Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

I love food.
A lot.
Really.

It is too bad that this usually goes together with consequences: extra weight and all the rest that then, in most cases, follows.

According to the author this is not necessarily always the case.
He explains in the book that it is more about quality of the food rather than about quantity: insulin production is the pivotal factor in storing energy as fat.

To support his point he shows several cases of populations with high fat ingestion that are not fat and that start to become fat once they start to use the “western diet”, groups of people with limited amount of available daily calories that become obese anyway, experiments with mice in laboratories.
His conclusion is that the foods that drive up the insulin production are the ones that will increase the fat buildup in a person.

On the basis of his findings the author suggests a diet that goes in the opposite direction of the ones promoted by the national health advisory councils in the western world: skip cereals (even unrefined), vegetables with high amid content and sugar while getting all the desired proteins, non-caloric vegetables and fat.

Sooner or later I’ll give a try at this shift of eating habits: most of the food I like better already falls in the categories he suggests hence I should be keep up with the change at least for a while.