YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Taubes

lines on the record: 121
first: 2017-11-30
most recent: 2017-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, of the studies we funded, the first one was a pilot study with some very influential obesity researchers. And it was a learning experience for me also. So in my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, I do discuss the epilogue is in part a meditation on how I don't believe nutrition, science, is a functioning science, that it lacks many of the characteristics that a functioning science has to have, particularly the sort of critical rigorous back and forth between scientists where they're attacking each other's ideas and being used by each other to understand how they might be fooling themselves. You know, Robert Martin, a philosopher of science, said that this kind of critical back and forth in science makes mothers”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much. I've convinced myself that it's easy to see the naivete. So we thought if we can get the research community to do the experiments themselves and to understand the competing hypotheses and to understand our arguments, and then we could raise the money for them to do the research, this would have a profound effect on their thinking. If anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put simply and Not substantially, no. I mean, there is so We could tell one of the things I did in all this in the course of this is I co founded this not for profit called the Nutrition Science. Yeah, we call New C, although it couldn't be New Sci, I guess. So New C, I co-founded it with Dr. Peter Retillo, very talented physician with also a business background. Our assumption was, particularly with this energy balance issue, obesity and energy balance issuers had a hormonal regulatory issue. The implication is the factor in foods that cause obesity, the caloric content or the effect of those foods on underlying hormonal states. Again, on some level, I think I shouldn't have to even, you shouldn't have to do the experiments to demonstrate it because I find the energy balance thing now so naive, but we'll accept that I just talk about it.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, again, when I started this, I thought that calorie, that excess calories cause obesity. But we're assuming you're asking basically after I shed myself of that belief. So, the question is, is there anything that I used to believe that is just that I'm now convinced it's wrong?”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, I'm afraid of what happened in the 1970s. You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates, you can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that will probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those other foods, and you could help more by getting the right answer rather than coming up with another wrong answer.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New technology you get to see new things, and now you assume you could learn new things, and we're desperate for a theory of obesity, right? Because we can't, we don't know what causes it or prevents it. So the gut biome explodes. And people say, well, clearly, Westerners are obese and diabetic have different gut biomes than hunter-gatherer populations. In Africa, what's the difference? Well, the hunter-gatherers eat more fiber. Know so then you get this focus goes back on fiber and then there are people like me saying wait a minute what about this 1960s endocrinology remember that so you know that's I don't”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clearly, obesity is caused by eating excess calories, and a calorie is a calorie. And then they kind of said, but we don't really know what makes people fat or how to make them thin. So these people are clearly lost. And I'm saying one of the reasons why they're lost is because they just, the revolution and endocrinology was obesity research nullified that, passed it by, never took advantage of it. And that was 1960 science. So then obesity becomes a kind of real science to the medical community in 1993 when the hormone leptin is discovered and then it becomes a subdiscipline of molecular biology and then genomics and proteomics. But this 1960 era endocrinology, which kind of solved it, has just left behind. So now another new technology comes along. Now you can suddenly sequence the genome of the bacteria in your gut.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, What could Cleve have been right all along? And he said, Yeah, that's a good point. Cleave really hit on something. And all I did in my books is say, hey, it looks like Cleveland Yudkin were probably right all along or more right. And then a few other people's too, like Atkins. So yeah, that's the story. Fiber, we're still obsessed about fiber. The idea that, so again, I said science progresses when new technologies come along that allow you to observe new things. So the obesity, diabetes science is completely botched. They've made no progress. They can't explain it. Even articles, it was recently a review, an endocrine society review of obesity written by some of the leading figures in the field. It was kind of a response to my work and that of others in which they said,”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So those two hypotheses couldn't be reconciled, but then Burkid comes along and says, no, no, no, it's not the sugar and refined grains, it's the absence of fiber. So they should eat low-fat diets that are high in fiber. And everyone goes, that's it. You know, the brand muffin craze appears like bran muffins start appearing on the market a year after Burkitt's first publication. And that becomes a conventional wisdom ever since. And the problem is these are hypotheses, right? And we've talked about how people do a lousy job of testing hypotheses. In fact, one of the things I talked to Richard Dahl a few years before he died for my research. And Dahl said to me, yeah, you know, that turns out the only thing fiber actually cures is constipation.