"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."
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Activists from the United StatesPeople from New York (state)Non-fiction authors from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesScience authors from the United States
Original Language: English
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Chapter 22, “The Carbohydrate Hypothesis, II: Insulin” (p. 400; ellipsis in the book)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes
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Gary Taubes
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