Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar?

Here I think you genuinely disagree with Taubes, who believes that people have a caloric set point of sorts and that they are never going to actually decrease the calories they take in, especially if they're not really trying to do so and just pursuing a separate goal like "cut down on fat".

Why is this comment being downvoted so heavily?

(NOTE: parent comment was at -3 when I posted this)

Huh? These seem clearly like "Main" posts, going by the wiki's definition. These posts are extensively cited, and not just posting a link or offering an opportunity for brainstorming:

These traditionally go in Discussion:

• a link with minimal commentary
• a question or brainstorming opportunity for the Less Wrong community

Beyond that, here are some factors that suggest you should post in Main:

• Your post discusses core Less Wrong topics.
• The material in your post seems especially important or useful.
• You put a lot of thought or effort into your post. (Citing studies, making diagrams, and agonizing over wording are good indicators of this.)
• Your post is long or deals with difficult concepts. (If a post is in Main, readers know that it may take some effort to understand.)
• You've searched the Less Wrong archives, and you're pretty sure that you're saying something new and non-obvious.

I worry the definition of what counts as suitable for "Main" has gotten ratcheted up over time so that now hardly anything counts as suitable for Main. Which is probably why hardly anyone posts there anymore. See this discussion, especially Yvain's comment and John Maxwell's comment about LW having gotten too focused on discouraging bad content at the expense of encouraging good content.

Having gotten no response from you to my previous comments in this subthread, and with few other people objecting, I've moved both of the posts back to Main.

To add to this, fruit juice makes it easy to rapidly consume a lot of sugar, whereas if you actually eat the whole fruit it is far less likely that you will consume that much. Plus eating the fruit has the benefit of obtaining the fiber, which is important for digestion.

No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.

I don't see outright misrepresentations. I see a focus on what Taubes thinks they did wrong.

Agreed. So why are you defending him?

Because everyone fails Less Wrong's standards for argument and discussion. Everyone here could spend 24 hours a day pointing out dark epistemology in the writings of public intellectuals and we would always have more work to do. If you're going to target a particular person it doesn't seem worthwhile unless the central content of the persons's work is wrong or dishonest-- especially with the context of a broader debate. Call it the Rationalist's Fallacy, in a world where everyone selectively emphasizes some facts to support their position someone selectively emphasizing facts that support their position provides little to no evidence about whether they are right or wrong, whether they are honest or dishonest or whether their work is net beneficial for the world.

Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I was worried about embarrassing Eliezer, but that was probably a mistake, insofar as it may have left people wondering why I was wasting my time on such an awful article. But it seemed worth addressing, insofar Eliezer apparently thought it made a good argument that crazed dietary scientists had killed millions.

Okay, well that makes some sense. But I sort of suspect Eliezer thought Taubes work in general made a good case that dietary scientists had killed millions and that was just the most convenient article he had when looking for cites.

knowing sweets aren't health food isn't rocket science.

Candy, sure. But there are tons of people who think yogurt with fruit(and corn syrup) on the bottom is health food. And juice. And Gatorade. I'll bet a lot of people have purchased a sugar filled cereal for their children after looking at the bottom of that food pyramid.

But what I don't get is why this confidence in the readers of the AHA pamphlet doesn't yield more charity when interpreting Taubes.

Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.

Nowhere does he say that. What he says is:

and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy.

If we're assuming the reader has enough knowledge to understand that the government's recommendations have never been very high on sweets it's pretty clear that what Taubes is saying is that people end up drinking a lot of soft drinks (but this certainly applies even more to fruit juices and sports drinks) because they have been told that the primary thing they should do to avoid gaining weight is to avoid fat at all costs. Which, if not obviously true is certainly a very plausible hypothesis.

Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.

Coke was absolutely a health food, but not during the periods that Taubes seems to be talking about. Many popular soft drinks have their origins in late-19th and early-20th-century patent medicines, and Coca-Cola is no exception.

