Gary Taubes gave a presentation at UC Berkeley called “The Quality of Calories; What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care.” If you have read Gary’s book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, it gives a bit more detail about the subject. If you have not, you’ll see why you should. It is 1 hour and 45 minutes long, but well worth the time: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216
One quote from the lecture shows very clearly how things went so terribly wrong and why it is so hard to bring about any change:
“There’s a group at the University of Cincinnati that did an Atkins vs. low-fat study and they found that the Atkins people lost twice as much weight and they liked the diet much better. I was interviewing the dietitian who did the study. She had agreed to talk to me but she was very hesitant — she didn’t offer up any information. Finally, at the end of the interview, the one thing she offered freely: I asked her who funded it and she said the American Heart Association.
I said, “Well, I have to give them credit for funding it.”
She said, “Don’t. They funded it because we proposed it as a study that would refute the benefit. And when we found that the Atkins diet really worked and worked better than the low-calorie diet, now we’re trying to get money to look further into it and they won’t give it to us.”
There’s also a fantastic article on the Taubes book from a Canadian paper, the Ottawa Citizen, called “Good Food, Bad Food.” Here is the link: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/arts/story.html?id=0e14c04c-5ff8-431d-bd8b-7fbcb55a35f0”
Thank you to Jimmy Moore, http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.com/ for finding this article. We can always count on Jimmy to keep us up to date on all the low-carb news.
