Life Lessons from the New York Times Magazine

Planning to do some reading? This weekend's New York Times Magazine is jam-packed with healthy goodness.

The cover article by Gary Taubes (you know -- the author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat") is about the eeeevils of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, which we discussed a couple of days ago.

But wait -- there’s much, much more crammed into this little issue! For example:

Mark Bittman shows you how to make lamb -- and how to carve it in three cuts!

James Vlahos spells out exactly why you need to ditch your office chair!

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” 

Maggie Jones examines why we need to get more sleep!

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. [psychomotor vigilance task] results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day...

Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

And Gretchen Reynolds surveys a bunch of talking heads in order to find the BEST EXERCISE EVER.

Other than Taubes' piece, this article was the one that piqued my interest. According to the exercise physiologists interviewed, three movements -- all of which are familiar to any CrossFit enthusiast -- stand head and shoulders above the rest:

Burpees (a.k.a., the King of all Exercises):

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Squats:

“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.”

...The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition... Most physiologists believe that only endurance-exercise training can raise someone’s VO2max. But in small experiments, he said, weight training, by itself, effectively increased cardiovascular fitness.

“I used to run marathons,” he said. Now he mostly weight-trains, “and I’m in better shape.”

Intervals:

High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours...

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all.

(What's your poison? Burpees, squats or intervals? Something else entirely?)

So what have we learned from just one issue of the New York Times Magazine?

• Meat is tasty, but skip dessert. 
• Sleep a lot. 
• But when you’re up, don’t sit: Do burpees instead.

Sounds like a plan.

A Panda Goes Low-Carb

Since the offseason began, bloated slugger Pablo "Kung Fu Panda" Sandoval of the (World Champion!) San Francisco Giants has lost 20-30 pounds so far, and recently tweeted that the secret to his success is a "low carbohydrate and high protein diet." (Maybe he picked up "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" over the holidays...)

Could it be that Sandoval has actually given up eating Colossal Brownie Sundaes at Buca di Beppo?

Sometimes, They Get It Right

Who says all the nutrition information in glossy magazines is total bullshit? (Okay, besides me.)

Fine. I'll concede that occasionally, the popular press hits the nail on the head. And maybe -- just maybe -- they're getting it right a little more often these days. The latest issue of Men's Journal features an article entitled "Everything You Know About Nutrition Is Wrong," and discusses Gary Taubes' well-supported argument that it's our intake of carbs, not calories, that makes us fat:

During the past several years, conventional dietary wisdom — skimp on fat, count calories — has started to crumble, thanks largely to a one-man wrecking crew named Gary Taubes. In his latest book, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Taubes argues that calories and fat aren’t to blame for the world’s increasing girth and high incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. He contends that exercise, while a healthy habit, won’t help with weight loss, and that most Americans would benefit from eating more red meat and eggs because animal proteins and saturated fat don’t cause cardiovascular disease and weight gain: Simple sugars and carbohydrates do.

I told you so.

(Source: Men's Journal)

Not the Bicycling Type

Paul Mason, formerly the World's! Fattest! Man! at 980 pounds, is suing the British National Health Service. Why? Mason claims that in the mid-1990s, when he was a relatively svelte 895 pounds, he asked the NHS for a referral to an eating disorder specialist, but he was instead referred to a dietitian, who offered useless advice: "Ride your bike more."

On the plus side, those glasses are pretty spiffy.

Granted, I tend to agree with the Taubesian viewpoint that the true underlying cause of Mason's extreme obesity is some kind of metabolic derangement, which in turn led to his overfeeding (rather than the other way around). Thus, a dietition who simply prescribes more exercise is, in my opinion, missing the point entirely.

On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt Mason to take some personal responsibility over his own well-being. After all, it's not like the British government was force-feeding him meals of:

• Four large cod
• Two pies
• Four battered sausages
• Six large portions of chips
• Mushy peas and curry sauce
• All washed down with bottles of Coke

Good thing the British National Health Service didn't also serve him an artichoke.

(Source: Gawker)

The Beast Weighs In

The Daily Beast just put up a review of both "Why We Get Fat" and "The New Evolution Diet." (Check it out here.)

But why is the article accompanied by a photo of the books' covers and a woman with a single piece of uncooked broccoli on her plate? I'm reading both books right now (along with a few others -- probably why I can't seem to finish any of 'em) -- and I'm fairly certain neither book advocates a raw vegetarian starvation diet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

On second thought, is she sneering at the broccoli? But that'd be weird, too. It's not like Art De Vany and Gary Taubes are anti-vegetables.

