Dr. George Bray's model of obesity

In July 2008 I posted on Dr. George Bray’s critique of Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories that appeared in Obesity Reviews.  Included in my post was a copy of Gary’s response.  Now Dr. Bray is back with a rebuttal to Gary’s response to his (Bray’s) original critique.  In conversation, Gary told me he has elected to drop the issue because the discussion is going nowhere.  Gary makes substantive points; Bray obfuscates the issues and will continue to do so.  I, however, am not going to drop the case.  Maybe I’ll have the last word here.

I want to go over Dr. Bray’s response to Gary’s letter in some detail because it is emblematic of all that is wrong with obesity research today and clearly demonstrates why we will never get anywhere until the people of Bray’s generation fade away. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen so many instances of one writer missing the point as often as Dr. Bray does in this short reply.  The entirety of his response is an example of either shoddy thinking or intellectual dishonesty.  Or maybe both. It brings to mind Mary McCarthy’s famous quote about Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

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There is an old joke that goes something like this:

Question: What is Mozart doing in his grave right now?
Answer: De-composing.

The same question could be asked of the living right now who are working hard on their diets and seeming to go nowhere body weight-wise.

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When I put out the call for what people wanted to read about on this blog in 2009, numerous folks commented that they would like to know why it seems so much more difficult to successfully follow a low-carb diet the second or third time around.  Over the years I’ve noticed this phenomenon in myself and in many others whom I have treated or advised, so it’s truly a subject worthy of exploration.

I’m going to list the reasons experience has taught me below, starting with situations over which we have no control and ending with those over which we have total control.

Aging

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A couple of weeks ago I posted that Gary Taubes had agree to answer questions from readers of this blog.  Over a hundred readers sent in questions through the comment section.  Many of these questions were actually multiple questions, so Gary ended up with probably 200+ questions to deal with.

I’ve gone through and compiled a list of the most common questions and presented them to Gary.  Here are the questions followed by his responses.

The most commonly asked question was how do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences? Read more »