Not “unfair” just not relevant to whether or not he is essentially right.
Jack
Karma: 12,743
You quotes from mainstream sources certainly indicate that the nutrition science community is familiar with the diverse factors that can lead to obesity—but that’s not surprising and wouldn’t be surprising to Taubes. The issue has never been that the mainstream refuses to recognize that heredity, medications, hormones and altered metabolism can contribute to individuals being overweight. The issue is that these facts contribute almost nothing to the medical and nutrition authorities response to individuals trying to lose weight or to the world’s growing obesity problem more generally.
You’ve found plenty of quotes from Taubes in which he doesn’t really make that distinction. We can agree he is guilty of using hyperbolic language to make his point and avoids equivocating to make his writing sound better. If he wants to avoid being read uncharitably by you in the future he should stop that.
After talking about how mainstream sources do take things other than calories in—calories out into consideration, and linking to someone (Guyenet) who seems to have actually taken these other things seriously in his consideration of the causes of obesity; you make Taubes’ point for him by concluding that we should actually be talking about akrasia.
I’ve lowered my pre-series credence for the position that “Taubes is right about how low-carb diets work” due to the Guyenet piece. My credence for “Low-carb diets are more effective for losing weight than calorie counting” remains high. As does “Sugar and other easily-digestible, low-fiber carbohydrates—not over-eating, portion-size or lack of exercise—are the primary causes of the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the Western world.”
The CDC diet and nutrition website at this very moment says:
Diets high in saturated fat have been linked to chronic disease, specifically, coronary heart disease. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommend consuming less than 10% of daily calories as saturated fat.
There is meaningful disagreement between those positions, but none of them dispute conservation of energy.
No. I’m taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
I don’t see outright misrepresentations. I see a focus on what Taubes thinks they did wrong.
Agreed. So why are you defending him?
Because everyone fails Less Wrong’s standards for argument and discussion. Everyone here could spend 24 hours a day pointing out dark epistemology in the writings of public intellectuals and we would always have more work to do. If you’re going to target a particular person it doesn’t seem worthwhile unless the central content of the persons’s work is wrong or dishonest—especially with the context of a broader debate. Call it the Rationalist’s Fallacy, in a world where everyone selectively emphasizes some facts to support their position someone selectively emphasizing facts that support their position provides little to no evidence about whether they are right or wrong, whether they are honest or dishonest or whether their work is net beneficial for the world.
Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I was worried about embarrassing Eliezer, but that was probably a mistake, insofar as it may have left people wondering why I was wasting my time on such an awful article. But it seemed worth addressing, insofar Eliezer apparently thought it made a good argument that crazed dietary scientists had killed millions.
Okay, well that makes some sense. But I sort of suspect Eliezer thought Taubes work in general made a good case that dietary scientists had killed millions and that was just the most convenient article he had when looking for cites.
knowing sweets aren’t health food isn’t rocket science.
Candy, sure. But there are tons of people who think yogurt with fruit(and corn syrup) on the bottom is health food. And juice. And Gatorade. I’ll bet a lot of people have purchased a sugar filled cereal for their children after looking at the bottom of that food pyramid.
But what I don’t get is why this confidence in the readers of the AHA pamphlet doesn’t yield more charity when interpreting Taubes.
Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.
Nowhere does he say that. What he says is:
and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy.
If we’re assuming the reader has enough knowledge to understand that the government’s recommendations have never been very high on sweets it’s pretty clear that what Taubes is saying is that people end up drinking a lot of soft drinks (but this certainly applies even more to fruit juices and sports drinks) because they have been told that the primary thing they should do to avoid gaining weight is to avoid fat at all costs. Which, if not obviously true is certainly a very plausible hypothesis.
Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
So that’s an interesting data point. If this is a common view among paleo/low-carb people than I would certainly agree that Taubes is to blame.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
I didn’t get this impression about his position on sugar from his books. Never thought he departed drastically from the mainstream in terms of advice about sugar consumption. I certainly get this impression from his view on carbohydrates more generally and anti-fat and anti-saturated fat messages( which is what the books are actually about!). If Chris or someone posts something indicating that he is misrepresenting mainstream nutrition science there I’ll change my min.
Then what was bad about it?
It’s hard to reconstruct these things, but Nornagest’s comment is basically what I remember. I definitely remember thinking Popsicles were healthier than ice cream because they didn’t contain fat.
Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite.
I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren’t actually being misled—they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books’ pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it’s about the low-fat prescription.
All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the “fat” message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison).
I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn’t a “sugar makes you fat” message.
Although you claim that it was done simply to “to explain to you why I’m not going to debate the subject with you,” you said nothing about that in your earlier post.
Back one more post:
And precisely how I might disagree with those definitions isn’t important since you and I aren’t going to have an extended conversation about this. If you’re curious you can read the discussion I’ll have with Chris.
I was trying to be polite...
I will—it’s pretty obvious why you keep trying to shift the exchange away from your earlier claim about the clarity of Taubes’ position.
