Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes

lyndacarol · Family Elder Joined: Dec 23, 2005 Posts: 471

I am halfway through Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes and think it expresses ideas very important to our general health, as well as MS in particular (tho he does not mention "MS", but speaks of "chronic disease")

Starting in his prologue, he writes: "One consequence of this sub-specialization of modern medicine is the belief, often cited in the lay press, that the causes of obesity and the common chronic diseases are complex and thus no simple answer can be considered seriously. Individuals involved in treating or studying these ailments will stay abreast of the latest 'breakthroughs' in relevant fields -- the discovery of allegedly cancer-fighting phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables, of genes that predispose us to obesity or diabetes, of molecules such as leptin and ghrelin that are involved in the signaling of energy supply and demand around the body. They will assume rightfully, perhaps, that the mechanisms of weight regulation and disease are complex, and then make the incorrect assumption that the fundamental causes must also be complex. They lose sight of the observations that must be explained -- the prevalence of obesity and chronic disease in modern societies and the relationship between them -- and they forget that Occam's razor applies to this science, just as it does to all sciences: do not invoke a complicated hypothesis to explain the observations, if a simple hypothesis will suffice."

Although his attention primarily concerns heart disease (atherosclerosis) and diabetes, he also addresses Alzheimer's, cancer, et al. His method is to bring research and study results to our attention that the experts feel don't fit the conventional, accepted wisdom.

For instance, on page 211: "Peter Cleave had suggested in The Saccharine Disease that the refining of carbohydrates might be involved in colon cancer. John Yudkin had noted that the five nations with the highest breast-cancer mortality in women in the late 1970s (in descending order: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, and Canada) had the highest sugar consumption (in descending order: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada and Denmark), and those with the lowest mortality rates (Japan, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Spain, and Italy) had the lowest sugar consumption (Japan, Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Italy)."

I recommend this book be in your personal library.