Taubes asks interesting questions about whether or not fat really gives you heart disease. But then he goes off the deep end and decides that the reason we're all getting fat is that the US government told us to eat simple starches. Carbohydrates, he says, make you fat. Meat and veggies don't.
[Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian. So I'm not going on Atkins any time soon. But since my diet choices are largely for health reasons, I have a somewhat open mind.]
Taubes doesn't understand the science behind what he's saying. Not that I'm a medical expert (I'm sure I'm about to get fact checked by luminaries like MedPundit and MedRant, so I'll try to keep from straying out too far on a limb). But as it happens, I did some research into the causes of obesity for an article I wrote for Salon, and it's clear to me that Taubes is making some fairly large errors.
First of all, Taubes says that we're fat because most of our diet is made up of grains, etc. -- a high carbo, low fat, moderate protein diet. Absent that, he implies, we wouldn't have gained so much weight since 1980. Umm. . . so how come Africa, where the primary foodstuffs are tubers or grains, isn't bursting at the seams? Or, for that matter, our ancestors, who lived on a diet of up to 80% carbohydrates as late as World War I? Ever eaten on a farm? Sure, you get bacon and eggs for breakfast -- after you wade through a couple of bowls of granny's oatmeal sludge. One or two kinds of bread, canned fruit, and often potatoes as well at every single meal. In fact, the traditional English favorite, Yorkshire Pudding, was the way that farmers wives filled the family up on a wad of bread so that they went easy on the expensive meat. Baked beans, the eternal food of the proletariat, were a meat substitute, loaded with carbohydrates. Yet most farmers weren't fat. And the industrial workers, who were extremely lean, ate even less than the agricultural ones did. The "meat and potatoes man" is an invention of the affluent fifties.
Taubes has engaged in a well-known data mining practice where you carefully choose your start dates and end dates so as to produce a high correlation between two variables that were both spiking during the time period. Another example of this is the way that the New York Times recently mined its data on global warming to produce an enormous warming trend in Alaska, a result the reporter achieved by starting the count on one of the lowest average temperature years on record, and ending it on one of the highest. If he had started the study a year earlier and ended it a year later, says a correspondant in the know, the "warming trend" would have been reduced by more than half.
If Taubes had started in an earlier time period -- say 1950 -- he would have seen no net increase in carbohydrate consumption. But we would have gotten a whole lot fatter. If he'd started in 1900, when most people didn't eat meat every day, we would have seen a net decrease in starch consumption. And the data would still show us blowing up like whales.
Of course, there is a kernel of truth to what he's saying. The science goes like this: simple starches, like those found in white bread and potatoes, turn into sugar in your body much more quickly than fat, protein, or complex carbohydrates wrapped in a package of bulky fiber, like those found in beans, whole grains, or vegetables. While the latter group takes hours to break down into glucose, a candy bar or a potato or a soft, luscious piece of sourdough bread you just pulled out of the bag, start turning into glucose as soon as the enzymes in your saliva hit them.
The result is a spike in your blood sugar. But remember the savannah. On the savannah, blood sugar levels were much steadier, since the body would be breaking down the food you'd consumed over a period of several hours. So while the entire sugar content of that candy bar enters your bloodstream in about 20 minutes, your body thinks you've eaten an enormous amount of berries or cucumbers or bear steaks or what have you, and expects the amount of sugar entering your blood to remain roughly steady for several hours as your meal breaks down. Your endocrine system therefore signals for an enormous amount of insulin to sweep up all that lovely sugar and store it away for a rainy day -- in the form of fat.
The insulin scours out all the sugar in your blood within an hour, leaving you feeling tired -- this is why you get sleepy after lunch, especially a lunch that's heavy and high in starch. Meanwhile, if all you've eaten is a candy bar, your stomach is empty -- and with your endocrine system clamoring for more blood sugar, and no countersignal from a full stomach, your endocrine system tells your brain to get hungry again. So you grab a candy bar to stave off those cravings. . .
So what Taubes has discovered is what the US government has been telling us for years: too much sugar isn't good for you.