If literally anyone else thinks this they are welcome to say so and I will talk with them about it. Done now.
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar. You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn’t give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don’t screw something up. Yes, I suppose the FDA could have encouraged people to consume more high fructose corn syrup and good on the government for not doing that. Taubes is a polemicist. He’s taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist—and he is using arguments as soldiers. He’s also constrained by popular science book length limit.
I’m sure the direct content of a nutritional recommendation is getting conflated with the practical effects it has on what people eat, especially in the short-form article context that you start out quoting from (why, by the way is that your jumping off point? It seems totally ill-suited as a best-version of his argument).
The part that Taubes ridicules about low-fat cookies and so on comes from a section on snacks that doesn’t come with a recommended number of daily servings. I suppose if you read the AHA pamphlet knowing nothing else about nutrition, you could take that as a sign that the listed snacks are wonderfully healthy and you should eat as much of them as you like. But anyone familiar with the standard nutrition advice of the time would understand that the intended meaning is “if you snack, choose the low-fat options”—not that you should necessarily be snacking much at all. That may or may not have been good advice, but it’s not nearly so absurd as Taubes makes it out to be.
Wait, the American Heart Association can get away with assuming that level of sophistication in their (much more general) audience but Taubes isn’t allowed to assume we know the government wasn’t literally recommending people drink soda and infer that he is complaining about relative levels of emphasis—the focus on fat over sugar?
I also worry that people who haven’t read Taubes will think you’re talking about a central argument of his. This entire sugar digression is basically tangential to the bulk of his critque.
An ad homenim is an attempt to tarnish a person’s position by criticizing the person. I’m not doing that at all and if anyone else is unable to a definition by googling they can ask me and I’ll point that in the right direction. I brought up my opinion on you as a poster to explain to you why I’m not going to debate the subject with you.
But by all means, take my response as a concession. You’re victorious and have successfully show Gary Taubes position to be unclear.
If you choose not to back up your claim that Taubes’ position is “plenty clear,” I will choose to draw my own conclusions. Your choice and my choice.
I have however-many years of reading your comments here and your barely-positive karma ratio to remind me that you will be drawing your own conclusions completely independently of someone else being able to back up their claims.
So I don’t take the weight gains from a high-carb diet to be directly analogous to a diabetic injecting insulin. Mainly, I’m talking about artificial insulin injection here just as a simply rebuttal to the notion that weight gain/loss is entirely about eating too much/ not exercising enough. People naturally tend to underestimate how much biochemistry influences decisions, mood and personality. It’s a product of lingering Cartesian mythology.
That said, most of what I’ve seen on insulin and leptin resistance emphasizes peak insulin level in the minutes to hours after eating rather than a moderate difference in baseline insulin. What is going on is probably more complicated than a straight-shot from carbohydrates to insulin to fat. We probably need a more committed, more knowledgeable or less busy defender of Taubes here.
I don’t think weight gain from insulin treatment has anything to do with the diet and exercise decisions people make. Obviously, as a matter of fact they take in more calories than they burn.
What’s weird is that agriculture—or at least the modern food system apparently also makes it much easier for low-status people to get fat, even when their children are starving—pdf.
The whole thing confused me, but the edit helps a bit. There is nothing particularly wrong with “Calories in, calories out” it just fails to illuminate anything at all which is why it’s a bad response to make to any claim about the effects of diet. It also, as a practical matter leads to people thinking about their size as the result of a system where their best control levers are how much they eat and how much they exercise. If trying to eat less and exercise more is a bad way to try to lose weight then attacking the model as simplistic (despite it being a tautology) seems like a reasonable thing to do. That is—aside from being uninformative it also seems like it might have counterproductive effects as far as people interpret it as dieting advice.
Basically all hunter-gatherer societies, as far as I know.
Again, huh? All of your replies in this thread sound like they’re replying to a position I haven’t taken.
Huh?
Why does it happen?
Well that’s what insulin does. It’s the hormone that mediates growth in adipose cells. If a person has broken insulin regulation (aka diabetes) and then you start injecting them with the stuff there is a good chance they’ll get fat (the effect of insulin is a little more complicated than that, such that people react differently—obesity has a significant genetic component).
There are a lot of known hormonal and metabolic disorders that can cause obesity. They don’t make up a very significant fraction of people who are obese in the modern, western world—but it in some societies it’s probably the only way some people ever get /got fat.
That you would say this tells me that your picture of how mainstream science works and the merits of Taubes’ critique is even more distorted than I realized.
That was fun, but seriously. I posted it precisely because the nonsense about sat fat causing heart disease is one of Taubes biggest cudgels against nutrition science and it’s something many experts are now admitting the medical establishment has been wrong about for decades. I’m confused how you came to a conclusion about Taubes without looking into it. It’s probably what he deserves the most credit for.
E.g. Stephan Guyenet, whose arguments against Taubes account of carbs and insulin causing weight gain you posted earlier, thinks that no unbiased person who is familiar with the literature can believe there is a causal link between sat fat and cholesterol and heart disease.