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No, a calorie is not a calorie, and you don't get fat from eating calories. There is increasing research evidence, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that carbs cause the weight gain, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease. Exercise can help, but the basic answer is chemical. The calorie theory is outdated, and anyone who has tried it for the last 30 years knows it does not work. It is simplistic, and easy to conceive, but a physics lie. The new metabolic dynamic is just as simple and plausible, and by all accounts, far more effective. Scientists agree individually that insulin's primary role is to drive fat production, and carbs primary effect is to drive insulin secretion. So why not take the logical next step and treat fat by reducing carbs? Scientists can't seem to follow their own simple, straightforward logic. Taubes is not saying that exercise has no place in health. He is specifically saying that it does not directly cause weight loss. Taubes agrees with the other benefits of exercise and exercises himself. He is just making the point that medical claims need to be checked for validity by research, which they often have not been. Do not just believe what health "experts" tell you to believe. You should not listen to any doctor who still believes in the low-fat or caloric model of nutrition. Taubes is not a researcher, is a journalist. He is just honestly reporting what the research actually says, which has often been covered up, and the medical community is running scared. Taubes is asking for the research to be done, and the research community is desperately resisting it. Something is rotten in Denmark and Taubes is merely exposing it. For more information and reviews of the research, see the follwing medical and general info websites: http://www.weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/ (Regina Wilshire) http://rjr10036.typepad.com/askdrvernon/ (Dr. Mary Vernon) http://www.proteinpower.com/ (Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades) http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ (Dr. Richard Bernstein) http://www.lowcarb-ca.com/ http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.blogspot.com/ (Jimmy Moore) Read the other reports by Taubes available widely on the web. Read the report by Dr. Ron Rosedale "Insulin and its Metabolic Effects" available widely on the web.

I see too many doctors who put diabetics on diets with grains and carbs. You want to think of white bread as cake without the frosting. Eating rice, bread, potatos etc will get you sicker. Many people have normalised their blood sugar and even been able to leave insulin shots behind. The garbage many doctors let people eat reveals staggering ignorance. I would say the obesity epidemic is related to same thing.

In the last weeks before slaughter cattle is fed - ta da - grains. Why? Because it fattens them up. Carbs, glucose, insulin, obesity - they are very much related and readily controllable through diet.

New York Times ran an artcile over the summer saying 1 in 7 New Yorkers would be diabetic in the future. The lazy ignorance of the medical establishment is very much to blame for this problem. Government too of course. The ridiculous "food pyramid" the issued a few years ago had grains as fundamental component. What a bunch of dopes. Millions that charade cost.

Here is a good docotor and treatment:

http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/

And lay off the carbohydrates too. This might start a flame war (Atkins diet arguments and such.) You should lay of the bread, chips, orange juice, and other things that have a lot of carbs. This stuff gets absorbed by your body and makes you fat. Actual fat is more or less just passing through and makes it into the toilet with your centrum multivitamin.

Cutting back on the carbohydrates and stepping up on the exercise is really what makes the difference.

Now, would anyone with a better understanding of dietary values care to correct me?

Sorta, kinda. Fat definitely does not "just pass through" in any sense. It's actually easier to digest and goes more directly to your flab. However the Atkins theory is that severely restricting carbohydrate consumption throws the body into a different metabolic state, where weight loss becomes much easier.

I've been following this lately, because some interesting data is now coming out. It turns out that all the physicians and nutrionists who have been mocking Atkins as pseudo-science for the past 30 years or so, did not have any actual scientific results to back up their criticisms--just common knowledge and assumptions. Assumptions which completely ignored what was being learned about endocrinology.

I think there's going to a real shit-storm within the next 5 years, because so much of what we've been told by the establishment (iow USDA and AHA in the US) was based on mere assumption but presented as science. And it's beginning to look like it was wrong--that the food pyramid with its big base in carbs (grains) is a recipe for obesity and Type II diabetes.

All through my 20s and 30s I practiced (mostly) the low-fat high-carb recommendations, and managed to stay pretty active overall. I always thought that Atkins was some kind of fringe quack, based on what I read. But now that the truth is coming out, there is no evidence that Atkins doesn't work, and never was. Where it has been studied recently, the data that is coming out suggests that it might work after all. And by work, I don't mean just rapid weight loss--I mean rapid weight loss, while increasing HDL, without increasing LDL, and none of the other dire health problems predicted by mainstream nutritional theory.

Just so you know this is not an ill-informed rant, here are a few references:

Here's a decent primer on more current nutrional thinking.

This article from the New York Times Magazine was one of the better ones, because it dug deeply enough to uncover the original gap in the science and the way it was glossed over for political expediency. Unfortunately, the article is old enough that it's in the for-pay archives. However, a quick google search for the title turns up a number of web sites with copies. For instance, here, here, here, here, and a pdf here.

There are other articles I've seen within the past 2 years that make what seem to me to be good solid scientific points, but I can't remember the reference. FYI, my interest all started when I read a small AP blurb in a newspaper about a nutrional researcher who got the idea to locate and examine the results of all the studies of the Atkins diet, then discovered that there were no such studies!

See Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution for details.

Wow, that's neat. If your pancreas is able to produce some insulin, some doctors (Dr. Bernstein most notably) recommend a strict low carb diet to preserve what little pancreatic function remains. By not stressing the pancreas and the remaining islet cells, some of his type 1 patients have been able stay off insulin or larger doses of it anyway.

His website is http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ and his book is really worth reading. He's a long-time type 1 diabetic himself.

• Carbs raise blood glucose levels. Carbs = sugar. Some carbs are faster than others, though. Liquids tend to be the fastest (soda, fruit juice, milk, etc.) Next come the simper solid (white bread, corn, etc), and you move all the way down until you get to the majority of vegetables and fiber. Those tend to have very little effect on blood glucose (limited amount of usable sugar).
• Protein raises blood glucose... a little bit... and slowly. It also helps slow down the breakdown of carbs.
• Fat doesn't raise blood glucose, but it does slow everything else, even more than protein.
• Insulin (what I need to inject or die but what most people's bodies produce for free) lowers blood glucose by allowing the body to use the glucose to refuel muscle, get stored as fat, etc. Even the fastest injectable insulin (insulin lispro aka Humalog aka Novalog) takes a few minutes to start working. It's much better than Regular insulin at dealing with glucose spikes (drinking fruit juice will spike you no matter what.) Regardless, the more carbs my diet contains, the more insulin I need to inject. It makes me extremely aware of what I'm putting in my body.

• Fewer carbs means fewer glucose spikes and that makes me feel better more of the time. High glucose causes all sorts of nasty effects. Everything from blurred vision, to need to urinate frequently to reduced mental ability.
• Fewer carbs also means I need to inject less insulin. If I want good control and flexibility eating, then with carbs there is trade-off of more frequent injections and corrections. A few carbs here or there can cause low blood sugar, or leave me with high blood sugar. The "rollercoaster" can be one of the worst things about this disease.

While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver

While your DNA (and mine too - I'm also a type 1) contains markers that predisposed you to get diabetes, there was also a roll of the dice involved. Some unknown environmental factor - most researchers suspect a virus - triggers the autoimmune attack that actually makes one diabetic.

If you could grow a new pancreas from your own stem cells, it would still contain the markers for diabetes, but it would also contain the same functional, insulin-producing beta cells that you had prior to becoming diabetic. If you never had another autoimmune attack, you'd be non-diabetic for the rest of your life. One quick writeup of this theory can be found in Dr. Bernstein's book.

So far as I've read, a pancreas grown from someone else's cells would face the same tissue rejection issues that you see in today's experimental pancreas transplants.