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can reconcile this fiber hypothesis with the dietary fat idea that's growing along through the 60s as well. So over the course of 1960s, the folk of the heart disease, nutrition community had decided dietary fat caused heart disease. And if it caused heart disease, it also caused obesity. And then you had Cleves saying, no, no, no, it's not that Cleve and Yudkin saying it's not dietary fat, it's sugar and refined grains, and these were seen as competing hypotheses that couldn't be resolved. In parks, if you told people to eat less fat, the question is, what were they going to eat if not sugar and grains?”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's also obsessed being a Brit with constipation, completely obsessed with constipation. So he decides that the problem isn't the presence of the sugar and the white bread and the beer, it's the refinement of the fiber, the absence of the fiber when you refine these products. So you take wheat and you refine it into white bread, you get rid of all the fiber in the process, and that's, he knows that fiber helps with constipation, and constipation is a disease that's often seen along with this cluster of Western diseases. So by the 1970s, Burkitt starts saying publishing articles with another former missionary physician from African named Hugh Trao saying the problem is the absence of fiber, not the presence of sugar and highly refined high glycemic index grains.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Richard Dahl, who was famous for identifying cigarettes as a cause of lung cancer. Richard Dahl gives him Cleves' book and says you should read this. I don't know how much is right, but there's a lot of it that's brilliant. And Burkitt reads it, and he thinks it's brilliant, but then he kind of thinks we're never going to convince the world to give up sugar and white bread and beer.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driving then, he concluded it was the refinement of the grains we were consuming, including sugar And so by the 1960s, Clevel had written it, Yudkin was publishing in the medical journals, and Cleve had written a book called The Saccharine Disease, explaining that it was refined grains and sugars that caused this cluster of diseases. And then into this walks a guy named Dennis Burkitt, who was a missionary physician in Africa in, I forget where was Edm in Uganda. Burke was famous for medical investigation he did that led to the identification of the first virus that causes a cancer that's known as Burke's lymphoma after Burkitt. So he was a very well-known, very famous physician. And Ediamin comes into power in Uganda, then he has to flee back to the UK, and he's looking for things to do. And the leading British epidemiologist in the world, a guy named”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, to understand the role, you have to know where it came from. So in the 1960s, several British researchers start focusing in on this idea that it's either sugar or sugar and refined grains that cause obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And so these two, one of them is John Yudkin, who's the leading British nutritionist. And the one is a fellow named Peter Cleve, who was a British naval researcher. And Cleve had the advantage that as a Navy man, he had traveled around the world and he had seen that there are all these disparities in chronic disease rates all around the world wherever you go. So, you know, urban, westernized urban centers had high rates of obesity and diabetes and heart disease, but less westernized areas and non-urban areas had low rates. So the question is, what was”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't see how that can be defended. And like I said, it's almost mystifying, and I've spent 20 years trying to understand it, and I kind of understand every step along the way, how it happened and when it happened. And I still want to say to people, you're talking about a disorder of excess fat accumulation. Don't you have to discuss the regulatory system that controls fat accumulation, the hormones and enzymes in the fat cells, on the fat cell membranes, elsewhere in the body, in the very beautiful system worked out by millions of years to regulate this, and it's clearly dysregulated.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his wife, who's equally smart and talented, Terry Merito's flyer, and they do research together. And if you actually look for what it is that causes obesity, they just in that chapter, the assumption is it's the overconsumption of calories. It's eating too much. It's a behavioral problem. And there's no discussion of what's been a very well-worked out science on the sort of hormonal regulatory system that controls both the use of fatty acids for fuel and the storage of fat in the fat cells.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the again long winded way to say as long as people believe it's about calories, they're not even paying attention to the hormones and enzymes that regulate fat accumulation. And what stuns me, so that last February there's an article in the New England Journal on the pathogenesis and mechanisms of obesity. And you could read that article. And it's sort of, this is the premier medical journal in the world, and there's actually no discussion of the mechanisms other than an assumption that people eat too much. That's the implicit. And you can go to the leading textbook in the world and the medical textbook, the seminal textbook, and the Harrison's principles of medicine, I think it's called, and the chapter on obesity is written by the very, very smart researcher named Jeff Flyer, who just until recently was Dean of Harvard Medical School.