Book 18: Why We Get Fat (And What to do About It) by Gary Taubes: My longest book review EVER!

A simple observation of the eating habits of my (skinny) husband and (not at all skinny) me will reveal two things: DH can eat whatever he wants and not gain weight,  and DH can eat whatever he wants, and his blood sugar will be perfect an hour a later. Neither of these things is true for me. So I was very pleased to read Gary Taubes' convincing, eloquent explanation of how these two things are linked.

I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes with my first pregnancy; I wasn't with the last two, but I still tested my blood sugar pretty regularly to make sure things were staying under control. As a result, I'm a lot more intimately familiar with my blood sugar than most non-diabetics. When I was diagnosed with GD 10 years ago, pretty much the only advice the nutritionist I met with gave me was to count carbs. And in my adventures with my blood sugar monitor it wasn't hard to see a relationship between eating carbs and my blood sugar levels: too many carbs of any type or pretty much any amount of pure simple carbs (i.e. fruit juice or coke) shot my levels up dramatically. So when I first started listening to Gary Taubes, I thought maybe he was exaggerating the "other side's" position for dramatic effect. Surely everyone recognizes that too many carbs are bad at the very least for a certain (large and rapidly growing) segment of the population that's especially sensitive to them, right? Then I started looking around, and realized that, in fact, there are people out there who say that diabetics need to cut their fat and that, other than pure sugar, they don't need to really worry about carbs. Fruit is fine, one site said, but if it makes you feel better you can cut down on it. Again, this is so counter my own experience with drinking 1/4 cup of orange juice when I was pregnant, that it seemed absurd.  This might explain, though, why my mother, who's been a diabetic for 10 years, eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost every night for dinner. No one's ever told her she shouldn't.

I almost didn't read WWGF because I was already pretty well convinced that, at least for me, a low or moderate carb diet was what I ought to be doing. Then I actually started doing it, and that made me a little more interested in the science behind the whole thing. Taubes thesis is that obesity is the result of a hormonal disorder involving insulin regulation, and that overeating and sedentary behavior is not the cause of obesity but a side effect of it. It's very clear to me, again, from my own experiences, that eating a big dose of carbohydrates (particularly if unaccompanied by sufficient protein and fat) leads to a blood sugar crash a couple of hours later that makes me crave sugar like crazy (sugar being the fastest way to restore my blood sugar to a reasonable level). So it makes complete sense to me that the same thing might be happening, on a less dramatic level, with lower levels of carbohydrate eating. It's also very clear after just a few days on a lowish carb diet that eating fewer carbs is remarkably effective for getting rid of sugar cravings. I won't get into the science of it more than that, because I suck at explaining science-y things. WWGF is presented in the introduction as sort of Good Calories, Bad Calories (Taubes' earlier, much longer, book on the same topic) for Dummies. "People kept asking me for a version that they could share with their not very bright cousin Ed," says Taubes (okay; not in so many words). This was enough for me. I don't feel a need to read Good Calories, Bad Calories.

I am much more schooled in analyzing writing than in analyzing science, however, so I'll blather on for a bit about that. First off, let me say that I believe Taubes is entirely sincere. At one point he says he's willing to stake his reputation on his claims, and, in fact, he has. He's clearly a serious guy--an award winning science journalist--and I don't think he would be pushing so hard a view many still see as quackery if he weren't certain about it. But, as John Kerry once told George W. Bush, "you can be certain, and you can be wrong." And once you're certain, all the evidence can seem to support what you already believe to be true. Taubes himself admits as much; this, he says, is why the high carb/low fat thinking has prevailed for so long in the face of all contrary evidence, and this, he admits, is a phenomenon that he is subject to as well. Taubes is also nothing if not long-winded. And he's a bright guy and a good writer, which makes me read (listen) extra carefully, lest I fall prey to the smartest guy in the room syndrome. All of that said, I find Taubes pretty damn convincing. He throws study after study at you and tosses in a lot of historical information; there's prettty much nothing in the way of personal anecdotes, and he's not fond of sensationalism or hyperbole (his relentless use of the phrase "fattening carbohydrates" in a transparent attempt to change conventional wisdom by changing language gets a little annoying).

