Activists From The United States

"Aye, think! Since time and life began, Your mind has only feared and slept; Of all the beasts they called you man Only because you toiled and wept."

"Now come on mothers throughout the land Pack your boys off to Vietnam Come on fathers don't hesitate Send your sons off before it's too late And you can be the first one on your block To have your boy come home in a box."

"And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn Next stop is Vietnam. And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopie! We're all gonna die!"

"I was inspired to write a folk song — about how soldiers have no choice in the matter but to follow orders — but with the irreverence of rock ’n’ roll."

"Neither eating less nor exercising more will lead to long-term weight loss, as the body naturally compensates."

"Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet—unrestricted in calories—than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet."

"It’s hard to avoid the observation that at least some individuals lose weight on carbohydrate-restricted diets while eating considerably more calories then would normally be consumed in a semi-starvation diet.… Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with calories."

"It’s not so much that fat fills us up as that carbohydrates prevent satiety, and so we remain hungry."

"Rats can be easily addicted to sugar, according to Hoebel, and will demonstrate the physical symptoms of opiate withdrawal when forced to abstain."

"The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right."

"Von Noorden’s focus on metabolic expenditure set the science of obesity on the path we still find it. The evolution of this research, however, proceeded like a magician’s sleight-of-hand. By the 1940s, common sense, logic, and science had parted ways."

"A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions."

"A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. Lost in this distillation is the fact that the effects of these different nutrients on metabolism and hormone secretion are so radically different, as is the manner in which the body employs the nutrients, that the energetically equivalence of the calories themselves is largely irrelevant to why we gain weight."

"It’s effectively impossible to restrict calories significantly without also reducing the carbohydrates."

"This notion that fattening is the cause and overeating the effect, and not vice versa, also explains why a century of researchers have made so little progress."

"Since none of this research is particularly controversial, it’s hard to imagine why obesity researchers would not take seriously the hypothesis that carbohydrates have a unique ability to fatten humans—or, as Thomas Hawkes Tanner put it in The Practice of Medicine almost 140 years ago, that “farinaceous and vegetable foods are fattening, and saccharine matters are especially so.” Researchers who study carbohydrate metabolism have found this science compelling. In 1991, the Belgian physiologist Henri-Géry Hers, an authority on what are known as glycogen-storage diseases, one of which is named after him, put it this way: “Eating carbohydrates will stimulate insulin secretion and cause obesity. That looks obvious to me.…” but this simple chain of cause and effect has nonetheless been rejected out of hand by authority figures in the field of human obesity, who believe that the cause of the condition is manifestly obvious and beyond dispute, that the law of energy conservation dictates that obesity has to be caused by eating too much or moving too little."

"One of the most reproducible findings in obesity research, as I’ve said, is that fat people, on average, eat no more than lean people."

"This era began with a handful of naïve assumptions…The forty years of research that followed would overturn them all—but it would have effectively no influence on the mainstream thinking about human obesity."

"The bulk of the science is no longer controversial, but its potential significance has been minimized by the assumption that saturated fat is still the primary evil in modern diets."

"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations."

"In preventative medicine, benefits without risks are nonexistent."

"But the greatest single change in the American diet was in fact the spectacular increase in sugar consumption from the mid-nineteenth century onward, from less than 15 pounds a person yearly in the 1830s to 100 pounds by the 1920s and 150 pounds (including high-fructose corn syrup) by the end of the century. In effect, Americans replaced a good portion of the whole grains they ate in the nineteenth century with refined carbohydrates."

"The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations."

"When I interviewed Grundy in May 2004, he acknowledged that metabolic syndrome was the cause of most heart disease in America, and that this syndrome is probably caused by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. Yet in his three reports—representing the official NIH, AHA, and ADA positions—all remained firmly wedded to the fat-cholesterol dogma."

"Because sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) are both effectively half glucose and half fructose, they offer the worst of both sugars."

"This is considered the fundamental principle underlying modern genetic research: once evolution comes upon a genetic mechanism that works, it reuses it again and again. Those genes that regulate the development and the existence of any single living organism will likely be used in some similar fashion in all of them. “When reduced to essentials,” as the cancer researcher J. Michael Bishop suggested in his 1989 Nobel prize lecture, “the fruit fly and Homo sapiens are not very different.”"

"In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture."

"“It appears that efforts to promote the use of low-calorie and low-fat food products have been highly successful,” Weinsier noted, but the reduction in fat intake did “not appear to have prevented the progression of obesity in the population.”"

"The documented failure of semi-starvation diets for the obese dates back at least half a century."

"We should not be surprised that dieting is difficult, as Keith Frayn of Oxford University says in his 1996 textbook, Metabolic Regulation. “It is a fight against mechanisms which have evolved over many millions of years precisely to minimize its effects.”"

"“Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power,” as Susan Sontag observed in her 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor, “are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” This is certainly the case with obesity."

"We may forget that the science is not adequately described, or ambiguous, even if the public-health policy seems to be set in stone."

"The most obvious difficulty with the notion that a retarded metabolism explains the idiosyncratic nature of fattening is that it never had any evidence to support it."

"Whatever the accepted wisdom, making obesity a behavioral issue is endlessly problematic."

"What may be the single most incomprehensible aspect of the last half century of obesity research is the failure of those involved to grasp the fact that both hunger and sedentary behavior can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to grow fat, just as a lack of hunger and the impulse to engage in physical activity can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to burn calories rather than store them."

"Children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing."

"The most dramatic of these animal obesity models is known as hypothalamic obesity, and it served as the experimental obesity of choice for researchers from the 1930s onward. It also became another example of the propensity to attribute the cause of obesity to overeating even when the evidence argued otherwise. The interpretation of these experiments became one of a half-dozen critical turning points in obesity research, a point at which the individuals involved in this research chose to accept an interpretation of the evidence that fit their preconceptions rather than the evidence itself and, by so doing, further biased the perception of everything that came afterward."

"Once the “truth” has been declared, even if it’s based on incomplete evidence, the overwhelming tendency is to interpret all future observations in support of that preconception."

"The reason for this book is straightforward: despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount."

"From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day…. The facts did not support these claims, but the myths served a purpose, and so they remained unquestioned."

"Obesity levels in the United States remained relatively constant from the early 1960s through 1980, between 12 and 14 percent of the population; over the next twenty-five years, coincident with the official recommendations to eat less fat and so more carbohydrates, it surged to over 30 percent."

"Skepticism, however, cannot be removed from the scientific process. Science does not function without it."

"Despite myriad attempts, researchers were unable to establish that patients with atherosclerosis had significantly more cholesterol in their bloodstream than those who didn’t."

"Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively."

"Conflict of interest is an accusation invariably wielded to discredit those viewpoints with which one disagrees."

"By the 1920s, insulin was discovered and found to be essential for the utilization of carbohydrates for energy. Without insulin, diabetic patients could still mitigate the symptoms of the disease by restricting the starches and sugar in their diet. And yet diabetologists would come to reject categorically the notion that sugar and refined carbohydrates could somehow be responsible for the disease—another example of powerful authority figures winning out over science."

"That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles of themselves."

"That sugar is half fructose is what fundamentally differentiates it from starches and even the whitest, most refined flour."

"All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon."

"That the toxic-environment hypothesis is deeply immersed in moral and class judgments is evident by the observation that few or none of the condemnations of fast-food restaurants included a coffee chain such as Starbucks, despite the copious extra calories it peddles."