The Diet Delusion

I finally finished reading Gary Taubes’ The Diet Delusion (originally published in the US as Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health). It took me months (I started some time last summer) because it’s massive and unapologetically dense: 460 pages of prose, followed by 45 pages of endnotes and almost 100 pages of bibliography.

This isn’t your typical popular diet book. Taubes is not a nutritionist or lifestyle guru, but a science journalist, and this book is as much about science and the scientific method, and what happens when they meet politics, as it is about what we should or should not eat.

I came across the book when I began reading up on the paleo diet, which I stumbled across by chance and began to follow precisely one year and two days ago. Since then I’ve kept to the diet quite well, apart from extended lapses at home through the summer and over Christmas, when I was too lazy to buy my own food.

But these lapses, if anything, have only convinced me further that the paleo diet is the way to go. Since Christmas, never a healthy time of year for anyone, I’ve pulled out all the stops. I’ve scarcely touched bread, rice or any type of grain or starchy food; my caloric intake derives from some vegetables, but mostly protein and fat – including saturated fat. With gay abandon I ignore those scary red warning stickers on supermarket packaging. I’ve even ditched olive oil except for salad dressing, and now I fry everything, which means most breakfasts and dinners, in lard.

Saturated fat alert!

The result after six weeks is that the Christmas gut has evaporated and I haven’t had a single heart attack. I feel healthy and energetic and I never let myself go hungry. The only time I feel lethargic is when for some reason I have a high-carb meal, like when I had lasagne for lunch yesterday and two hours later the post-glucose crash left me falling asleep on the sofa.

Lard makes you be young and fall in love!

Being an archaeologist interested in human history, I found the basic premise of the paleo diet attractive as soon as I started reading about it, but Gary Taubes has really helped elucidate two things: first, the science of fat metabolism, which explains why the diet works as well as it does; and second, the politics of dietary research, which explains why the diet diverges so starkly from what governments and health experts tell us we should be eating.

This is what Taubes has to say about people who work in nutrition, chronic disease and obesity:

“I believe it is difficult to use the term ‘scientist’ to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it.”

It’s truly alarming, since we base our personal notions of what constitutes a healthy diet so much on trust.

Taubes explains that obesity is not caused by caloric input and expenditure per se – i.e. the idea that you get fat because you eat too much and/or exercise too little – but on a dysfunction in how the body stores and mobilises fat deposits.

The comedy documentary filmmaker Tom Naughton can explain it better than I can, as he does in Fat Head, which I highly recommend.

None of this is scientifically controversial, but due to politics, peer pressure and lack of communication, the obvious conclusion that eating fewer carbs will promote weight loss has been swamped in the last three decades by the twin misapprehensions that eating fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries, leading to heart disease (it doesn’t), and that chronic obesity is principally the result of a character defect, in other words lack of willpower (it isn’t).

While Taubes’ main focus is on obesity, he also suggests that excessive carbohydrate consumption is a root cause of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia and even premature ageing – the so-called ‘diseases of civilization’. Clearly a lot of dedicated research needs to be done to test these hypotheses, but the possibility is intriguing.

Basically, The Diet Delusion is perhaps the most important book I’ve ever read. I can honestly say that it’s changed my life – and how often can we say that?

The Old World and The New World

I was in the university library yesterday evening and bored of reading about monks (having overdosed on St Boniface in Fulda a couple of days earlier), so I sat down with my shiny new copy of Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, in which he advocates a lifestyle founded on a version of the Paleo Diet. I've already been following the Paleo Diet for the past two or three months, with occasional lapses due to moving about and visiting Pizza Hut and suchlike. Sisson certainly knows what he's talking about. I always hated biology at school, but Sisson manages to make the biological basis of the Primal lifestyle both comprehensible and interesting. The main thing is to hunt and kill at least one animal every day - it could be a duck or a cat or an elk or anything else, as long as it can be eaten.

I also got Terrence Malick's 2005 The New World out from the library on DVD, starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith and Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. It is either a piece of sublime cinematic genius or lumbering and pretentious, I'm still deciding. Much of the film consists of long, slow shots of forests, shorelines and meadows, with ponderous internal monologue voiceovers which reveal the surprising truth that north America was settled not by pilgrims and pioneers, but tortured emos:

If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake.