I read a lot of anti-Taubes stuff as well while I was listening to the book. Most Taubes criticism seems to fall into two categories: 1. people who parrot back the opinions of "experts" who disagree with Taubes and then announce triumphantly: "see! he's wrong!" Since Taubes' entire point is that the experts have gotten things wrong for the past 50 years, this line of criticism is a bit...misguided. 2. people who clearly haven't read the book and throw out gotcha, "but what about.....!" statements. Like, "what about in Asia?! With all the rice!" Turns out if you read the book, even the for Dummies version, there's not much that Taubes hasn't considered and addressed...including what about Asia with all the rice (I got a little distracted during that part, but it has something to do with how traditional Asian diets don't include many simple carbohydrates, so they haven't destroyed their bodies, and they can still eat rice...except for in the places where they have McDonald's and sugar now; those people are all getting diabetes. Also, Taubes never claims that no one can eat carbohydrates without getting fat. His analogy is this: not everyone who smokes cigarettes will get lung cancer, but most of the people who get lung cancer get it because they smoked).

But some of the criticism is thoughtful and deserves attention. I read one critique (not of this book, but of Taubes' 2002?(ish) piece in the NYT magazine that started to lay out some of these ideas) in Reason magazine, that seemed to raise some good points (except that that guy poo pooed the idea that eating carbs can set up a blood sugar crash that makes you crave carbs...and, as I've mentioned, that's something I experience regularly (and I don't think it's particularly uncommon)). Then I read Taubes' rebuttal, which addressed absolutely every critique the guy made and ran something like twice as long as the original critique. Again....does this mean he's right or just that he'll talk longer than anyone else? The most reasonable sounding critiques of Taubes are generally from people who have no particular agenda and who say things like, "Taubes makes some good points about x and y, but I disagree with him here." Michael Pollan seems to be one of these people (and the respect mingled with healthy skepticism seems mutual; both authors quote the other frequently, but sometimes have quibbles). A lot of people raise good questions about his POV on exercise (namely, that it's largely unhelpful for sustained weight loss). It's worth noting that there's plenty of overlap between Taubes' view and conventional wisdom these days, too. Taubes regularly stresses that refined carbohydrates, especially in liquid form, are the worst offenders, and that for a lot of people cutting these out may be all that's needed. Although Taubes pulls up some pretty outrageous quotes from nutrition experts in the 80's, at the height of the low fat craze, there's not really anyone TODAY who suggests that you're better off drinking Coke than eating eggs (I don't think there is, anyway).

I wondered if perhaps Taubes was cherry-picking studies (as he's been accused of) when he extols the amazing results of low carb diets,  so I checked out the Wikipedia article on the studies that have been done. I expected them to be somewhat inconclusive; the impression I've gotten from the media over the years is that some studies show low fat diets as better than low carb, and some show the opposite. I was surprised to learn that, assuming Wikipedia hasn't fallen prey to a low carb conspiracy, the results of recent research is pretty uniformly positive for low carb diets. Weight loss is generally better than on low fat or straight up calorie restricted diets--at worst it's roughly the same (and with, remember, no calorie restrictions), and heart health indicators almost always get better on low carb diets.

For me personally, if I had to name my own quibbles/questions about the book (which, to be clear, I am, by and large, a huge fan of)....I'd echo the questions about exercise. It's true that I don't find exercise particularly helpful with weight loss now, in my mid-thirties, but it definitely made a difference 10 or 15 years ago, when I could eat complete crap all the time (including copious amounts of liquid sugar) and stay pretty thin as long as I jogged 20 or 30 minutes a day. Taubes tends to talk mostly about "exercise" as if all of it is the same, without making any distinctions about type, duration, who's doing it, etc.  And, perhaps this falls under the category of criticizing the book the author didn't write, but Taubes himself brings up, briefly, in the introduction, the ethical considerations in adopting a diet composed largely of animal products. But then he never really addresses it. Unlike Pollan, he makes no argument, ethical or nutritional, for eating pastured meat and dairy. I do eat mostly pastured meat and eggs (dairy is a work in progress), but I recognize that this is a luxury, and I'm not sure there's any question that the world's carrying capacity is a lot higher when we mostly eat plants. But, again, that's a different book.

