The Letters section of today’s New York Times Book Review carried Gary Taubes’ rebuttal to Gina Kolata’s self-serving review of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I was glad to see Gary strike back the way he did because it saved me some work.

In her review published earlier this month Kolata took Taubes to task for his conclusion that all calories don’t act the same in terms of how easily they make one gain weight. She accused him of ignoring specific studies done 50 years ago that she felt showed decisively that a calorie really is just a calorie irrespective of what it’s made of. Read more »

I just got word from Gary Taubes that the Larry King Live show he taped is airing tonight at 9 PM Eastern Time. He will be on discussing his book Good Calories, Bad Calories with Mehmet Oz and Andrew Weil.

Hope you can catch it despite my not alerting you until the 11th hour.

If you’re interested in what your fellow readers are reading, below is the best seller list for the last quarter based on what readers of this site ordered through Amazon.com.

I don’t know if you realize or not, but whenever you click onto Amazon.com through this site anything you purchase throws off a few cents, which I use to help maintain this site, pay for the hosting and pay for my web guy to keep things running. The amount I harvest from this each month falls far short of what is required for the above, but it along with the Google ads just about covers the expense. And I appreciate it very much.

When I get the reports from Amazon they simply tally the books ordered and what the commission for this site is. There is no way to identify who ordered what, so if you want to order something naughty, go for it. I’ll never know who it was. (In case anyone is curious, there wasn’t a single X-rated book or video ordered during the entire quarter. I guess readers of this blog have clean minds to go along with their healthy diets.)

The books that sold the most during the quarter were The Protein Power LifePlan and others that MD and I had written or co-written, but I’m not including those on the best seller list because they have an unfair advantage in that it is my site and the icons for those books are the entry portal into Amazon. The best seller list includes only books that MD and I didn’t author or co-author.

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I was looking through my (as yet unorganized) library a couple of days ago and came across a couple of books that I thought I should blog about. After giving it some more thought I decided to start a series of posts on the books that I found most essential in my own low-carb reading. These would be the books that should make up the core of any good low-carber’s library. So here we are with the first post in the series.

Probably the most influential diet book of all time was not really a diet book, but a bound letter written by a satisfied patient. William Banting (1797-1878) was a middle-aged undertaker living in London who had become obese. He sought the help of multiple physicians and other practitioners who prescribed a variety of remedies for him, none of which worked. Or as he put it
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In going through the huge pile of mail confronting me when we got home from Europe, I found a prepublication copy of Gary Taubes’ new book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

I’ve read the book in manuscript form when it was 800 plus pages, again when it was cut down to 700 or so pages, and now I’m going through it again at its new, svelte 600 or so pages. It is a remarkable book, and one that, I believe, will initiate a sea change in the way everyone looks at nutrition. Unless I miss my guess, Taubes will be on every talk show known to man, and his book will be reviewed everywhere, and talked about by everyone. Just think of the satisfaction you will have (those of you who are long-term low-carbers) in just a couple of months when you can go around with big smiles on your faces telling everyone I told you so.

Here is a review from Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes that I cribbed from Amazon.com: Read more »