Good news, bad news

I'm reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories with a great deal of fascination. Assuming (which I believe) that he is right, the good news is that it is possible -- for those who can afford it -- to lose their fat, or not gain it in the first place, and become much more healthy.

The bad news is that (unless there is some rabbit up a sleeve that I know nothing about), only a fraction, notably less than one (that is, less than 100%), of the worlds population can possibly use this solution. The rest are condemned to ill health and hidden malnutrition.

The very short summary is that carbohydrates (in particular refined carbohydrates) cause the fat cells to take the calories that are provided to the body and store them away as fat. This storage and/or the high insulin levels that are involved, cause heart disease, diabetes and possibly cancer and Alzheimer's also.

The way to not eat a diet high in carbs (and according to the low carb people, low is very low) is to eat a diet high in fat and protein. So far, so good -- but the way to eat a low carb diet is to eat meat -- lots of meat. If one eats mostly meat, supplemented with some eggs and aged cheese, one can eat very few carbs.

Of course, it takes a lot of grain to make meat. I read Diet for a Small Planet when I was in my 20s and for a number of years I was a vegetarian. However, she believed that as long as the diet provides enough protein, it is healthy. If anything, she probably believes that a low fat diet is more healthy than a high fat one and so being a vegetarian is more healthy than being a meat eater. It is surely counter-intuitive to think that a high fat diet will make a person thin, but such is the claim.

In the last several years, the world has grown less grain than it has eaten. If the best way to engender health in people is to feed the grain to animals and then eat the animals, the carrying capacity of the world (in terms of healthy people, not ones that are either starving outright, or starving at a cellular level) is even lower than the level we have now, not including the effects of environmental destruction. Thus, the bad news is that if he is right, then the resource crisis is much worse than I had imagined.