Ultimately, while Taubes himself is entirely convinced of his "alternate hypothesis" (as he calls it) he recognizes and emphasizes that that's what it is. His purpose here is partially to convince people that he's right, but also to convince the scientific community that more good research is needed...because if he is right then time's a-wasting.

Book 17: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

I.e. not Seabiscuit. It's important, I think, for people who read this book to realize going into it that it is not Seabiscuit. It turns out that being in a Japenese POW camp is a lot more...harrowing than horse racing. Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, one time Olympic runner turned WWII soldier. It recounts his early life as a runner, then his war experiences, notably the part about how his plane crashed and he spent nearly 2 months adrift on a life raft, surrounded by sharks, followed by a couple of years in a Japanese prison camp, then follows him home and details his life after the war as he attempts to come to terms with everything that happened to him. As I suggested, I was a little unprepared for how relentlessly grim much of this book is, although there's not really any reason why I should have been. Except for Seabiscuit. But I stuck with it because it is a hell of a good story, and very well told. My good luck streak with narrative non-fiction (AKA my new favorite genre) continues. I can't even begin to list the warning labels this book should come with. Though I do think Hillenbrand handles the gritty details as non-sensationally as possible without doing any sugarcoating.

Book 16: At Home by Bill Bryson

I'd never read any Bill Bryson before (although he seems to have written approximately 4000 books), so I wasn't precisely sure what to expect from At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Well, I mean, I guess the subtitle gave me something of a hint. Reading Bill Bryson is kind of like listening to a charming but eccentric professor who is delightfully easy to lead off track onto some fascinating tangent that lasts for the whole class period. I kept finding myself wondering--and utterly unable to remember--how, for example, the chapter on the bedroom wound up talking about the history of cremation. Bryson won me over in the introduction, when he started wondering why we have salt and pepper shakers on our kitchen tables instead of, say, cinnamon and basil shakers. Yes, why indeed? I couldn't wait to find out. As far as I can recall, though, Bryson never manages to actually explain why...at least not about pepper (salt seems fairly self explanatory anyway. duh--it's salt. yum). But no matter; At Home is a fascinating compendium of knowledge--some useful, some decidedly not. Laura Miller, in her review for Salon, writes that, " 'At Home' may ultimately be a bit pointless, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun all the same." I think that pretty well sums it up. Bryson does have a thesis, of sorts; it's directly stated in fact, and placed curiously a full third of the way through the book: "If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly." And I guess in some way or another, most all of the topics Bryson touches on do lead back to this central idea. Smallpox, crop rotation, the staircases in Monticello, locusts, frozen cavemen, the invention of the telephone, wig fashions, the commercial history of ice....yep; they're all covered here.

February 28-March 4: Week 26

I guess I'm calling this week 26; things got a little fuzzy somewhere. Basically, though, I'm aiming to finish up most of our stuff by the time Dave finishes school, which gives us 11 1/2 more weeks, assuming we take spring break when he does (which we will; no sense pretending otherwise). So we have an extra week or so to play with. Milo will need to do some math over the summer, and I'll probably find some supplemental math for Ari (maybe one of the Duke TIP things), and I imagine Gus will want to keep doing math, too. I might intentionally leave some of Practice Town for Ari to do over the summer so that he stays in...umm, practice. And I'm hoping we'll find time for Ari and Milo to learn how to type over the summer. Milo's handwriting is perfectly good, but very, very SLOW. He doesn't really complain about it, but I'm having a hard time imagining him doing the writing assignments for MCT next year unless he types them (or dictates them; that may happen a lot). But this wasn't about what we did this week! I am easily distracted. By myself.

What DID we do? Many things. I will tell you about some of them.

Ari:
*officially hates Life of Fred again. I think at this point we've given it a good try, and we're calling it quits (at least for Ari; we may revisit it when Milo gets there). New plan: stop trying to slow down Singapore, and just let him go through it as fast as he wants to (or as fast as he happens to, working on it for 30 minutes or so a day). He'll probably finish 6B sometime midway through next year, and then we'll see where we are and where to go next.

*finished Math Olympiad for the year

*wrote a summary about gladiators

*had an off week from Paragraph Town writing assignments. The week I didn't write a weekly report, he did an assignment where he's supposed to use a key word (or two or three) throughout a five paragraph essay. He used "popular" and wrote about Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It was a pretty big leap, I thought, from other PT assignments, so I gave him a lot of help, but I think it was a good introduction to coming up with a thesis, finding support in the text, etc.