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can and his blood sugar starts coming down, insulin starts coming down, and then you could mobilize the fat you've stored and use that fat for fuel, which is how your body's supposed to work. So there's a term called metabolic flexibility, where when blood sugar starts coming down, fat's coming up, you just But if your insulin resistant, your insulin stays high, and you never successfully make that switch. So blood sugar comes down, but you continue to lock away fat. And sort of like a ratchet wrench at day-to-day, it only goes in one direction. You just store fat and that's all you do.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The early 1960s, it was clear that insulin, the hormone insulin, was the primary regulator of fat accumulation in the human body. So what it does is you secrete it in response to the carbohydrate content. So your blood sugar starts to go up and the body puts insulin out to signal your lean tissue to take up the glucose from the blood and burn it for fuel. The insulin facilitates the technical ways it facilitates the uptake of sugar, of glucose. But it also signals the fat tissue to hold on to any fat and to store whatever fat you've eaten. So it's sort of partitioning the fuel used to say, look, the immediate problem is we have this rising tide of blood sugar and high blood sugar is toxic. So the way we're going to deal with that is we're going to store fat, get that out of the way, and then we're going to burn the blood sugar as quickly as we can.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Kahneman. And it never went away. And even today, the great themes in obesity research or this idea that the obesity is caused by highly palatable or rewarding foods. And the implication is there's something about the brains of obese people that can't control their appetite in the onslaught of all the bliss points created by salt, fat, as opposed to the simple idea that there's something about the foods we eat that trigger a hormonal response that tells the body either to store fat or mobilize and use it for fuel and then bringing this all back to insulin resistance.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To withhold sex if he didn't lose weight that week. And it's just suddenly eating obesity becomes an eating disorder. And then later it becomes sedentary behavior disorder by the 1970s. And none of these people, you know, if you've got psychologists studying it, well, their specialty is psychology. It's not endocrinology. It's not hormones. It's behavior. So you get this sort of what you see is all there is phenomena.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in America, they just glom onto this idea that it's all about how much you eat and exercise. You know, a lot of lean research. They don't want to read the German literature anymore. So the lingua franca medicine pre-World War II was German. But post-World War II, yeah, but a lot of young German doctors. I mean, excuse me, young American researchers who had fought in the war, who had just are nine, they justifiably have this natural antipathy to the Germans and Austrians. They're not going to read the literature. They don't cite the pre-World War II studies, and they just recreate the science of obesity as a gluttony and sloth disorder. And by the 1960s, the major figures in the field are psychologists who are trying to change the behavior of the fat person to make them eat less. My favorite example was one idea where you would get the obese man's wife.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's all got to be hormonally and maybe regulated through the central nervous system as well. And then the German and Austrian school just evaporates with the Second World War. Literally, you know, these people emigrate to the US, end up in one of the great endocrinologists from the University of Vienna ends up living in Los Angeles, writing articles and working for the Hospital of Medical Evangelists because nobody else wants to hire these European ⁇ migr ⁇ s, particularly the Jews. And then after the war, the European researchers have many things to think about more important than obesity.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To cover a burn. And then they get older and they get obese and one hand has got no body fat on it. You know, if you look at the back of your hand, it's a place we just don't store, tend to store body fat. On the other hand, I'll have this huge tuft of fat on it. So they would say there's clearly regulatory enzymes in the skin itself that are determining whether or not this area of the body will accumulate fat.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hair Professor Doctor types who would both see patients and theorize about what the cause of the disorders might be. And they had concluded that obesity had to be a hormonal disorder. Had to be because there are all these manifestations of sort of a hormonal regulatory disorder. They would say things like, you know, look, men and women fatten differently. Therefore, sex hormones are involved with obesity. We know when people are insulin deficient, they don't have insulin. They can't store body fat. So insulin must play a role in, I mean, these people get emaciated no matter how much you feed them type 1 diabetic. So insulin must play a role in storing body fat. We know that there are tumors, fatty tumors called lipomas that are independent of how much people are eating and exercising. If you have a liposoma, you could starve someone. The lipoma's not going to go away. It's still going to be this cluster of fat. And there are even cases in the literature where people had skin graphs, you know, a graft of skin taken from their stomach and put on like the back of their hand to...”