The Case for Keto
Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating
We’ve featured two of Gary Taubes’ other great books: Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar. If you or a loved one have struggled with reaching your optimal weight while trying to follow the conventional wisdom that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more, I think you, too, will enjoy Taubes’s thoughtful perspective on just how flawed our current thinking is regarding the cause of obesity. Hint: It’s not an “energy balance” issue; it’s primarily a HORMONAL issue. The book is PACKED with Big Ideas. As in, jumbo packed. Hope you love the Note!
Big Ideas
- Textbook Science On Why We Get FatOn why we get fat.
- A Brief History Of SugarA brief history of.
- What We Can EatOn LCHF/Ketogenic eating.
- The Big “If...”Are you committed?
“I am not writing this book for the lean and healthy of the world, although I certainly believe they can benefit by reading it. I am writing it for those who fatten all too easily, who are drifting inexorably toward overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or some combination of them, or who are already afflicted and are living at increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and, in fact, all chronic disease. And I’m writing it for their doctors.
This book is a work of journalism masquerading as a self-help book. It’s about the ongoing conflict between the conventional thinking on the nature of a healthy diet and its failure to make us healthy, about the difference between how we have been taught to eat to prevent chronic disease and how we may have to eat to return ourselves to health. Should we be eating to reduce our risk of future disease, or should we be eating to achieve and maintain a healthy weight? Are these one and the same? ...
My goal is to help each of us shed a century of tragic preconceptions about the nature of a healthy diet, to learn to ignore the bad advice we have been given, and to replace it with a way of thinking about diets, our weight, and our health that works.”
~ Gary Taubes from The Case for Keto
This is something like the 620th PhilosophersNote I’ve created over the last 15 or so years. It’s the first one I created after taking an 18-month sabbatical to launch Heroic.
Now that we’ve launched the v1 of the Heroic app (which pilot study data shows can boost your energy (by 40%!), productivity (by 20%!) and connection (by 15%!) in just a few minutes in the app for just 30 days by helping you go from Theory to Practice to Mastery in your Energy + Work + Love), I’m re-integrating the Philosopher in me and doing everything I can to help you get your Soul Force score to 101 while the team hammers the product road map.
For whatever reason, as I perused the thousands (!) of books in our little library in the studio-barn here in the country outside of Austin where we now live, I was drawn to this book by Gary Taubes.
We’ve featured two of his other GREAT (!) books that have deeply influenced my thinking on (and practice of!) nutrition: Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar. So, I was excited jump in. I read the book cover to cover over the weekend in a few Deep Work time blocks.
It’s FANTASTIC.
The inside-flap cover summarizes the book perfectly: “The best-selling author of Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar reveals why the established rules about eating healthfully might be the wrong approach for most people, and how low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diets can help many of us achieve and maintain healthy weight for life.”
If you or a loved one have struggled with reaching your optimal weight while trying to follow the conventional wisdom that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more, I think you, too, will enjoy Taubes’s thoughtful perspective on just how flawed our current thinking is regarding the cause of obesity. Hint: It’s not an “energy balance” issue; it’s primarily a HORMONAL issue.
The book is PACKED with Big Ideas. As in, jumbo packed. Get a copy here and know this: As much as I enjoyed the philosophical look at why our current thinking on nutrition is so fundamentally flawed, I thought the practical side of how to dominate a Low-Carb/HighFat eating approach was even better. Although it’s super important to understand WHY this approach works, if you feel so inspired, feel free to jump straight ahead to Page 200 for 50 pages
of incredibly powerful, practical wisdom.
And now, let’s jump straight in. We might just fundamentally and permanently change your life and help you create more Energy and Zest while getting you to your optimal weight faster than you ever thought possible.
Download MP3
Download PDFOur grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
If the conventional thinking and advice worked, if eating less and exercising more were a meaningful solution to the problem of obesity and excess weight, we wouldn’t be here.
Get the BookTextbook Science On Why We Get Fat
“Go to your local medical library or college bookstore (or bookshelf, if you’re a physician) and find a biochemistry textbook or an endocrinology textbook published after, say, 1980. Look up fuel metabolism and insulin. ...
Here’s the 2017 edition, for instance, of Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, widely considered the most authoritative biochemistry textbook, from the summation of a section on ‘Hormonal Regulation of Fuel Metabolism’:
High blood glucose elicits the release of insulin, which speeds the uptake of glucose by tissues and favors the storage of fuels as glycogen and triacylglycerols while inhibiting fatty acid mobilization in adipose tissue.
