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?Sigh? says Matt Stone as he listens to an interview between Gary Taubes and Jimmy Moore on filing a class-action lawsuit on the government?

Yeah, I was just listening to a Taubes interview done by Jimmy Moore of ?Livin? la Vida Low Carb? lore. It was painful. It’s like, I love Gary Taubes so much. He makes the most sound and sophisticated arguments challenging the weight loss mantra of the modern world. He sucks you in. He talks about refined carbohydrates and their ?guilty until proven innocent? relationship to human health problems. He talks about the lack of causal relationship between eating a lot of calories and accumulating excess body fat. He relies upon legendary health greats like T.L. Cleave as he throws massive punches at the outdated way to think about saturated fat and heart disease.

And then he takes this giant pile of genius and comes to the conclusion that a ketogenic diet is the best weight loss diet for the human organism. He actually believes that the carbohydrate is inherently fattening ? that the ingestion of carbohydrates magically triggers insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

It’s a black fly in your chardonnay. It’s a death row pardon, two minutes too late. It’s like meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife, or you know, something like that.

Because Gary, here I am, stuffing myself with food, eating like a friggin? madman, and losing a half pound a day ? and I ain’t got much to lose. I engulf 600 grams of carbohydrates like it’s nothing, then wake up the next day lighter than the last. For Pete sake, one of my meals this week included 3 pears, 3 whole wheat bagels, and a huge bowl of steel-cut oats with 3 lil? bananas. That’s over 300 grams of carbs in one sitting.

Monkeys eating bananas, birds eating grain, and horses eating grass till their heart’s content causes a rise in blood sugar and insulin in them too ? but do they get fat? Not so much.

The most carb-loving societies on earth also happen to be amongst the leanest. How could Gary read T.L. Cleave’s books, which he sites so profusely in Good Calories, Bad Calories, without taking close note of the impeccably lean and healthy rural Zulus and their 90% carbohydrate diet? Gary needs to go on a trip to Asia. He needs to eat like they do. Maybe the hoarseness in his voice, a symptom of a low metabolism that he has induced by eating ultra low-carb for several years, will clear up a bit (Watch Gary give a lecture here).

Not to pick on the poor fella, but the ultimate conclusion of his 7-year research saga is off. I just don’t see how a guy can be so close yet so far. It’s as if he booked the boat ride, received his tickets in the mail, found the port, saw the boat coming in, walked all the way down to the end of the dock, tied the boat to the dock, got it on with the captain’s mistress, beat some stowaways in a heated game of Uno? And then still missed the boat!

Anyway, that rant aside, I have in fact lost 5.5 pounds in 11 days (most of it as fat). My fasting glucose is precisely 80 mg/dl. And day after day, post after post, interview after interview ? people are losing weight on diets that denounce Taubes such as Fuhrman’s http://www.diseaseproof.com/. I’m not saying you can’t lose weight on low-carb. You can, and many do. Most do. Figuring out why that is and abandoning the useless calorie-centered approach to weight loss is a MASSIVE step in the right direction. I’m also not saying that fat and meat phobes aren’t equally blind to Taubes. In fact, they are typically far more blind, stubborn, ignorant, and intellectually feeble than Mr. Taubes.

But isn’t there someone, anyone, that dares to NOT demonize fat, protein, carbs, calories, or some other natural constituent to the food humans have been eating for millennia without obesity problems?

Ugh.