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You pay attention to them. You'll notice them when they are and when you see an obese person sitting at a restaurant eating a tiny salad, you don't think it just doesn't cross your consciousness as refuting your belief that they're gluttons. So it seemed to go along with what seemed to be conventional wisdom and it was easy to believe. And then the weird thing is a research community just bought into it and locked into it in a way that, again, part of it can be explained by, so not all the research community locked in. The German and Austrian clinicians, and Germany and Austria was these people were doing far and away the best medical science in the world at the time. And they pioneered all the fields of science relevant to obesity. So metabolism, genetics, endocrinology, the science of hormones, nutrition, all sort of came out of Germany and Austria.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think in terms of calories because that's all they could look at, that's all they had. And so by 1910, 1920, they had this very simplistic idea with some $5 words attached to it to make it seem more complicated that said that people get fatter because they consume too many calories or they don't expend enough. And it seemed to coincide with what we see in the environment, which is you're likely to see obese people running marathons or doing hard physical labor. So you tend to think of them as sedentary or lazy. And you often see obese people, and we have this sort of model of false staff and Shakespeare is, you know, they're gluttons, even if they're not.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nutrition science from the 1860s to the 1920s was completely dominated by, as all sciences are, by what they could measure, the technologies available to make observations. And all they had were they had devices called calorimeters where they could measure the energy content of a food, and then they could measure the energy expended by humans by putting them in these room-size calorimeters or dogs. And then they had they could do experiments with animals where you give them vitamin or mineral deficiencies and see what kind of diseases manifest.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up because it's taking in more energy than it's letting out. I've just in one sentence sort of nullified billions of dollars worth of research into what it is about the atmosphere and various, you know, and greenhouse gases and the wavelengths of light they reflect or transmit. And I mean all the intricacies of climate change science would be nullified by this statement that the atmosphere is heating up because it's taking more energy than it's letting out, which it has to be doing. So the point is back.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And excess calories makes you fat. I thought, you know, if this was a James Surycki writing about economics, and he said the one undeniable factor in the science of wealth is about the importance of dollars. You know, David Remnik or one of his crew would say, James, are you out of here? Are you kidding us? Are you out of your mind? Like, of course, dollars are, you know, if, I mean, if I were discussing wealth accumulation, I just kept telling you, you said, Gary, why is, you know, let's talk about why is Bill Gates so rich? And I said, well, because he makes more money than he spends, you know, you'd be going on, why did I book this guy? And if we were talking about climate change, he said, why is the atmosphere heating up, assuming it's heating up, which I'm beginning to believe since we just had 100 degree weather here in Oakland a couple weeks ago? And I said, well, clearly atmospheres heating.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game will make you win. It's almost uncomprehensively naive to me. And I now understand where it comes from because I've read all this literature and to this day I'm still sort of mystified. So I'm going to pet peeve time. My sugar book came out. I got sort of almost universally wonderful reviews. And then Jerome Gropman and the New Yorker sort of condescendingly dismissed the book as the work of a sort of wannabe investigative journalist. And in his review, he makes this statement that the one undeniable fact about nutrition research is the importance of calories.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, going back to the 19th century. And I mean, back then nowadays you could virtually download them. Back then, 2002 to 2006. I had students all around the country whose job was to go to their local medical libraries and make copies of the 50 or 100 references I would send to them. And then I would buy books. So I actually started doing my research and I realized that this idea that excess calories is what makes us fat is the, and I'm embarrassed that I ever thought of this before it's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started my research, okay, journalistic research on this subject, and if you go back to the very first infamous New York Times magazine cover story I had in 2002 that was called What If It's All Big Fat Lie. I had a line in there where I said I was speculating that dietary fat doesn't make people fat and it's carbohydrates that do, but still I had allowed clearly it's excess calories that cause us to eat too much. And then I actually get a big book advance and now I could spend five years of my life doing research. And the internet at this point in time made it possible for me to learn, you know, to, it was like a new technology had come along. And suddenly I can sit in my office, which was then in New York, and I can get every primary source on obesity, whether it's in the academic literature or books or conference proceedings.