*did a couple of exercises in Killgallon, including the first one where he gets to make up his own sentences. I think it's growing on him now.

*says that his two favorite words are "amiable" and "participle"

*read more of The Hobbit and will probably finish this coming week. I'm not sure what he's been reading at night.

*maybe he hasn't been reading that much at night, actually, because he's been on a moviemaking kick. His latest masterpiece is "Feline Goddess," featuring several clips of Athena the kitten playing. I should send it to her former foster mother.

Milo:
*worked on adding three 2 and 3 digit numbers with renaming in Singapore. He did really well with it. He's getting MUCH faster adding in his head (7 + 8, etc.), and he has no trouble whatsoever with the concept of renaming. Speed continues to be the issue. But, on the bright side of that, he seems to be able to concentrate for a much longer period than he used to be able to, so he can work for 20 or 30 minutes without collapsing in a heap of tears and frustration (you know, as long as I'm sitting right there. If I send him to another room to work, he's nearly always staring into space when I check on him).  I'm flirting with the idea of giving him the ITBS this summer to get a better idea of where he is and what he needs to work on before he takes it "for real" (not that anyone sees those scores either. Our homeschool laws are kinda weird) next year. Maybe over the summer. More for summer!

*is still immersed in the worlds of Magic Treehouse, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson. The Lightning Thief is missing right now, though. Milo loses things a lot.

*is doing very well with WWE. I think I'll have him read The Mouse and the Motorcycle next if ever finishes Chamber of Secrets, so he can find out all the other stuff that happens in it.

Gus:
*is tearing through Singapore 1A. He gets a little cocky and makes mistakes sometimes, because he thinks he knows more than he really does and goes too fast. He does the same thing in reading. He's the anti Milo.

*is reading MTH: Dinosaurs Before Dark to me, for a class he's taking at LEO. He and Dave are still reading The Hobbit at bedtime. They have big plans to read Harry Potter next.

*is ridiculously excited about starting Writing With Ease in the fall. I hope it lives up to his expectations. It's encouraging him to do his handwriting regularly, at least, since I told him he needs to finish Handwriting Without Tears before he starts.

*really loves Royal Fireworks Press' Aesop books.

Other stuff:
*I signed everyone up for homeschool soccer this week. It starts in 2 weeks. Milo insisted, right up until we were pulling into the park to register, that he didn't want to play. Then, at the last possible minute, he said grudgingly, "I guess I'll try it." So they're all signed up. Yay!

*Everyone LOVES Greek Code Cracker. As a consequence, everyone is very excited about starting Song School Greek (Milo and Gus) or Greek for Children (Ari) next year. Ari became a fan of Classical Academic Press on Facebook to help them get enough fans to give out a discount code. Must remember to order this week when discount code comes out.

*we did science! We learned about our eyes and how our pupils get bigger and smaller to let more or less light in. We inserted an (included!) battery into the (included!) flashlight and shined it into our eyes:

*We started Augustus Caesar's World for history. We read some of it while hanging out in the basement waiting out a tornado warning. That's the main reason we homeschool. I remember tornado warnings, lined up in the hallway, when I was in school, and we didn't get ANY work done.

*We still have a kitten:

 

Oh, speaking of that, I'm trying to set up a thing where we foster kittens for the local humane society, but the woman in charge of the program is proving to be a slow e-mail responder. I wanted some kind of volunteering project for the kids, and this seems like a very good one for shy kids who love animals and are currently kitten-obsessed. 

*We let IEW's poetry memorization program fall by the wayside awhile back. I didn't order the CD, and then I decided we needed it, only they don't sell just the CD, AND I didn't want to pay as much as they'd charge for it even if they did, so Dave tried to record the poems and make a CD, but that didn't work, for reasons we can't really figure out....so we've been doing our own poetry memorization program now. We're almost finished memorizing "Jabberwocky" (we have it on the CD that comes with A Child's Introduction to Poetry). Next up is Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." We read it and talked about it some this week. I might have sort of brought up the idea that it's about suicide. And then I might have started quoting Hamlet's "To be or not to to be" soliloquy. I am not sure how age appropriate all of this was. Particularly for my five year old.