Gary taubes Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Gary Taubes
Quotes of Author: Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes _ Good Calories, Bad Calories:
Russell Ross reported that insulin also stimulates the proliferation of the smooth muscle cells that line the interior of arteries, a necessary step in the thickening of artery walls characteristic of both atherosclerosis and hypertension.
book-quote
Gary Taubes _ Good Calories, Bad Calories:
The belief in physical activity as a method of weight control is relatively new, however, and it has long been contradicted by the evidence. When Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic lectured on obesity in 1932, he noted that his patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, "while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss." "The patient reasons quite correctly," Wilder said, "that the more exercise he takes the more fat should be burned and that loss of weight should be in proportion, and he is discouraged to find that the scales reveal no progress.
book-quote
Gary Taubes _ Good Calories, Bad Calories:
Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."}
book-quote
Gary Taubes _ Good Calories, Bad Calories:
human history was dominated by what Jared Diamond had called the "conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle." Reasonable as this may seem, we have no evidence that food was ever any harder to come by for humans than for any other organisms on the planet, at least not until our ancestors began radically reshaping their environment ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture.
book-quote
Gary Taubes _ Good Calories, Bad Calories:
The idea of specific populations predisposed to obesity is encapsulated in a notion now known as the thrifty gene-technically, the thrifty-genotype hypothesis-that is now commonly invoked to explain the existence of the obesity epidemic and why we might all gain weight easily during periods of prosperity but have such difficulty losing it. The idea, initially proposed in 1962 by the University of Michigan geneticist James Neel, is that we are programmed by our genes to survive in the paleolithic hunter-gatherer era that encompassed the two million years of human evolution before the adoption of agriculture-a mode of life still lived by many isolated populations before extensive contact with Western societies. "Such genes would be advantageous under the conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle," explained the UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond in 2003, "but they would lead to obesity and diabetes in the modern world when the same individuals stop exercising, begin foraging for food only in supermarkets and consume three high-calorie meals day in, and day out." In other words, the human body evolved to be what Kelly Brownell has called an "exquisitely efficient calorie conservation machine.
book-quote