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Substance has power over my children than no other food does. And even the sort of ardent defenders of sugar historians and journalists would say, well, of course parents still have duration their children's behavior. I mean, they're sugar eating. You can't allow them to eat all the sugar they want. So there's clearly, you know, whether it's this effect in the nucleus incumbents or there's an interesting effect that might drive sugar consumption in also in the liver. It's a little more technical, but I've always wondered how much for all that played. But something about it clearly, it just becomes something we like because it affects our brain and the body in a way that we want more. But we want to repeat the experience.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Favorite saying on this was from Charles Mann, the journalist historian who's a friend of mine and somebody who just aws me with how good his work is. And he said in his book 1493, he was discussing the sugar industry, and he said scientists today debate amongst themselves whether or not sugar is an addictive substance or we just act like it is. It's like, you know, clearly, again, I think I have kids. I don't need scientific research to tell me that”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From heroin. Yeah. I mean, clearly you can't do these experiments with children. But if you have kids, you probably don't need to. So there's a lot of clearly sugar is a psychoactive substance. We give it to newborns when they get circumcisions a couple drops of sugar water on the tongue. you can remove the foreskin and doesn't bother them, or at least not in the short run. Sugar has always been considered a painkiller and actually entered Europe in the 13th, 14th century, or 12th post-Crusades more as a medicinal and perceived as having medicinal uses than as a food or a spice. But my best, my favorite...”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or the cocaine. And if it chooses sugar, it can't go back to the cocaine. It can't over the course of a couple days, the rattle switch from sugar to, from cocaine to sugar takes a little longer before making the switch.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happen to be things that for whatever reason, just by chance, over the course of human history, we sample 10 million leaves, twigs, starches, foods, animals, and lo and behold, there's a few things that happen to sort of overstimulate the nucleus accumbens and overstimulate dopamine, and those become addictive substances that we then want to repeat and repeat and repeat. So there is evidence that sugar stimulates dopamine secretion, the nucleus occumbent, just like these other drugs of abuse. And in animals at least, so rats and mice, we could do these experiments. You could demonstrate that they are more addicted to sugar than to cocaine or heroin. So these experiments, some of them were done in France or sort of. Perversely fascinating you basically addict your lab rats to a daily”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. You know, if you ask that question about any drug of abuse or any addictive substance, a nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, I mean, it's sort of, so on one level, the idea is we become addicted to foods because there's an area of our brain called the nucleus accumbens, the award center that rewards is there to reward behaviors that are good for the species. So when you have an orgasm during sex, the nucleus incumbents responds by like dosing your body with dopamine and it feels great. You want to repeat it. When you eat foods, you know, which we have to do to foods that taste good also stimulate a dopamine response in the nucleus occumbency. You want to continue eating, which means you'll continue to stay alive and you'll continue to replicate. And so drugs of abuse just...”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on the other side, you have these insulin resistance researchers saying, hey, insulin resistance seems to be caused by the accumulation of fat in liver cells. And all I'm saying is, you know, you've got 150 years of history of people saying when diabetes appears, it does so after sugar consumption goes up. And then you've got all these biological mechanisms suggesting that sugar is literally at the scene of the crime in the human body when insulin resistance begins and when insulin resistance begins. You're on your road to this whole slew of chronic disorders that are now becoming epidemic or already epidemic.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So everything is targeting the liver, and there you've got the fructose. Now I'm bringing it back to the case against sugar. Now you've got the fructose component of sugar being metabolized in the liver. And the liver didn't evolve to metabolize at the levels we see today. So throughout the last two million years, you would only see sugar in small quantities and fruit. It's what makes fructose in small quantities. It's what makes fruits sweet. And you'd see it in even smaller quantities in green vegetables. But nothing like the amount you would see in like Coca-Cola or a glass of apple juice or a candy bar, an ice cream cone, or any of those foods where you really just dumping fructose on the liver. And by the 1960s, the biochemistry had pretty clearly worked out that when you dump fructose on the liver, it converts it to fat.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, virtually every chronic disease has a linked insulin resistance. And the best research on what caused insulin resistance suggests that it starts in the liver and it starts with the accumulation of fat in the liver. In fact, there's another epidemic going on at the moment of what's called non-alcoholic fatty living, and it associates with obesity and diabetes and metabolic syndrome.