Hold the rice. Hold the potatoes. Hold the pasta. The low-fat diet our government has been serving up through USDA's “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” may be the root of this country's obesity epidemic.

That's just one of many controversial conclusions author Gary Taubes draws in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” published in 2007 by Random House.

He has a point. Researchers and public health authorities have promoted low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets since the 1980s, and USDA reports that dietary fat intake has decreased significantly. But obesity has increased markedly since 1980 — right along with an increasing consumption of carbohydrates and sugar.

In fact, in 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of adults and 16% of children in the U.S. are obese. The finger of blame typically points to dietary fat, overeating fast food and television- or computer-induced sedentary behavior.

In contrast, Taubes argues the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in — good or bad — not the number. His 500-page book is thorough and by no means a quick read. It's the product of seven years of research in every science connected to nutrition and human health, and it brings good news for beef consumers. The book says the fundamental problem with America's eating habits is not the dietary fat in your cheeseburger. The problem is the refined carbohydrates — like the flour in the bun, the starchy french fries on the side, and the high-fructose corn syrup in the soft drink.

About the book

“Good Calories, Bad Calories” stems from “What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?” — a highly controversial article Taubes wrote for New York Times magazine in July 2002. The aim was to research what could be causing the obesity epidemic, and the article triggered an uproar. It accuses the American medical establishment of basing its dietary recommendations on bad science.

“We tend to think of science evolving through this process of hypotheses and tests, and then the things that get accepted are things that were rigorously tested over the years,” Taubes says. “None of that happened in obesity research.”

An award-winning science journalist and a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, Taubes specializes in science controversies and says he recognizes bad science like an English teacher recognizes bad writing.

While he isn't a medical doctor or nutritionist, Taubes has a solid background in science. He studied applied physics at Harvard and aerospace engineering at Stanford before earning his master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.

For the book, Taubes interviewed more than 600 clinicians, investigators and administrators.

“I went back through all of the research since the 19th century to see if what they were telling me was supported by the science,” he says. “Often it wasn't. It's that simple.”

Taubes says he found the quality of research on nutrition, obesity and chronic disease very inadequate and much of the conventional wisdom about nutrition to be founded on insubstantial evidence.

Carbs vs. fat

Surprisingly, the conventional wisdom that a low-fat diet is a healthy diet has only been accepted for about 30 years, Taubes explains. Up until the 1960s, the accepted wisdom was that carbohydrates make you fat and — what's more — that fat and protein protect against overeating by making you sated.

“Carbohydrates literally keep you hungry, whereas fat and protein do not,” he says. And the scientific evidence supports this hypothesis. In the late 1950s and mid 1960s, biochemists and other researchers figured out that the hormone insulin regulates fat and pointed to carbohydrates as the cause of overweight and obesity.

“It's not how many total calories you eat. It's the quality and quantity of carbohydrates,” Taubes says.

For example, 1,500 calories of pasta could make you gain weight when 1,500 calories of meat will not. The carbohydrates in pasta will drive up insulin levels, and the insulin will tell your fat tissue to store these calories as fat. The glucose is swept away into fat and muscle cells, and this all tells your body to prepare for more food to come.

“It's like emptying out a storage space so you can continue to throw in more,” he says, concluding that obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, rather than overeating or sedentary behavior.

What's more, Taubes says refined carbohydrates are likely the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes because of their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar. In addition, refined carbohydrates, starches and sugars are the most likely environmental causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other chronic diseases of civilization, he says.

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