Good Calories, Bad Calories

the diet.

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^*106 When Ted Van Itallie, who worked with Jean Mayer in the 1950s, was asked why Mayer paid so little attention to the prewar German literature on obesity, he said, “Mayer hated the Germans. He shot a few of them in World War II.”

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^*107 Brobeck paired each of a dozen lesioned rats with a healthy control rat and fed the lesioned rat precisely the same amount of food that the control rat had consumed on the previous day. “In three pairs of animals,” Brobeck wrote, “the rat with lesions gained more rapidly than the control when they were fed the same amount of food.” Thus overeating could not be the cause of the excessive fattening, because these rats weren’t overeating.

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^*108 In reference to the islets of Langerhans, the pancreatic cells that secrete insulin.

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^*109“Diet therapy and weight loss are extremely important in reversing this process,” Rosenzweig added, “but the long-term results of these therapies have generally been disappointing, even in patients not receiving insulin.”

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^*110 In which the pancreas had been removed.

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^*111 Schoenheimer and Rittenberg worked in Harold Urey’s lab at Columbia. Urey had recently discovered deuterium and won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.

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^†112 Wertheimer began his career at the University of Halle in Germany and was expelled from his position in the same purge that sent Schoenheimer to New York. Wertheimer immigrated to Jerusalem, where in the 1940s he became head of pathophysiology and biochemistry at the Hebrew University.

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^*113 ATP gives up a phosphate molecule, becoming adenosine diphosphate, or ADP, and releases energy in the process.

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^*114 Synthesis of the enzymes required to convert carbohydrates into fat will also increase and decrease in proportion to the carbohydrate content of the diet.

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^*115 The VLDL particles we discussed when we talked about heart disease.

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^†116 The addition of a phosphate molecule to glycerol to make glycerol phosphate is said to “activate” the glycerol so that it can now be used in this process.

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^*117 For this reason, vagotomy, as this surgical procedure is known, was later considered a potential treatment for obese humans with various syndromes of hypothalamic obesity.

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^*118 Of Neel’s two primary papers on thrifty genes, this is the one that is rarely read or referenced.

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^*119 Brunzell and Bierman fed mildly diabetic patients a diet of 85 percent carbohydrates and no fat, and compared their glucose response with that of patients on a more typical American diet of 45 percent carbohydrates and 40 percent fat. Those on the carbohydrate-rich diet had a slightly lower blood-sugar response, and insulin secretion remained unchanged. Brunzell and Bierman interpreted this to mean that a carbohydrate- enriched diet “increase[s] the sensitivity to insulin of tissue sites of insulin action.”

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^*120 This explains why preventing estrogen secretion in female rats—by removing the ovaries —will make them obese, hungry, and sedentary, as we discussed in the previous chapter, whereas replacing the estrogen will make them lean again.

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^*121 He told me that I could confirm this observation by simply going to an airport and noticing, as he always did, that it was the overweight who took the escalators and the lean who walked up the stairs.

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^*122 From 1990 to 1996, Keen was chairman of the British Diabetic Association. He was also elected honorary president of the International Diabetes Federation in 1991, and was chairman of the WHO Expert Committee on Diabetes in 1980 and 1985.

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^*123 Fat synthesis and accumulation.

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^*124 The progressive addition of carbohydrates was similar to a common treatment of diabetics in the pre-insulin era: Diabetics would be fasted to lower their blood sugar to healthy levels; then protein and fat calories would be increased gradually, until glucose appeared in their urine. That would be considered the critical calorie level, and the diabetics would never be allowed to eat any more than that.

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^*125 Van Itallie, Stunkard, Bray, Cahill, and Dwyer.

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^*126 Van Itallie attributed this ineffectiveness, as was common at the time, to the fact that “a varied diet reduced in energy content remains highly palatable” and so too tempting. “Even the Lord’s Prayer does not call for resisting temptation,” he would say; “it asks that the supplicant be not led into temptation.”

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^†127 This does not include several texts specifically on the psychology and behavioral treatment of obesity.

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^*128 According to Novin, when he wrote up his presentation for the conference proceedings Bray removed the last four pages, all of which were on the link between carbohydrates, insulin, hunger, and weight gain. “I couldn’t believe he would make that kind of arbitrary decision,” Novin said.

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^*129 Indeed, Mayer would divide those who endorsed carbohydrate-restricted diets into those who were sincere and misguided, and those who were simply insincere.

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^*130 It was not “even remotely true,” Stare wrote, “that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health.”

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^*131 In treating obese children, Sidbury noted, there is “concern that a low calorie diet will be