Or:

Who are you whom I so faintly hear? Who urge me ever on? What voice is this that speaks within me... guides me towards the best?

Or:

There is only this - all else is unreal.

Or my personal favourite:

You flow through me, like a river.

A line worthy of an Avatard. The New World reminded me a lot of another of Malick's films, The Thin Red Line, which is one of my favourite war movies but similarly strays rather too often into portentous philosophising (the film's opening line, I think, is a dreamy voiceover which asks, What is life...?) and idealisation of the old Western trope of the noble savage living in harmony with nature.

There's also the question of Colin Farrell, whom I do like as an actor, but I'm not sure why he sticks with his Irish brogue in this film when he's supposed to be playing an Englishman. The gaggle of Jamestown urchins also provide a couple of the best moments in the film with their Ken Loach-esque realism, but again, I'm not sure why these diminutive English colonists sound like they were picked up from some Dublin backstreet. Maybe it's because Irish accents sound more Olde Worlde to cinema audiences.

Malick's version of the John Smith/Pocahontas romance aims to be a more a historically accurate retelling of the story, except for the fact that the romance never actually happened; the real Pocahontas was only 10 when she saved John Smith (she's portrayed as 14 or 15 in the film), and the idea that they were romantically involved is a later fiction. The Pocahontas story has always bothered me anyway. There's something weirdly paternalistic and prurient about it which, ironically, is an effective metaphor for the philosophy of colonialism as a whole.

Never mind, New World (aged 15), the Old World (aged 30) is here to look after you

Still, this version is much less offensive and more inventive than Disney's. Although that may not be saying much.

Eating like a caveman

For the last month I've been following my first ever conscious diet. I started it because I happened to stumble across an online article which led me to the homepage of Arthur De Vany, a professor of economics and fitness guru who's developed something called Evolutionary Fitness. His fairly simple argument is that the best possible diet and fitness regime for humans is the one to which evolution adapted us over millions of years. This does not include any foods produced by agricultural techniques.

This got me looking into the so-called Paleo Diet, which led in turn me to the low-budget comedy documentary Fat Head by Tom Naughton, a kind of rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock's problematic Supersize Me. The basic message of the documentary is that the dietary meme that has been repeated in western societies for the last fifty or so years (saturated fat = higher cholestoral = heart disease) is completely bogus, and always has been.

According to this new (for some people, not so new) theory the healthiest diet for human beings is high in vegetables and high in saturated fat from meat, fish, eggs and nuts, with liberal amounts of sugar from fruit. The most important thing is to avoid simple carbohydrates and trans-fatty acids, since they raise blood sugar levels, cause the body to store the sugar as fat and in many people can lead to diabetes and heart attacks. This means no cereals or grains or starchy foods - corn, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes - and only naturally occurring oils for cooking, so out with corn oil, sunflower oil, any kind of vegetable oil, all of which has to chemically extracted from the plant, and in with ladlefuls of butter and extra-virgin olive oil.

As an experiment I decided to go cold turkey on all cereals and grains and stick with the diet for a month. Since for years I've basically eaten some kind of cereal or grain with almost every single meal, this left me rather disoriented for a few days, but I bought a basketful of herbs and spices, explored forbidding corners of the vegetable market and looked for good lean meat, and soon, for the first time ever, I realised that cooking was actually rather fun.

Having tried it out quite strictly for a month, I see no reason to stop. I've decided there's no point being fascist about it if I'm in the mood for a hot cross bun or a pizza or a takeaway, but so far I haven't missed bread or pasta or rice at all. That in itself says something about my body's needs, I think. I've been experimenting with a few different recipes which I may post at some point. The best thing about the revelation, though, is that suddenly this...

... is good for me. Yes. A good heavy fry-up of quality meat and eggs in a pan of olive oil or melted butter is good for me. All that oil and saturated fat does not clog up my arteries. It was all a humungous myth which has been soundly debunked by the latest research, even if the massive momentum of the health and food industry, with the occasional exception such as the Atkins Diet, will not advertise this fact for years. Provided I also eat lots of fresh vegetables, I could have a fry-up every morning for the rest of my life (minus the bread, of course), and my body would thank me for it. This is happy news indeed.