I'd have been happier with a stock photo of a woman cracking up over a bowl of salad. At least then, we could add it to this list.

Why We Get Fat

I know -- you tried, but couldn't get through all the dense science-y stuff crammed into Gary Taubes (excellent) "Good Calories, Bad Calories." But today, just in time for your New Year's Resolution-planning, Taubes has released his CliffsNotes version of GCBC: "Why We Get Fat - And What To Do About It." It's shorter, punchier, and aimed at a broader audience.

And even if you don't feel like springing for the book, check out Taubes' recent interview with WNYC:



If you haven't already noticed, I'm a bit of a Gary Taubes groupie.

Holy Crap! It's Gary Taubes!

As you know, I'm a big fan of Gary Taubes of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" fame.

A few hours ago, Taubes kicked off the marketing push for his new book ("Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It") with a brand-spankin' new blog.

This is awesome.

Taubes' inaugural post is devoted to debunking the conventional "wisdom" (quotation marks = irony) on why people get fat. Little in the post is new to careful readers of "Good Calories, Bad Calories," but it's great to see that Taubes'll be penning short(er) pieces focusing on particular subtopics in the area of nutrition.

Taubes' first blog entry is well worth reading -- especially if you're still convinced that obesity is caused by overeating and under-exercising. He tears down this particular argument, but his larger point is this: The conventional wisdom is wrong -- but why aren't more people questioning it?

What’s been needed (and still is) was for someone (a reasonably smart 14-year-old would suffice) to ask the obvious questions and then insist on intelligent answers. Here’s how such a dialog might go:

The experts: Obesity is caused by over-eating, by consuming more calories than are expended. There’s no getting around the first law of thermodynamics. 

Us: But all that law says is that if somebody gets fat, they have to consume more calories then they expend. So why do they do that?

The experts: Because they do.

Us: That’s not a good enough answer.

The experts: Well, maybe they can’t help themselves.

Us: Why can’t they help themselves?

The experts: Because they can’t.

Us: That’s not a good enough answer either.

The experts: Because the food industry makes them do it. There’s so much good food around and it’s so tasty, they can’t help but eat it.

Us: But obviously some of us can, because we don’t all get fat. Why is it only some people can’t help themselves?

The experts: Because they can’t.

Us: Try again.

The experts: Well, it’s complicated.

Us: What do you mean complicated? We thought it was easy. Just this eating-too-much, exercising-too-little, calories-in-calories-out, thermodynamics thing.

The experts: Okay, how about this? [Now quoting from an NIH report published in 2000.] “Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from an interaction of genotype and the environment. Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”

Us: So what do all those have to do with eating too much and the laws of thermodynamics?

Experts: They contribute to making fat people overeat.

Us: How do they do that?

The experts: We don’t know. It’s complicated.

Us: Then maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear -- to you anyway -- to be kind of lazy. We’re compensating for the loss of calories into our fat.

The experts: Yeah, well, maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.

The 4-Hour Body: Who Cares If It's Overhyped?

Author / record-breaking dancer / yabusame archer / fighter / speaker / relentless, cocky self-promoter Tim Ferriss is one of my heroes. And he's about to release a new book: "The 4-Hour Body."



This is a follow-up to his bestseller -- "The 4-Hour Workweek" -- and Ferriss has been hyping his new tome for months now. While the pitch comes across as a little (okay, a lot) over-the-top, I couldn't resist buying it. I pre-ordered a copy (along with Gary Taubes' upcoming book) a while back, and can't wait for it to show up on my doorstep.

Why? Because if even a fraction of what Ferriss is advertising is possible, this will be all sorts of awesome. Here's a description Ferriss posted on his blog:

YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each):

• How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails.
• How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
• How to increase fat-loss 300% using temperature manipulation
• How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
• How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
• How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
• How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
• How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
• How to reverse permanent injuries
• How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
• How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects. You don’t need better genetics or more discipline. You need immediate results that compel you to continue. That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers.

Granted, I have serious doubts about the whole "sleep 2 hours and feel fully rested" thing. I am not about to ditch my Paleo approach in favor of "odd combinations" of "chemical cocktails." And I'm really uninterested in tripling my testosterone or doubling my sperm count, as (1) I am already super-manly (obviously), and (2) we're done pumping out kids. (We refuse to be outnumbered by our children.)

But increasing the weight on my lifts? Boosting my endurance? Reversing injuries? Sign me up.

(By the way, I asked M: "what do you think he means when he says we can learn 'how to produce 15-minute female orgasms'?" Her response: "That's why YOU need to read the book.")