Of course, the late 19th and early 20th centuries were times when nutrition advice was almost entirely superstition and quackery, as opposed to merely substantially so. So that amusing historical factoid doesn't tell us much about the quality of nutritional science as it's been in living memory.

Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite.

I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.

To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.

Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books' pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it's about the low-fat prescription.

All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the "fat" message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison).

I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn't a "sugar makes you fat" message.

Over time, even a relatively small difference in daily average caloric intake can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, a 100 cals/day decrease will yield a ~10lb body mass decrease per yer.

While that is widely claimed, it is false. Think about it for a minute: do you really think that a decade of such deprivation would kill a light person? The problem is not all the complications of metabolism that people bring up in these posts, but the very basic fact that energy consumption is roughly proportional to body mass. Under that model, a caloric deficit will not lead to linear weight loss nor a surplus to linear weight gain. Instead, the new caloric intake is enough to support a new weight and the difference between the current and new weight decays exponentially. Here is a recent model, with some testing; one of the authors is quoted claiming that a 100 Cal/day deficit will lead to a total loss of 10lb, after about 3 years.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but:

fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9)

Why is “per gram” the relevant metric? It should be something more like “per unit ‘satiating power’” (to the extent that such a thing can be defined). If drinking a half-litre bottle of Coke doesn't make me less hungry than before¹ but eating a cone of ice cream makes me feel full, if I want to reduce my calorie intake it makes more sense to forgo the former even if it weighs several times as much.

1. Other than due to the water, CO2, and caffeine, which I could also get from a bottle of sparkling water and a shot of espresso.

If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.

As a historical claim, I believe that this is false. The opposition to consuming fat is primarily about correlation with heart disease. Certainly none of the examples of government advice in this post are about weight loss.

Along come the carb-cutting people. My hypothesis is that the general rationale for this movement was the recognition that the average American diet was made up of some huge % of carbs (>50% of caloric intake) and so the simple math of avoiding carbs, even if you upped your fat intake, would ensure your daily average caloric intake went down.

They wrote down their reasons and this certainly isn't any of reasons that Atkins gives.

If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.

Seems to me that this strategy is vulnerable to munchkinism (haha) by the food industry. Which sells "low fat" this and "reduced fat" that. Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food, it may be only a proxy.

If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.

This assumes that the average person can meaningful succeed in his attempt to eat less and beat his hunger. What people eat has a lot to do with the desires of the body for food and if you starve a body of fat that has consequences.

If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.

This doesn't explain why the government put starches at the bottom of the pyramid, thus encouraging people to eat as many of them as possible.

If this were true we would expect hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets to become fat if they have had plenty of food for, say, the last seven years.

I don't know a lot about hunter gatherers, but it occurs to me that "plenty of food" for a hunter gatherer might be very different from "plenty of food" for your typical Westerner.

In a typical American city, you can walk a a couple hundred feet and buy extremely tasty food equal to half your day's caloric requirements for an amount of money a typical person could earn in 10 or 15 minutes. So the cost of food, in terms of time, mental and physical exertion, inconvenience, etc., is extremely low for your typical Westerner. Even if you live in the sticks, it costs very little in terms of money and exertion to get in your car and hit the drive-thru window at MacDonalds.

For a hunter-gatherers, I doubt it's anywhere near that easy to eat -- even in times of plenty.

Yet from what I understand hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets never get fat.

Would be awfully hard to check if that's even true for temperate climates. Furthermore, having to go through the trouble of hunting your food adds a negative feedback (the heavier you are the harder it is to hunt).

edit: also, in what conditions would ancestral populations get fat? Getting fat may look like a disorder, but it is a complicated biological process that is not going to be preserved if it has no use.

edit2: also, there's a lot of variation between contemporary populations, e.g. between east Europe and US & west Europe. The key thing is that, well, east is poorer, and if you're gaining weight that means you can save some money on food (yay, good news). Perhaps rather than looking into paleolithic, where there's not much evidence for much anything, we can just look at contemporary populations.