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think sort of basically insulin resistant syndrome. So this is elevated blood sugar with glucose intolerance. It's called. It's also you're getting heavier or your waist size is increasing, so you're getting fatter. And you've got an elevated level of what are called triglycerides, which are a form that fat appears in the blood, and you've got low HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol when your blood pressure is elevated. So it's this whole sort of cluster of metabolic abnormalities that not only sort of include obesity and diabetes in them, but also associate with heart disease and stroke and all these other chronic diseases. Then you're asking the question, whatever causes insulin resistance causes”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With type 2 diabetes, and the assumption was all diabetes was a disorder insulin deficit until the 1960s, when they could really measure insulin levels in the bloodstream and the research community realized that type 2 diabetics actually have both high insulin and high blood sugar. So the insulin must not be working, so they're resistant to the insulin they're secreting, or it's not working well enough, so they have to secrete more insulin. So since the early 1960s, we've been aware that type 2 diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance. And then this went along with the observation that obese people also tended to be insulin resistant. They had high blood sugar and high insulin levels. And that there's a condition that's now known as metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of abnormalities.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disorder of what's called insulin resistance. So with type 1 diabetes, you don't have enough insulin or no insulin at all, and you can't properly metabolize the carbohydrates you eat, and in effect, no matter how much you eat, you kind of starve to death because you can't use these fuels for food.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you don't, yeah, it's not the acute form that hits in childhood, which is type one or that typically appears in childhood, which is type 1. So it's about 5% of all diabetes. And then type 2, there are variations now, but type 2 is effectively about 95% of diabetes. So when we're talking about the diabetes epidemic, it's type 2 diabetes we're talking about. And because it associates so closely with excess weight, the assumption of the diabetes experts going back to the 1920s is caused by being fat. And you get fat because you eat too many calories. You don't exercise enough and we'll probably talk about that shortly. But by the early 1960s, once the scientists had a tool that allowed them to measure hormones in the blood accurately, they realized that type 2 diabetes was a”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of rice and they have low levels of diabetes, ergo, it's not about sugar or rice. They also thought that once you start giving diabetics insulin, which begins in the early 1920s, it's easy to dose the insulin properly so the diabetics would often experience episodes of very low blood sugar where they could go into hypoglycemic shock and die and they had to be rescued from these episodes and the easiest way to do it was with candy. Ergo sugar must be good for you. That's how they thought. But physiology. So when we're talking about diabetes, we're talking about particularly type 2 diabetes, which is the common form that associates with obesity and age. That's the one you're not.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through the portal vein to our liver and some huge proportion of it is metabolized by liver cells. And this stuff was worked out by biochemists back as early as the early 20th century, but biochemists were in doctors and they weren't studying, treating diabetes or obese patients. And the doctors, even if they were getting biochemistry, might not have gotten this level of biochemistry. So the physicians treating diabetes never really understood what sugar was or what made it different than other starches. So when you began to have debates about whether sugar was a cause of diabetes, diabetes specialists tended to say no because they thought sugar is the same as rice and they're all carbohydrates and look, we know that the Japanese.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we talk about the glycemic index, exactly that's the response of your blood sugar to the foods you're consuming. So if you're consuming a food that's almost pure glucose and is easy to digest like white bread, you will have a quick rise in blood sugar. And it's one reason why white bread was usually considered sort of the standard by which you would then compare other foods to in the glycemic index. But there's another half of the sugar molecule, or in the case of high fructose corn syrup, another 55% of it, which is this molecule fructose. So any molecule that ends in OSC is a carbohydrate. So fructose is the sweetest of the carbohydrates. So it's what makes sugar sweet. But the fructose is metabolized not by every cell in our body.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when we're talking about added sugars, particularly sucrose, which is the white powdered stuff and high fructose corn syrup, these are simple carbohydrates that are combinations of two simpler carbs, so glucose, which is when we consume grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes are broken down in our body into glucose, and the glucose is transported into the bloodstream and it's blood when we talk about blood sugar, we're talking about glucose, blood glucose. So the glucose gets into the bloodstream, the glucose level rises, so your blood sugar rises, and that glucose is metabolized by every cell in the body.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT