Good Calories vs Bad Calories

May 12th, 2009 • Related • Filed Under

Feeling sickA technical book written by Gary Taubes, a scientific writer, Good Calories Bad Calories, challenges the idea that eating fat is evil and that exercise is not the answer to the obesity epidemic. The answer is complex but lies in controlling our hormones, especially insulin, adrenalin and cortisol.

One of the reasons kids may be so fat is that the mother was heavy when she became pregnant, gained lots of weight during preganancy- causing gestational diabetes - and exposed the fetus to lots of sugar during its growth in the womb.  This may trigger genetic traits to be expressed that make these children extra sensitive to carbohydrates with a high index and load.

Here are 3 respected experts on Larry King live in 2007,  Dr. Andrew Weil,

Dr. Mehmet Oz and Gary Taubes. Listen to what they have to say for 6 minutes..

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There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Kathryn Merrow - The Pain Relief Coach on 19 May 2009:

    Thank you for a thought-provoking article and video.

    Dr. Weil said people “predisposed by genetics” when supplied with the foods we typically may eat, will have obesity and health problems. Well, those same genetics have always been with us, yet 50 years ago there were very few overweight adults and virtually no overweight children. Those same genetics occur all over the earth, yet the US is the fattest country in the world.

    Doesn’t it boil down to eating as nature designed us to eat? We used to eat real food that was available to us historically–food from the earth and sea and fields and trees–rather than from factories and chemistry labs.

  2. Comment by Bruce Bair on 20 May 2009:

    You are so right Kathryn! Eating real food that isn’t processed until it is prepared at home is key. Processing refines the food in a way that makes too many calories available to us and our digestive system absorbs too much too fast. It gets all our hormones really out of whack! A more disturbing fact it that babies born to Moms who are obese are likely to be genetically altered so that they may be obese almost no matter how they eat.