Here’s a less technical translation: High blood sugar, which you can have when you either are diabetic or have eaten a carb-rich meal, will prompt your pancreas to secrete insulin, which in turn will prompt you to burn carbohydrates as fuel, store glucose as glycogen and fat, and prompt your fat cells to store the fat you’ve eaten and the fat made from glucose and hold on to the fat it already has.”
In the first part of the book, Taubes makes his case for Keto.
To do so, he juxtaposes the current, accepted dogma on why we get fat with what he believes to be the *actual* reason why we get fat.
We talk about this in our Notes on the other two books of his we feature: Why We Get Fat and The Case Against Sugar. We also talk about it in a bunch of other Notes including Robert Lustig’s Fat Chance, David Ludwig’s Always Hungry?, and Mark Hyman’s Eat Fat, Get Thin.
Plus, we discuss it in our Optimal Living 101 class on Optimal Weight 101. Here’s the short story. Most of us have been led to believe that the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. If you’re having a hard time losing weight, you just need to get this “energy balance” corrected.
But... The science shows that it doesn’t work that way.
As Taubes puts it in Why We Get Fat: “The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one—specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary.”
I love the way Nobel prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn puts it in her great book, The Telomere Effect. She tells us: “When we want to spot the parties responsible for metabolic disease, we point a finger at the highly processed, sugary foods and sweetened drinks. (We’re looking at you, packaged cakes, candies, cookies, and sodas.) These are the foods and drinks most associated with compulsive eating. They light up the reward system in your brain. They are almost immediately absorbed into the blood, and they trick the brain into thinking we are starving and need more food. While we used to think all nutrients had similar effects on weight and metabolism—a ‘calorie is a calorie’—this is wrong. Simply reducing sugars, even if you eat the same number of calories, can lead to metabolic improvements. Simple carbs wreak more havoc on metabolism and control over appetite than other types of foods.”
And, here’s the ultimate thing to know...
Taubes tells us: “One obvious implication of this basic human physiology is that if we want to get fat out of our cells in any biologically efficient way, we have to keep the insulin levels in our circulation low. We have to create that negative stimulus of insulin deficiency, which means not eating carbohydrates. It’s all surprisingly simple if we work from the assumption—I would think a very reasonable one—that human physiology, biochemistry, and endocrinology are actually relevant to a problem like obesity and why we get fat. The authorities, for the past half century, have not done that.”
Ignoring difficulties is a poor way of solving them.
All diets that result in weight loss do so on one basis and one basis only: They reduce circulating levels of insulin.
A Brief History Of Sugar
“Our livers would be easily capable of metabolizing the trickle of fructose that they would have encountered during the few million years that preceded the coming of agriculture about ten thousand years ago: a little sugar, a little fructose, seasonally, in fruits, bound up in fiber, slow to digest (and not necessarily ripe fruits at that). Our livers might have had to deal with the fructose of honey as well. After the twelfth century, depending on where our ancestors lived and their wealth, the trickle increased very slightly as refined sugar, now separated from the fiber that slowed its digestion and absorption, was first imported from the Middle East into Europe. Then the Industrial Revolution came about, and the beet sugar industry was launched to join the cane sugar industry, and the trickle turned into a flood. In the late 1970s, the corn refiners got into the game with high-fructose corn syrup, and the flood of sugar rose even higher; some variant of sugar was consumed in huge amounts daily by all, from breakfast to postdinner desserts, drinks, and snacks.
From the early years of the nineteenth century to the very tail end of the twentieth, average per capita sugar availability (how much the food industry makes available for consumption) increased in the United States more than thirty-fold: from the sugar equivalent of a single twelve-ounce can of Coca-Cola every week to that of more than five cans every day, for everyone, from newborns to centenarians.”
Sugar.
It DOES NOT do a body good.
Please (!) see our Notes on The Case Against Sugar for more on how the consumption of sugar drives ALL (!!!) of the metabolic disorders we do not want to have or develop in our kids.
Rule #1 of optimizing our nutrition to get our Energy to Heroic levels?
Reduce/eliminate your intake of sugar.
If that’s ALL you did, you’d go a LONG way in optimizing your Zest.
As Taubes puts it: “If there’s a primary evil in this nutrition story, it’s almost assuredly sugar, and learning to avoid it and still enjoy life and eating is key.”
When you cut out carbohydrates, you lower insulin sufficiently, mobilize and burn fat, and lose weight. Because you burn your own fat for fuel, your body remains well fed, and you feel no hunger.
What We Can Eat
“So let’s return to the basics: what we’re not going to eat, what we’re abstaining from eating, and what we can eat freely.
Abstaining from carbohydrates and carbohydrate-rich foods means you won’t be eating the foods in the list below. You won’t be eating them because they are predominantly carbohydrate and so will raise your blood sugar, stimulate insulin, and promote fat accumulation and hunger.
• No grains, which means no rice, wheat, corn, or even ‘old world’ grains like quinoa, millet, barely, and buckwheat. No products made from these grains: no pasta, breads, bagels, cereals. No sauces that use cornstarch as a thickening agent, as many do.
• No starchy vegetables, so no root vegetables or tubers. No potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, or carrots. You won’t eat vegetables that grow below the ground. It’s okay to eat those that grow above ground.
• No fruit, with the exception of avocados, olives, and tomatoes (all technically fruit), and with the possible exception of berries, which we’ll discuss.
• No grains or legumes, which means no peas, lentils, chickpeas, or soybeans.
• Absolutely no sugary foods and particularly sugary beverages, even if the sugar comes from ‘natural’ sources like fruit: so no soda, fruit juice, smoothies, cakes, ice cream, candy, bonbons, or even health-food bars, and perhaps particularly those advertises as low in fat.
• No milk or sweetened yogurts, particularly low-fat varieties (in which the fat content is removed and replaced, typically, with some kind of sugar).”
Reducing/eliminating sugar will, unquestionably, boost your well-being.
Know this: ALL “diet” programs that work are effective because they get you to reduce/eliminate the ultra-processed, sugar-laden junk food that is at the core of the standard western diet.
And...
If you are feeling a little/a lot sluggish and are a little/a lot overweight and you want to see JUST how good you can feel (energy and mental clarity and emotion wise) then you may want to consider going ALL IN on a little low-carbohydrate/high-fat ketogenic approach.
And, that’s the list of stuff you’d eliminate.
Why?
Because, in short: If you believe Taubes and the science he references (I do!), then we need to know that we get fat because our insulin levels are too high. Our insulin levels are driven by our carbohydrate consumption. Therefore, if we want to get our insulin levels appropriately low to trigger fat BURNING instead of fat STORING, we need to radically reduce the amount of carbohydrates we consume.
Most of the physicians whom I’ve interviewed for this book now recommend intermittent fasting or timerestricted eating along with LCHF/ketogenic eating.
Ultimately, your success will depend on your commitment. ... As selfhelp and management advice books will often say, setting a goal and committing to it are vitally important. Without the commitment, we never find out if the goal is achievable. By diluting the commitment and allowing us to compromise, we never know.
The Big “If...”
“Bourke, a Yale-educated emergency medicine physician, is the cofounder of the dozen JumpstartMD clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. He told me that some fifty thousand patients had come to these clinics looking for advice on controlling their weight since he opened the first one in January 2007. This is, in effect, his clinical experience. (With his JumpstartMD colleagues and a collaborator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bourke recently published a paper in the Journal of Obesity on the results from over 24,000 of these patients, for whom he had complete clinical data.) The program, he said, originally counseled a broadly calorie-restricted approach—‘low in everything’—and its patients achieved what Bourke called reasonably good results so far as weight loss was concerned. But the patients were also, not surprisingly, always hungry, and they would have to deal with that hunger forever, if they wanted to maintain that weight loss. ‘We were seeing better results in the lower-carb, higher-fat state,’ Bourke said. ‘We were seeing people who were just less miserable and less dependent on medications to suppress their appetites. If they embraced the low-carbohydrate, high-fat, they found it a broadly more sustainable way to eat, with a better flavor profile, greater satiety, and greater craving reduction. Over time, medications were not as necessary and the lifestyle feels more sustainable to them, if they embrace it.’
That last clause, which Bourke repeated twice, has always been the critical one in any dietary program—if they (i.e., you or me) embrace it, it will work. I’ve tried to provide the rationale, biological and historical, for why LCHF/ketogenic eating is worth the effort, but you have to make that effort. Believing in what you’re doing and doing it for the right reasons are both essential conditions for success.”
