Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Big Fat Lies: The Truth About the Atkins Diet Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 21:02:15 -0800 From: Phil Gasper <pgasper at NDNU.EDU> Reply-To: Science for the People Discussion List<SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU> To: SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU
Big Fat Lies: The Truth About the Atkins Diet
by Bonnie Liebman
Health Letter November 2002, volume 29 / number 9 Center for Science in the Public Interest
"What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" asked the cover story of the July 7th New York Times Magazine. The article, by freelance writer Gary Taubes, argues that loading our plates with fatty meats, cheeses, cream, and butter is the key not just to weight loss, but to a long, healthy life.
"Influential researchers are beginning to embrace the medical heresy that maybe Dr. Atkins was right," writes Taubes. Taubes claims that it's not fatty foods that make us fat and raise our risk of disease. It's carbohydrates. And to most readers his arguments sound perfectly plausible. Here are the facts--and the fictions--in Taubes's article, which has led to a book contract with a reported $700,000 advance. And here's what the scientists he quoted --or neglected to quote--have to say about his reporting.
Perhaps the most telling statement in Gary Taubes's New York Times Magazine article comes as he explains how difficult it is to study diet and health. "This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory."
He got that right. It helps explain why Taubes's article sounds so credible. "He knows how to spin a yarn," says Barbara Rolls, an obesity expert at Pennsylvania State University. "What frightens me is that he picks and chooses his facts."
She ought to know. Taubes interviewed her for some six hours, and she sent him "a huge bundle of papers," but he didn't quote a word of it. "If the facts don't fit in with his yarn, he ignores them," she says.
Instead, Taubes put together what sounds like convincing evidence that carbohydrates cause obesity. "He took this weird little idea and blew it up, and people believed him," says John Farquhar, a professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University's Center for Research in Disease Prevention. Taubes quoted Farquhar, but misrepresented his views. "What a disaster," says Farquhar.
Others agree. "It's silly to say that carbohydrates cause obesity," says George Blackburn of Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "We're overweight because we overeat calories." It's not clear how Taubes thought he could ignore---or distort---what researchers told him. "The article was written in bad faith," says F. Xavier PiSunyer, director of the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. "It was irresponsible."
Here's a point-by-point response to Taubes's major claims.
Full: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/index.htm