“Escape from Caloriegate” Why Low Calorie Diets Fail, and What to "Count" Instead of Calories

“Escape from Caloriegate” podcast – Episode #1 Show Notes

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Welcome!

In the inaugural episode of “Escape from Caloriegate,” I assault one of the most deeply entrenched ideas in health/nutrition: the doctrine of “calories in calories out.” This episode and the next few that follow it will consist of me rambling into the microphone solo, in an attempt to get you to think in radical new ways about stodgy old problems that are keeping you and the rest of society stuck in 2nd gear.
After the show ramps up, I’m going to be bringing on people who actually know what they’re talking about :] — including some of the most brilliant minds in diet, health, science and beyond. It’s gonna be crazy, in a good way.
So let’s roll.
Here’s what’s cooking in Episode #1:
• The radical premise of “Escape from Caloriegate”
• The Calories In Calories Out (CICO) mindset is the root of all evil
• Why obesity is a problem of “overstoring” not “overeating”
• If Gary Taubes is the Christopher Columbus of this idea, consider me one of the “John Smiths”
• I’m not a doctor, not going to treat anybody
• My motley resume: degree in physics from Yale, failed screenwriter, obsessed with counterintuitive ideas
• Diverse creative speculation is the thread that binds my work
• I’m a low carb fan, but show is not “rah rah” low carb
• We need better questions, not more people who claim to know the answers
• If we screwed up on calories for 60+ years, what does this teach us about science, about our capacity to learn anything about nature?
• Are there “Caloriegate” like mistakes in other fields? (I believe so)
• “It’s Overstoring Not Overstoring” (IONO): the antidote to CICO
• Is IONO just the “carbs insulin hypothesis” warmed over? (no)
• Diet wars focus on calories vs. carbs, but this is a false choice
• “Obesity is most simply defined as the state in which the amount of triglycerides stored in adipose tissue is abnormally increased”
• CICO says “excess energy” causes this excess storage
• Carbs-Insulin says “bad carbs -> insulin problems” causes excess storage
• Both models make mistake of incorporating cause into definition of problem
• Why not say “obesity IS the overstoring of fat” and go from there?
• Repeat after me: “it’s IONO not CICO”
• How do you determine when a counterintuitive idea is legitimate or not?
• Two ways to go wrong – a) quackery; b) cynicism
• 4×4 matrix looks at degree of perspective and degree of critical thinking
• no perspective, no critical thinking = go with the herd
• perspective w/o critical thinking = homeopathy and crazy beliefs in crystals
• critical thinking w/o perspective = default too abruptly back to conventional wisdom
• critical thinking WITH perspective = brilliant insights, like Theory of Relativity
• how do we find this “Awakened Critical Thinking”?
• does eating turmeric prevent cancer?
• Science is a blunt tool – can’t really answer questions like that without hard work
• Karl Popper’s definition of science: “Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it”
• Almost no one (including most so-called “scientists”) abides by this rule
• Gary Taubes on coenzyme Q10 – healthy for you or not? His surprising answer!
• To get scientific answers (per Popper’s definition of science) to all our diet questions would take 400,000 years and cost $6,000,000,000,000,000.00.
• There’s a gap between what science tells us and what we want to know
• Gurus are all too happy to fill that gap with their opinions
• How do we escape from “Caloriegate”?

http://www.caloriegate.com/calories-in-calories-out/escape-from-caloriegate-podcast-episode-1-show-notes

Graham