Taubes on Food Reward/Palatability, IIc

One point I’ve been making in my posts and in my books is that it’s possible to find evidence in favor of virtually any idea – including the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the ruling force in the universe. More important to the validation of an idea or a hypothesis is the strength of the evidence that seems to refute it. Can the hypothesis survive more or less intact our best attempts to refute it?

This is one of the points I was trying to get across at the Ancestral Health Symposium: that the foods we eat today during our current obesity epidemic might have a high reward value, and that diets consumed by lean populations in faraway locales might not, isn’t particularly interesting. Yes, it supports the hypothesis, but how do we explain epidemics of obesity in populations that  eat diets that don’t appear to have a high reward value? Do we need an entirely different hypothesis for them? That would be unfortunate.

Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(c)

I think this is Taubes' most compelling post yet, but taken together, the series is enough to convince me that "food reward" is a compelling but incomplete explanation for population obesity.

Another element of the carb hypothesis that is compelling is the studies which show that low fat, low calorie diets (~1200 kcal/day) lead rather rapidly to the symptoms of starvation (folks feel cold, lethargic, irritable, think about food all the time, and are inactive), whereas folks on a high protein/fat diet at the same number of kcal/day will continue to lose weight and feel relatively good.  Presumably, those on a low protein/fat, low cal diet would naturally eat more food so that they can stop feeling bad - they would also not lose weight, and if they did, they would not feel better and so might wonder "what's the point of losing weight if I still feel like dirt?"  In short, based on physiological reality, one could predict that low fat/protein and low calorie would be a losing proposition - which it usually is.  Even worse, it does not improve the measurable markers of health very speedily, or as dramatically, as does carb restriction.

I await the next series when Taubes discusses the evidence in opposition to the "carbohydrate hypothesis" of obesity.