Stop With The Egg Whites

The New Yorker's food issue is out this week, and it features a lengthy piece about April Broomfield, the chef/owner of NYC's The Spotted Pig and The Breslin -- both of which are awesome for meat-lovin' Paleo eaters like me. Last month, M and I hit The Breslin for brunch, and ordered two full English breakfast plates, piled high with porky goodness, and with no beans or toast to spoil the fun.

We clearly did not do an adequate job of educating one of our brunch companions about the place, though. And as I mentioned in a previous post, he's not on the Paleo train. After scouring the menu in vain for something -- anything! -- that the USDA Food Pyramid and conventional dietary wisdom would smile upon, he asked our server whether the vegetable frittata could be made with egg whites. "No," she replied.

Of course, the server's intent wasn't to steer him towards better health. Chances are, she subscribes to the same beliefs that most people hold about the dangers of egg yolks and saturated fats and everything else on The Breslin's menu. I seriously doubt she's read Gary Taubes.

But you know who has? Director/producer/screenwriter/novelist Nora Ephron. She most certainly would not have asked for fucking egg whites.

Ephron was being interviewed by Michael Krazny on NPR's "Forum" this morning. I know next to nothing about Nora Ephron, other than that she wrote "When Harry Met Sally" or something, so I was only half-listening -- until Krazny gently chided her about her position on eggs and cholesterol. My ears perked up.

"Eating the cholesterol in eggs doesn't raise your blood cholesterol!" she countered. Krasny shot back that the Mayo Clinic says she's wrong. She stuck to her guns. And she happens to be right.

Here's what I dug up from an old HuffPo blog post of Ephron's on the subject:

[D]ietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: you can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and cheese and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?

Which brings me to the point of this piece: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. 

According to yesterday's New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're participants in something known as an informational cascade, which turns out to be a fabulous expression for something that everyone thinks must be true because so many reputable people say it is. In this case, of course, it's not an informational cascade but a misinformational cascade, and as a result, way too many people I know have been brainwashed into thinking that whole-egg omelettes are bad for you.

So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette.

Hear, hear.

David H. Freedman wrote in this month's Atlantic about how the health studies you hear about on the news are almost universally fraught with error and bias -- and then the information cascade takes over and we go flying off the cliff with all the other lemmings. So what happens when another study comes out and draws the opposite conclusion -- which, by the way, happens ALL THE TIME?

Too late. We're already in freefall -- and we didn't even get to enjoy the frittata with the awesomely delicious egg yolks.

Check It Out: Robb Wolf's "The Paleo Solution"

I'm an unabashed fan of Robb Wolf's. Robb is, among other things, a former research biochemist, Loren Cordain disciple, powerlifting champ, unfairly excommunicated CrossFit affiliate owner, and a current owner of one of Men's Health's top 30 gyms in the country -- and in just a few years' time, he's become one of the paleo movement's biggest names and greatest assets.

For months, I've been soaking up everything I can from Cordain, Sisson, the Eades, et al., but Robb's weekly "Paleolithic Solution" podcast has been my go-to resource for all things paleo. It's incredibly informative and entertaining, with Robb (and co-host Andy Deas) answering questions from the peanut gallery.

For as long as I've been listening, Robb's been working on a book about paleo nutrition and fitness. As soon as it was available for pre-order on Amazon, I bought it. But even though the book was finally -- FINALLY -- released last Tuesday, my copy wasn't delivered until the end of last week. (With most other book purchases, I wouldn't have given a crap. But I found myself actually getting pissed every day I came home to find that "The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet" hadn't yet arrived. That's how much I was looking forward to reading Robb's book.)

I'm still reading it (and sharing with M, who's also digging it), but "The Paleo Solution" has already become my favorite book about the science behind and implementation of a paleo lifestyle. It's reader-friendly (unlike Gary Taubes' excellent but dense "Good Calories, Bad Calories"), but not too Reader's Digest-y (a quibble I have with Mark Sisson's "The Primal Blueprint," which is narratively compelling but skips over a lot of the science underpinning the paleo/primal approach).



I'll try to post a more comprehensive review once I actually finish the book, but in the meantime (if you haven't already jumped on the bandwagon), you can read an excerpt of Robb's book yourself over at Tim Ferriss' blog.

Now He Just Needs to Lose the Bowtie

Drew Carey cut out all grains, starches and sugar, and has lost 80 pounds as a result.

"No carbs," he said. "I have cheated a couple times, but basically no carbs, not even a cracker. No bread at all. No pizza, nothing. No corn, no beans, no starches of any kind. Egg whites in the morning or like, Greek yogurt, cut some fruit."

Carey's also no longer diabetic, and attributes this to his new approach to eating.

"I'm not diabetic anymore. No medication needed," he said. Another benefit: "I like being skinny. I was sick of being fat on the camera. Really, I just got sick of it."

I wouldn't be surprised if a dog-eared copy of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is on Drew Carey's nightstand.

(Source: HuffPo)

Check It Out: Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss, author of the bestselling self-help book, The 4-Hour Workweek, is full of himself -- a trait I don't appreciate in most people (besides myself), but for some reason, it totally works for Ferriss. Yes, he brags a lot (check out his book for self-glorifying anecdotes about his phenomenal successes in business, martial arts, ballroom dancing, learning Japanese, etc.), but unlike some people, he's not all talk -- he's the real deal. Here are some snippets from his Wikipedia entry:

Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, a San Jose-based online company that sells sports nutrition supplements. He sold the company in January 2009 to an unnamed private equity firm. He is now a full-time angel investor and has invested in the following companies: Twitter, Posterous, DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee), Reputation Defender, Foodzie, Badongo, Rescue Time, and SimpleGeo. He also acts as an advisor to StumbleUpon and Shopify, which he has alluded to in interviews with Kevin Rose are in exchange for equity.

He holds the Guinness Book of World Records' record for the most consecutive tango-spins in one minute. Ferriss and his dance partner Alicia Monti set the record live on the show Live with Regis and Kelly. Prior to his writing career, Ferriss served as an advisor to professional athletes and Olympians and was a National Chinese Kickboxing Champion, a title he won through a process of shoving opponents out of the ring for which he was nicknamed "sumo." In 2008, he won Wired Magazine's "Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time" prize and was named one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People of 2007." Ferriss has also spoken at the EG Conference.

His show "Trial By Fire" aired on the History Channel in December 2008. In the show, Ferriss had one week to attempt to learn a skill normally learned over the course of many years and in the pilot episode he practiced the Japanese art of horseback archery, Yabusame. 

And the guy's only 33. God, I'm a slacker.

I picked up Ferriss' book some time ago and have been slowly adopting some of his productivity tips (using Evernote to organize my cluttered life, for example). But I only recently started checking out his blog, which contains some useful information about personal fitness and nutrition. For example:

• Preeminent kettlement guru Pavel Tsatsouline posted a guest article on Ferriss' blog about maximizing gains and efficiency in powerlifting:

• Ferriss has also invited Dr. Michael Eades to discuss why calorie-counting is a pseudo-science, and how counting carbs is the key. (One of the reasons I'm a fan of Ferriss is that he's solidly in the Gary Taubes low-carb camp.)

• I'm a terrible swimmer, so it was eye-opening to read about how Ferriss quickly (in ten days!) became a strong swimmer after a lifetime of being afraid of the water.

• Ferriss shares how he gained 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks using something he calls "Four-Hour Fitness."

• He writes about how to figure out what the labeling on meat products really mean.

• Ferriss is into Vibram FiveFingers.

• And most importantly, he describes how to properly "peel" a hard-boiled egg:

Meat: It Does The Body Good?

A new Harvard study confirms -- in part -- what Gary Taubes has been preaching all along: eating (unprocessed) red meat -- despite its high saturated fat content -- doesn't increase the risk of heart disease.

So go ahead and order that steak. (But hold the bacon.)

Is Low-Carb the Way to Go?

Could low carbohydrate diets be the antidote to the ever-growing obesity epidemic?

Gary Taubes thinks so, and I, for one, am now rooted firmly in his camp. But Taubes' book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories," can be a difficult read for those whose eyes glaze over when faced with chapter upon chapter about complex biochemical processes.

Enter Adam Kosloff, whose new website, Why Low Carb Diets Work, is sort of a Clif's Note version of Taubes' tome. It's perfect for anyone who's interested in Taubes' work but intimidated by the density of his prose.

You Can Eat the Butter, But Skip the Bread

The evidence is mounting:

Carbs are bad.

Saturated fat? Not so much.

Conventional wisdom -- “go low-fat” -- got it ass-backwards. The persistent belief in “low-fat” diets -- premised on four decades of flawed governmental findings, limited and/or mis-cited studies, agribusiness interests, scientific hyberbole, and willful blindness -- has led Americans to stuff ever-increasing amounts of processed carbohydrates in their mouths in place of proteins and good fats. And it’s killing us.

