Reminds me of Airborne - “created by a school teacher!”
This is an aside, but if I ever get a hemorrhoid, I’m going to name it Stoid.
Jeezuz, Lobohan. You’re inviting her to get up your arse? Really?
Well as long as there is no snot up your ass, you should be OK.
Yeah, she pulled that on me twice in that thread. Once when she accused me of misrepresenting factual statements and I told her that while it was a fact that the wussy men had said those things, they were not in and of themselves factual statements - she quoted only the first part of that and accepted it as me agreeing with her. And the second time when she decided to dismiss me because she didn’t like me mocking her, I said I agreed that we didn’t see eye to eye but she couldn’t expect me to roll over and take her abuse without replying to it - she quoted only the first part of that too and again accepted it as my agreement.
It’s a shitty, terrible debate technique, and coming from someone who claims to value truth and constantly accuses others of misrepresentation, it’s especially egregious. I can’t tell if she thinks this method is witty repartee or if she thinks it’s fiendishly clever, but it’s neither - it just exposes her as the petulant child she is.
I note that the ‘Dear Women’ thread is closed now, but she got her one last flounce in there before it was shut down. She claims that the wonderful, enlightened people in her own life understand and appreciate this video, and the rest of us can pretty much go fuck ourselves. She also seems to think that if the thread had just stayed in MPSIMS there would have been no debate, despite the fact that criticism was already coming in before the thread was moved. And she puts down the whole SDMB, which makes me wonder why the hell she comes here at all.
Ah yes. And the weight loss secrets that are always “discovered by a mom!”. Who knew you got biology skills from being a mother?
And somehow, I cannot seem to escape this Taubes guy. His bullshit is fucking everywhere lately. Now the New York Times? He’s also an expert on sugar apparently. I am really starting to hate this guy.
So am I, I love the stuff.
Oh, and to hell with this Taubes clown.
Now don’t be going and sugar coating how you really feel Stevo.
Okay, treading lightly here…but I’m wondering - have you actually read any of his work? Not just excerpts, but the whole book or books? Or are you just hating on him so much because you don’t like Stoid’s argument?
Because I’m starting to have a little trouble distinguishing between people who have read Taubes and genuinely think he sucks vs. those who just think Stoid and anything she believes in sucks…
If you read the thread in question, the so-called Monster Thread, you would see that I was one of the few people Stoid was willing to argue because I did read the book she did. We also discussed multiple articles he has written, one of which was written for Slate, which I tore apart in that thread as well for his citations being haphazardly thrown in there and not proving what he thinks they prove. Trust that my distaste for the man has been won wholly on his own merits, Stoid’s wankfest notwithstanding. I cannot speak for everyone else in that thread, but the gist of it was that Stoid was obsessed with this guy, we were trying to demonstrate that what he was theorizing didn’t hold water, in the hopes that maybe logic would appeal to Stoid and she would let go her stranglehold of idolization on his work. Rookie mistake, clearly.
nm, too slow.
By the way, the book I recommended was his previous one (Good Calories, Bad Calories), not the synopsized version that Stoid had so much difficulty with. The earlier one focused largely on how sugars seem to be the biggest culprit in metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, artery disease, type 2 diabetes, etc.), and that low-fat eating which simply increases the percentage of carbs in the diet may be more harmful than not. I haven’t read the newer book, but the first one is more about sugar and carbs, so the article today in the NYTimes is no surprise.
needscoffee, I’ve read a couple of the articles but none of his books. ISTM, he blames insulin for fat storage and carbs for insulin. Does he ever address the fact that amino acids/proteins also trigger an insulin response?
An insulin index of foods
The reason I started this thread has nothing to do with Gary Taubes or anything he has to say. I’m not familiar with his work and couldn’t give a rat’s fat ass about it one way or the other.
I started this thread because of Stoid’s attempts to force him down our throats, and for her True Believer zeal. She’s been around long enough to know that the board culture doesn’t deal well with that sort of behavior.
I actually read about half of his book after Stoid made such a big stink about it in the monster thread. I also read some of the articles that were linked, including the one where he shit all over Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, which I found particularly annoying. I suppose you can call those ‘excerpts’, but I feel like I got enough to see what he’s about. I know you’re going to say that people made fun of Stoid when she had only read half the book, but I did not personally say anything to her about that.
