Nutrition

The contradiction at the heart of mainstream nutrition

Western societies are plagued by non-infectious diseases, the so-called ‘diseases of civilisation’, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and obesity, diseases running at near epidemic levels. Mainstream nutrition claims that the Western lifestyle is toxic; we eat too much and exercise too little, our very affluence killing us. But this can’t be right. The Third World is plagued by the same diseases, each having roughly the same incidence level (WHO data). And the third world is poor by definition, with vastly different lifestyles; so how can the same set of non-infectious diseases be driven by affluence in the West, but by poverty in the Third World? This contradiction lies at the heart of mainstream nutrition.

There is growing evidence that obesity is a central risk-factor for each of diseases listed above. But, despite the obvious affluence-poverty contradiction, mainstream nutrition still insists that obese people are obese because they eat too much and exercise too little, with obesity being a psychological problem not a physiological one, obese people being just lazy overeaters. Mainstream nutrition appeals to thermodynamics, with energy conservation laws showing that increases in energy storage require calories-in to exceed calories-out, a simple truism, the increase in the number of people in a room, for example, being simply the difference between those who have entered and those who have left. If this is so obviously true, then what is wrong with the mainstream view? Very simply, thermodynamics says nothing about the direction of causality. What is driving what? Does excess consumption drive growth, or does growth drive excess consumption? Thermodynamics is completely silent on this issue. Obviously the number of people in the room will grow if more people enter than leave, but this obvious truism cannot explain why this happens.

Insulin drives growth, and carbohydrates drive insulin

In reality, growth causes excess consumption, not the other way round. Growing children are clearly storing more energy than they are consuming, otherwise they wouldn't be growing. Everyone accepts that in this case, growth hormone is driving their growth, their net consumption simply adjusting to accommodate the growth. And, similarly, it is another hormone, insulin, that causes us to gain weight, to store energy, making us feel tired and hungry. Overeating and lack of exercise are simple consequences of insulin. Insulin is producd in the pancreas in response to the growth in blood sugar which occurs following a meal high in carbohydrates. Its job is to drive nutrient molecules into the cells where they can be used as energy.

We get fat because more fatty acids enter our fat cells than leave them. Insulin is the hormone that drives fatty acids into our fat cells and prevents them from leaving; that’s its job. To extend the analogy, insulin is the force that drives people into the room and won’t let them, or the ones who are already there, leave. Without insulin, fatty acids are free to enter and leave fat cells as they please, there's no glycerol to bind them into triglycerides. Fatty acids are small enough to move freely backwards and forwards across the fat cell membrane. But when three fatty acids bind to a glycerol backbone to form a triglyceride, the resulting molecule is too big to cross the membrane, ending up locked into the fat cell. As any Type I diabetic knows, without insulin it is simply not possible to get fat. Therefore, if we want to control obesity, we must control insulin and the only way we can do that is by controlling the amount of carbohydrates we eat. Carbohydrates are the primary drivers of blood sugar and insulin.

Those in the mainstream who accept that thermodynamics doesn’t explain anything about obesity, also have a theory about causes, for them the problem is behavioural, psychological, obese persons simply lack the will power to do the right thing. This is an extraordinarily cruel approach. Insulin prevents the release of cholecystokinin (CCK), a hormone which triggers the satiety switch, by disabling this switch insulin blocks the achievement of being satisfactorily full and unable to eat any more food, condemning overweight people to constant feelings of acute hunger.           

So the conventional wisdom of the food pyramid is utterly wrong. Moreover it is dangerous. There is no correlation whatsoever between heart disease and cholesterol. But there is a strong correlation between heart disease and triglycerides. Triglycerides are another form of blood fat but this time made out of circulating glucose. No carbohydrates, no triglycerides.

Gary Taubes on Why We Get Fat