That’s from a chapter called “Lessons to Eat By” in which we learn six powerful lessons to keep in mind as we go all in on rewiring our energy production and optimal weight maintenance system by, if we feel so inspired, adopting a low-carb, high-fat diet.
Here’s the quick take on the lessons:
1. “Many of the policies will also strike you as involving more work. ... In order to eat well we have to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.” (Translation: Yes, if you want to be healthy in a profoundly unhealthy society, you’re going to need to do some extra work. Perfect. Do it.)
2. “This is not something you are going to do. This is what you are going to become.” (In other words: We’re not embracing a fad diet. We’re adopting a different way of being.)3. “You don’t get cake and ice cream when you’re finished.” (Note: Taubes compares conquering our carb-addiction to conquering other addictions like alcohol abuse. He says: “There’s a good reason, as Miller said to me, why alcoholics don’t celebrate the successful completion of a twenty-eight-day rehab program with a champagne toast.”)
4. “If you fall off the wagon, at least you know there’s a wagon to get back on.” (Reminds me of our +1 wisdom on bright lines—it’s not that you never go outside the lines, but at least you know where they are and how to back on track!)
5. “It’s not a religion; it’s about how I feel.” (Let go of the dogma. Be willing to experiment!)6. “Weight loss and weight maintenance are learned skills. You have to practice.” (Ask my son Emerson how to get good at anything and, as per this +1, he’ll echo this wisdom as he tells you: “PRACTICE!”)
As powerful as those lessons are, what REALLY jumped out at me was one particular phrase from the main passage I quoted that I want to highlight and bold:
“if they “ (i.e., you or me) embrace it, it will work.”
When I read that, I thought of a statement I have repeatedly made about our Heroic app—since my very first crowdfunding presentations in which I articulated our two brand promises.
A year-and-a-half before we launched Heroic I said that we were committed to building an app that would allow us to say: “If you use Heroic, then you will flourish.”
“More specifically,” I would say, “If you hit ten Targets on Heroic each day, then you will be x% more Energized, x% more Productive, and x% more Connected.”
I promised to conduct a scientific study on the very first day we launched the app and then measure the results in the first thirty days. I was very confident that the data would show the app worked because a) nearly everything I teach and nearly everything on which we architected the Heroic app is grounded in proven science and b) we already scientifically proved that our 300- day Mastery Series that’s part of our Coach program worked.
I’m very excited about and proud of the fact that our pilot study, conducted with 1,000 founding Heroic members with the support of leading researchers in the fields of positive psychology and human flourishing showed that, in fact, if you use Heroic, then you are likely to flourish.
More specifically: The pilot study showed that, if you hit 5+ targets per day, you went from the 60th percentile in flourishing to the 83rd percentile in just 30 days.
And, even more specifically, if you hit just 3+ (not 10 but just THREE!) targets each day on Heroic then you, on average, reported feeling 40% more Energized, 20% more Productive, and 15% more Connected. In just a few minutes on the app a day for just 30 days.
But...
There’s ONE BIG qualification... IF.IF you use Heroic, then you will more consistently show up as the best, most Heroic version of yourself. IF you hit 3+ targets per day, then you will be significantly more Energized, more Productive and more Connected.
IF!IF!!IF!!!Of course, ultimately you may or may not be interested in trying our Heroic app and/or trying a low-carb, high-fat/ketogenic eating style or any number of approaches to optimizing your wellbeing.
But...KNOW THIS...The *only* possible way ANY of these approaches will work is IF YOU decide to show up and give us your best shot—not for a day or a week or on the days you feel like it. But a true, earnest, all in effort.
If enough of us do the hard work to show up as our best selves day in and day out (ESPECIALLY on the days when we don’t *feel* like it), then (and only then!), will we have a shot at changing the world—one person at a time, together, starting with YOU and me and us TODAY.Let’s do that.
While the basics of LCHF/ ketogenic eating are obvious— abstain from grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars, replace those calories with fat— individual variation is where the plateaus come in, and tweaking or massaging or finetuining what we eat (and don’t eat) is necessary.
She wants them to understand that commitment doesn’t preclude falling off the wagon on occasion. The important thing is remembering that the next step is to get back on the wagon. It’s to go back to abstaining from sugars, grains, and most starches.
One guarantee can be given, though: If one day you determine it’s not worth it and you go back to eating sugars, grains, and starches, the benefits you accrued will be lost. A lifetime of benefit will come only from a lifetime commitment.
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