originally neutral on and negative on the second for the same reason as Jack. But now you've started to demonstrate some of Taubes' misrepresentations in the third post, I am more positive on the second post. I'm not sure whether it was avoidable (for any reasonable amount of effort) for the posts to be so non-sequentially dependent in their standing. I shall probably hold off on voting on the posts until everything's in.
I'm looking forward to the rest of 'em!
people gain weight when they consume more calories than they burn
Is that really the mainstream claim? Because it doesn't make sense from the engineering standpoint, given that no burner is 100% efficient. Or does "burn" misleadingly include "expelled without burning"? Are there discussions/measurements of the human burning efficiency and how it depends on metabolism and why?
As I understand, outside pathological cases human digestion pretty consistently manages to absorb 95% of the calories we consume (excepting dietary fiber, which we can't digest at all). Calories lost as heat count as burned. There is one complication to this that I'll discus in the next post, but it turns out to be a minor factor.
I've often wondered, since first learning the little factoid that "the stomach has almost as much neural complexity as the brain", whether we've mis-located the source of the 'willpower' problem.
If our digestive tract is a fully-trainable neural net with direct two-way feedback to our brains (and it certainly seems like it is), then it might be fruitful to start figuring out how to re-train it directly, or short-circuit it. Concepts like "reward circuits" and "willpower" almost invariably focus on the brain in our heads; has anyone done any studies on what the stomach's internal reward circuits look like?
There's also some evidence that low-carb diets may have some advantages. in terms of, say, warding off hunger, but the evidence is mixed.
That might be because protein stimulates the production of insulin as much as, if not more, than carbohydrates, and for people who don't have a fucked up grelin/leptin feedback loop, insulin is a powerful appetite suppressant.
Related: Trusting Expert Consensus
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about whether we can find any clear exceptions to the general "trust the experts (when they agree)" heuristic. One example that keeps coming up—at least on LessWrong and related blogs—is Gary Taubes' claims about mainstream nutrition experts allegedly getting obesity horribly wrong.
Taubes is probably best-known for his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. I'd previously had a mildly negative impression of him from discussion of him on Yvain's old blog, particularly some of other posts Yvain and other people linked from there, such as this discussion of Taubes' "carbohydrate hypothesis" and especially this discussion of Taubes' attempt to refute the standard calories-in/calories-out model of weight.
But I figured maybe the criticism of Taubes I'd read hadn't been fair to him, so I decided to read him for myself... and holy crap, Taubes turned out to be far worse than I expected. I decided to write a post explaining why, and then realized that, even if I were somewhat selective about the issues I focused on, I had enough material for a whole series of posts, which I'll be posting over the course of the next week.
The problem with Taubes is not that everything he says is wrong. Much of it is ludicrously wrong, but that's only one half of the problem. The other half is that he says a fair number of things mainstream nutrition science would agree with, but then hides this fact, and instead pretends those things are a refutation of mainstream nutrition science. So it's worth starting with a brief in-a-nutshell version of what mainstream nutrition science actually says about obesity.
(The following summary is drawn from a number of sources, including this, this, and this. Everything I'm about to say will be discussed in much greater detail in subsequent posts.)
Here it goes: people gain weight when they consume more calories than they burn. But both calorie intake and calorie expenditure are regulated by complicated mechanisms we don't fully understand yet. This means the causes of overweight and obesity* are also complicated and not fully understood. It is, however, worth watching out for foods with lots of added fat and sugar, if only because they're an easy way to consume way too many calories.
We currently don't have any great solutions to the problem of overweight and obesity. If you consume fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight, but sticking to a diet is hard. It's relatively easy to lose weight in the short run, and it's possible to do so on a wide variety of diets, but only a small percentage of people keep the weight off over the long run.
As for low-carb diets, people do lose weight on them, but they do so because low-carb diets generally lead people to restrict their calorie intake even when they aren't actively counting calories. For one thing, it's hard to consume as many calories when you drastically restrict the range of foods you can eat. There's also some evidence that low-carb diets may have some advantages. in terms of, say, warding off hunger, but the evidence is mixed. There's certainly no basis for claiming low-carb diets as a magic bullet for the problems of overweight and obesity.
The above points are not the only issues at stake in Taubes' writings on nutrition. Admittedly, he covers a huge amount of ground, from the relationship between sugar and diabetes to the relationship between fat intake and heart disease to the alleged dangers of extremely-low carbohydrate diets. However, I'll be focusing on his claims about the causes of and solutions to the problems of overweight and obesity, because that seems to be the main thing people talk about when they talk about Taubes supposedly showing how wrong mainstream experts can be.
I'll also focus heavily on how Taubes misrepresents the views of mainstream experts on obesity. In the next post, though, I'll be temporarily setting that issue aside in order to look at what Taubes is proposing as an alternative. This will involve examining some claims made by Dr. Robert Atkins, whose ideas' Taubes champions.
*Note: if the use of "overweight" as a noun sounds weird to you, it does to me too, but I discovered as I researched this article that it's standard usage in the literature on the subject. I came to realize there's a good reason for this usage: it's inaccurate to talk about the problem solely in terms of "obesity," but constantly saying "the problem of people being overweight and obese" gets really wordy.
Next: Atkins Redux