Good Calories, Bad Calories

I just finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. I had read a lot of reviews about the book from different blogs and websites that I habitually read over and decided that it was first on my list of nutrition books to start reading. That was a smart decision. This book is spot on and detailed exhaustively with notes and citations to the point of almost being repetitive or obtrusive to reading. In fact, once the book officially ends on page 460 you can flip through to page 573 with nothing but notes and bibliography references.

OK, so that aside, what causes us to get fat? Eating more calories than we expend daily? Are fat tissues simply large depots where we store excess dietary fat and calories? Is dietary fat bad for us? What causes hunger? These are the kind of questions that are asked and investigated throughout the book. Most of our common dietary beliefs are expelled and replaced with new ones based firmly on scientific evidence from the last 100 years. The epilogue has a list of 10 things that somewhat summarizes the book, of course reading the book will explain all the relevant science behind the things listed.

1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity heat disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.
2. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostasis– the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well being.
3. Sugars– sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup specifically– are particularly harmful, probably because the combination of fructose and glucose simultaneously elevates insulin levels while overloading the liver with carbohydrates.
4. Through their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar, refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes. They are the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and the other chronic diseases of civilization.
5. Obesity is a disorder of fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.
6. Consuming excess calories does cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consumer does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.
7. Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance– a disequilibrium– in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism. Fat synthesis and storage exceed the mobilization of fat from the adipose tissue and its subsequent oxidation. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses his balance.
8. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated– either chronically or after a meal– we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel.
9. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. The fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.
10. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.

I think one interesting note from the book is that the average American is now consuming over 150 pounds of sugar each year. This was less than ten or twenty pounds a year in the mid eighteenth century. Since sugar releases insulin and insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage, it is no wonder we are seeing an obesity epidemic today.

This book is definitely not in the same category that most diet related books are placed. There are no recipes and very few graphs, pictures, or diagrams. Instead it is full of stories and evidence from over a century of research by many different people with many different reasons. Taubes is not selling a diet or endorsing and kind of product. It is evident that the five years took to research this book were simply out of a desire to discover what is the backbone of a healthy diet and the health consequences related to the choices we make in our diet. This book ought to be a mandatory read for anyone in the position of giving nutritional advice.

The Philosphy of Ayn Rand

I just finished reading For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand which is a summary of her views on a number of themes. The majority of them revolve around capitalism as opposed to collectivism. She has to be the hardest proponent of unbridled capitalism I have read to date.

The book starts with a long essay on her developing philosophy known as Objectivism in which she goes on to say that the following excerpts from her four novels will elucidate in more or less totality. Some of the text is quite challenging to get through especially John Galt’s speech which is almost 100 pages in length and gets to be quite repetitive at many points. Behind the repetition and over the top verbiage are a number of thought provoking ideas.

Some of these include the idea of making money as opposed to its being traded, looted, or mooched. This stems from her belief that all money today has to come from somewhere and that it is the human mind that it comes from. This is meant in the case of the inventor or industrialist that creates and produces. After money is made you can then use it as currency that holds value. Much of the book turns on the relationship between the thinking man and what he produces.

Some other themes touched on in the book are sexual desire, free trade, personal liberty, and the role of government. It also goes into great depth on the relationship between working for society or working for personal gain. In the end, many people can easily chalk this book up to extreme radical capitalism and dismiss the underlying ideas. I often feel that looking at an extreme case can reveal some thing valuable. This book is definitely thought provoking and seems, at least in me, to touch some ideas that stand out as absolutely true.

I might go as far as saying this is a book that could impact the future way I choose to live my life.

Anna Karenina

“Flawless as a work of art.” -Dostoevsky

So not a whole lot can be said about Anna Karenina that has not already been said. Fortunately, my reactions and feelings to it have not yet been said. I had wanted to read this book for a long time and finally had the time to sit down and attempt finishing it in a descent time frame this summer. Obviously, the first thing noticeable is its 1000 pages in length. Being a slow reader this was an arduous task for me.

Although I can not say that I felt it to be as flawless as Dostoevsky did, once finishing it I was left with a eerily calm demeanor and sense of awe. The book ended on a such a good note, that is to say the last 150 pages I read today. The ending describes the book’s leading protagonist in his spiritual awakening and leaves that warm fuzzy feelings I personally welcome in a lot of books, but only when done well.

The book in it’s expanse covered a wide range of topics and more or less went over any theme you could think of at one point or another. The biggest qualm I had with the book was personal and completely unrelated to quality. Having the main character, Anna Karenina for those who couldn’t guess, be such a loathsome little creature is something that really puts me off. This is only the second time I forced myself through a book like this, the first being The Great Gatsby. For those of you who love that book and think it is romantic, I do not care, Gatsby sucks and should have just shot himself.

However, a great book should invoke feeling and produce meaningful thought and this book certainly does that (I admit The Great Gatsby does too). There are multiple story lines taking place and the central line revolving around Levin is fantastic in my point of view and I always found myself getting bored when reading over Anna’s hoping the next section would switch back to Levin. Anna and Gatsby alike are both predictable and dull in their passionate, selfish, to hell with anyone else attitudes.

I also understand that this is one of the first examples of stream of consciousness writing and to that degree it was great. Anna’s thoughts during her final chapters were beautifully rendered and the psychology that takes place is definitely at the height of realism. It is obvious that Joyce and Salinger both learned a little from Tolstoy.

Finally, as good as it is in summation, I think that the length alone could count a lot of readers out. I have read some of Tolstoy’s other works and have always enjoyed them. In fact, after having read The Devil, The Death of Ivan Illyich, Family Happiness, and A Confession and Other Religious Writings I think a reader has a general understanding of the ideas that will be presented in Anna Karenina and need not search this novel for anything new. If however, you are looking to read one of the world’s classics that is quoted and sited perhaps more than the Holy Bible, by all means go for it, you will certainly be rewarded in a number of ways.

Online Databases: Nutrition, Medicine, Books

They say things come in threes and over this last week I found three really good databases. One on nutritional information, one that publishes medical articles for free, and one that has entire books online for free.

Nutritiondata.com

From the about ND section of the website, “The information in Nutrition Data’s database comes from the USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and is supplemented by listings provided by restaurants and food manufacturers. The source for each individual food item is listed in the footnotes of that food’s analysis page. In addition to food composition data, Nutrition Data also provides a variety of proprietary tools to analyze and interpret that data.” Sign up for a free account to store foods in your pantry and combine them to store recipes with the full nutritional breakdown.

PubMed

“PubMed is a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of citations and abstracts of biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, and PubMed covers fields related to medicine, such as nursing and other allied health disciplines. It also provides very full coverage of the related biomedical sciences, such as biochemistry and cell biology. It is offered by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health as part of the Entrez information retrieval system.” Wikipedia

As with nutritiondata.com you can sign up for a free account to store articles you find relevant for easy finding and reference later.

Project Gutenberg

This has thousands of public domain books available to read or download on the website. All of these are free and no longer under copyright so feel free to use them however you wish. It is also the host of LibriVox.org which offers public domain audio books for free download as well. Check it out if you want to download some Joyce to your Ipod for a road trip or cross country flight.