Gary Taubes’ 2002 New York Times Magazine article (“What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”) and 2007 book (“Good Calories, Bad Calories”) covered this subject in exhaustive and compelling detail, but at the time, many dismissed him as another Atkins nut. (Others rejoiced.) But more and more, it looks like he was right on the money: Refined carbs -- not saturated fat – are responsible for the health epidemic associated with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease (a.k.a., metabolic syndrome, or Syndrome X).

Scientific American is the latest to echo Taubes’ assessment of carbs versus fat:

[W]hile Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

…

“If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits—you might actually produce harm,” Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that “butter is actually the more healthful component.”

Read the entire article here. And if you’re interested in all the gory details about how American health officials and nutrition experts got it so very wrong for so very long, check out Taubes’ book or watch his 2007 lecture at U.C. Berkeley.

Link Dump

• Behold: the 40 deadliest fast food meals.

• A new genetic test "claims to show whether people will do better on a low-fat or a low-carb weight loss plan." Mindy Dopler Nelson, a Stanford nutritional biologist, conducted a study that concluded that "women on diets well-matched to their genes, as defined by the test, lost roughly five times more weight than those on mismatched diets." According to Nelson, "the study tested four diets -- Atkins (ultra-low-carb), the Zone (low-carb), Ornish (very low-fat) or a low-fat diet following the federal Food Pyramid." In the end, "researchers saw that women whose diets matched their genetic makeup lost more than 13 pounds over a year compared to less than 3 pounds for women on mismatched diets." 

• Could it be that Wal-Mart's produce is better than Whole Foods'?

• If you're healthy, don't go on cholesterol medications as a preventative measure. Medical experts say that statins -- "the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States -- may not be as safe a preventive medicine as previously believed for people who are at low risk of heart attacks or strokes." Among other things, "recently published evidence indicates that statins could raise a person’s risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 9 percent."

• The secret to touching your toes: "It's a tennis ball. You don't need to throw it, hit it or catch it. You just need to roll it under each foot for a few seconds. Then put it aside, bend down again and you're guaranteed to reach a smidge closer to the ground." Is this why Ichiro rubs his feet with a wooden dowel?

• This isn't news to anyone who's read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories," but it's gradually getting out there that we should be eating more (good) fat: "Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the cardiologist who led the Harvard meta-analysis that's published in current issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, says that in their zeal to rid diets of 'fat' many consumers, snack makers, and restaurateurs have loaded their meals with sugar and simple carbohydrates, instead. It's a bad trade-off for the heart."

Check It Out: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

So begins Gary Taubes' thought-provoking and spectacularly polarizing July 2002 cover article for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" Taubes, an award-winning science journalist, points out that well into the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that diets high in "sugars and starches" -- in other words, carbs -- caused obesity. Up until that point, "the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat." Thirty years ago,

you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.

But over the past three decades, "we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer."

What explains the shift in conventional wisdom? In 1977, "a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its 'Dietary Goals for the United States,' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of 'killer diseases' supposedly sweeping the country," and "peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat." But according to Taubes, the reported increase in heart diseases that triggered these conclusions was wrong, and there was (is) no evidence to support the hypothesis that consumption of meat and dairy products had led to a dramatic uptick in heart disease. In the 1980s, the N.I.H. spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying -- and failing -- to link fatty diets with heart disease, but on a "leap of faith," posited nonetheless that the link existed. And "once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over":

The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating.

The message was loud and clear: Go low-fat. Eat carbs instead. For decades, this mantra was pounded into our heads by academics, health professionals, agribusiness and marketers alike. But these days, it's become widely accepted that carbs spike insulin production, which in turns triggers weight gain. And "[f]ew experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified."

If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it...

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

I'm not saying you should immediately run screaming from carbs and start stocking up on lard. But it's worth checking out Taubes' claims for yourself.

I've just begun reading Taube's 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and will post a review when I'm done. So far, I'm finding it an engaging read. If nothing else, it encourages intellectual curiosity: Taubes challenges readers to look askance at conventional wisdom and to question whether there's evidence to support what many of us have been taught about diet and nutrition. A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing. (It certainly helped color my reading of the New York Times' recent article on the "obesity-hunger paradox.")

Just like his controversial New York Times Magazine article, the talking heads are split on Taube's book. (Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil are fans; Jillian Michaels and Mehmet Oz are not.) And not all reviewers agree with Taube's conclusions. But regardless of where you land on this issue, there's certainly a lot of food for thought here.

After the jump: Video of Taube's 2007 lecture at U.C. Berkeley (in case you don't feel like reading his 468-page book, but want to get the gist of what he's saying).