More on Good Calories, Bad Calories
My review of the Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories is up at Doublethink Online.
As a follow-up to that piece, there are a couple of things that I didn’t feel that I had space to address in the article, or that I thought of later, that I’ll mention here. This relates to the book’s contention that it is carbohydrates, and especially refined carbohydrates, that cause weight gain and myriad chronic diseases, and its related assertion that overeating and sedentary behavior do not cause obesity–the conventional wisdom on overeating and weight gain has the causality backwards, lack of energy and excessive hunger are the effects of having excessive amounts of energy in the bloodstream diverted into fat storage.
Taubes takes some time examining several populations that exhibit a coexistence of obesity with poverty and, indeed, malnutrition, and this is one of the most fascinating parts of the book. Some “conservatives” like to make the Rush Limbaughesque point that in America the Land of Plenty, since you see a lot of overweight people among the working class and poor, it must mean that talk of deprivation or hunger is some kind of leftist fraud because look, these people obviously can’t stop stuffing their faces! So how deprived can they actually be? (I admit that I have been guilty of this kind of reasoning in the past.)
But the coexistence of obesity and poverty doesn’t just happen in America, it is found in impoverished populations around the world (except those that eat the sort of diets that prevailed before the advent of agriculture). Taubes’s model of fat accumulation makes sense of the otherwise paradoxical observation of overweight coexisting with hunger and poverty. Eating excessive refined carbohydrates, which are the cheapest foods, can divert excessive nutrients to fat tissue, thus potentially leaving other bodily tissues undernourished. So maybe looking at the problem from a fresh perspective can make us a little less judgmental and have a little more compassion instead.
There are also some implications with regard to assumptions about the sustainability of our food supply. Environmentalists have a point when they talk about the environmental strain of producing meat, but they’re probably wrong when they claim that a animal product-free diet is optimal for health: the truth is closer to the the opposite. Meanwhile optimistic growth-oriented libertarians are confident that the ever-improving technology of mass food production can sustain enormous and growing urban populations indefinitely. But the cheapest and easiest calories to mass-produce, as we’ve seen, result in disease-ridden populations. How does their calculus change if we consider how to feed those masses with increased amounts of meat, dairy, and eggs?
One depressing answer to the need to balance healthy eating with the imperitave of feeding large populations could be increasing the scale and output of factory farming, but that would carry its own share of serious moral, health, and environmental downsides. Maybe there aren’t really any good answers, but I tend to think that the crunchies are on to something.
January 24th, 2012 at 6:23 am
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