I think Taubes is way to smug and overly-confident about his shaky conclusions. I also think he either misunderstands or deliberately misrepresents the research he cites. My impression is that he’s received so many accolades because he has told overweight people just what they want to hear ("it’s not your fault! you can eat as much as you want!), and he has lost sight of the actual scientific community and the process of peer-review.
So I dislike Taubes, and I find Stoids endless fawning over him to be excessive and obnoxious. But even if I didn’t dislike Taubes I would still find Stoids way of presenting his work annoying - she was, as usual, guilty of using numerous bad debate techniques and putting down other posters who dare to disagree with her. She has a way of presenting her viewpoint as the undeniable truth and herself as an enlightened knowledge-seeker, when actually it’s usually just her self-serving opinion.
So, in short, I really do think Taubes sucks, and I also think Stoid sucks. I’m not going to say that everything she believes in sucks, but I certainly haven’t encountered anything yet that doesn’t.
I’ve been reading about the strength of the insulin response to protein. It’s very true that it exists. I think however that most low-carbers would advocate a diet high in fat, and moderate in protein.
Also, when you say “beef was equal to brown rice,” does that mean on a weight-basis? caloric basis? I’m sure I could look it up but I’m feeling lazy so if you know off-hand you could tell me. Otherwise I’ll dig through the paper myself 
I’m afraid I’m no authority here but it seems the Insulin Scores are fairly similar for those two pairings from what I can see. I haven’t really gone through this thoroughly myself - I mainly read the more plain language sections. I posted this because it seems to be the footnote on a couple of other things I came across while looking at this whole debate.
(Apologies to ladyfoxfyre for yet another diversion) What he focused on was simple carbohydrates seemingly being harmful, not complex carbohydrates. It wasn’t a diet book. It was simply a look at how we’ve come to believe over the last 30 years that lowfat, high carb diets are good for us, and why that seems to be wrong. Also, that exercise makes many of us hungry, so it often isn’t an effective means of weight loss for many people who don’t have the will power to resist that increased desire to eat. (He never says that it works for no one.) He also talks about insulin-related growth factor, which also seems to be a culprit on par with insulin. That chart you linked to is very interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed the higher insulin response to cheese, or low response to pasta, although the high response to cake and doughnuts isn’t surprising.
I truly don’t want to hijack this thread away from Stoid, who manages to pull out just what she wants out of what she reads and sees and throw away the rest. I gave up on the trainwreck thread pretty early on when it became apparent she was torturing what she wanted out of her interpretation of her book. Also, I find her writing style incredibly difficult to follow, despite her over-enthusiastic use of text formatting. There, now I’ve added to the pitting.
But Stoid, at least, is good at sucking - or so she says. 
The main problem is people over-simplifying what Taubes actually presented. Several times he made the point that high insulin levels in the presence of high blood glucose stimulates the accumulation of adipose tissue. But protein doesn’t spike blood sugar the way carbohydrates do. So if you’re eating few carbohydrates, preferably slow-release/low GI carb sources, you won’t have high circulating blood glucose levels and won’t partition it off into your fat stores.
Something to keep in mind is that type-2 diabetics and people with normal insulin sensitivity have different responses (PDF) to protein intake. Type-2 diabetics have higher circulating blood sugar to begin with, and appear to release more insulin in response to a meal with higher relative protein content, but their blood sugar drops more after the meal.
People who are adapted to a low-carb diet probably have a slightly different insulin response to protein since they’re largely adapted to running on ketone bodies with minimal glucose needs, but I’m not aware of any studies that elucidate the difference.
Even this simplification completely ignores the role of glucagon, which stimulates the release of glucose stores from the liver and is essentially antagonistic to insulin. Higher protein intake relative to carbohydrate simulates greater releases of glucagon.
Aside from the purely physiological responses, there’s another player that has effects on satiety levels as well as playing some role in how nutrients are secreted and stored. Cholecystokinin, released in response to fat and protein intake, is a powerful appetite suppressant. That impacts total caloric intake both at the time of ingestion and over a longer period of time. Taubes talks about this when he discusses starvation diets and shows how the higher carb group was absolutely miserable, while the protein and fat dieters were okay.
From what I recall of the book, Taubes does cover all of this in obviously much greater detail and depth than I have here. I think the problem isn’t the author, it’s the readers. From what I’ve seen so far here, you guys don’t understand the biology particularly well either, so it’s kind of funny for you to be criticizing Taubes for his lack of understanding. I’m not trying to say I’m some kind of expert, but the objections raised so far are so easily dismissed that I really doubt any of you are either.