But Taubes says the government is the problem: specifically, the anti-fat dictates of the NIH and the FDA's "Food Pyramid". He must not have read the same literature I did. The literature I read specified whole grains, beans, and other complex, vitamin-rich and highly fibrous sources of carbohydrates. It did not say to run out and load up on the fat-free cookies at the snack bar. Taubes glides over this distinction in order to make the case that the government and the medical establishment have been grossly misleading us all these years. Now, I certainly wouldn't put it past them to be wrong, and to cling to their belief long after it was fruitful. But the government did not tell us to up our sugar consumption 30 pounds a year. We did that part ourselves.
For one thing, we stopped looking at calories. Now, I know that there are problems with calories as a measurement. And that two people eating the exact same things won't gain the same amount of weight. But broadly speaking, you will lose weight if you burn off more than you eat, and you will gain weight if you eat more than you burn off. This is the most accurate thing we can say we know about weight loss, because we can stick people in a lab for a month and test how many calories they eat versus how much excercise they do. Long term studies, on the other hand, are notoriously inaccurate. Why? Because when you ask people to self report what they ate, they forget about the three bites of their husband's cheeseburger, the candy at the coworker's desk. . . all the things they wish they hand't eaten. Many of them aim at a sort of wish fulfillment by not telling the researchers. And the bias is all one way, though it's impossible to quantify it -- towards telling researchers that they're eating less of whatever they think they shouldn't be eating.
Any road. The point is that when we got religion on fat grams, we lost religion on not eating anything in excess. My personal trainer used to tell me stories about the neurotic New York women who would swear they were eating healthy -- but would turn out to be consuming a box of snackwells, or eight servings of Tasti-D-Lite (a sort of frozen, artificially sweetened dessert sold here that has the consistency and taste of well-chilled hair cream) a day. These women were only listening to part of the message. Any nutritionist pushing a low-fat diet was also pushing a low sugar, high fiber, heavy on the fruits and veggies and light on the desserts, diet. But these women stopped reading after they saw the words "Fat Free" and were then surprised that they didn't lose weight. So in one sense Taubes has a fair cop -- we listened to the government telling us to eat less fat, and we decided that that meant we should load up on the Snackwells. But that wasn't what the government was saying; it was what we wanted to hear. What we didn't want to hear was that eating healthy meant eating less of stuff we like.
Here's the deal: the stuff that tastes good -- really good -- the stuff that makes you go back to the buffet for seconds and thirds and eighths -- is the stuff that's loaded with
a) Fat b) Sugar
That's why low-fat foods substitute sugar for the fat (like Snackwells, which have as many or more calories as the cookies they're supposed to replace) and low-sugar foods (like the Atkins diet) substitute fat for sugar. Otherwise no one would buy them. But the culprit isn't carbohydrates, period; it's that while we were cutting our fat intake, our sugar intake pushed our calorie count higher than ever. And I will bet you a million, billion dollars that if the nation went on Atkins, you'd find in ten years that everyone was still getting fat unless they cut the calories they consumed.
Which is actually what Atkins does. Though Taubes pooh-poohs it, the doctors I talked to said that the evidence was quite clear cut that Atkins worked -- where it worked -- by getting people to cut their calorie intake to about 1500 calories a day.
I'm not saying that sugar may not have special bad qualities, just as I think fat probably has its own special bad qualities. But carbs aren't the culprit. Our propensity for consuming massive amounts of processed food that crams as many calories as possible into as little space is.
Meanwhile, something I saw on Norah Vincent’s homepage inspired me to drag out my soapbox again. It was an article on spammers, and how much spam basically, well, sucks. Amen, sister, and hallelujah!
But what started me thinking was the question she repeats, and attempts to answer; namely, “Why, dear Lord? Why?!!!!” Which made me think of one of my very favorite economic ideas, the Coase Theorem, which was designed to answer just such questions as these.
The Coase Theorem was developed by a man named, coincidentally enough, Ronald Coase. If you are interested in a fuller explanation, you can find an excellent one here, but in short, the theorem states that absent transaction costs, it does not matter whether a polluter has the right to pollute, or their neighbors have the right to be free from pollution; markets will permit the amount of pollution that achieves the maximum social utility (otherwise known as the efficient outcome).
To see how this works, let’s take a very simple example: we’re neighbors. You like to play your stereo on 11 at 3 am. I like to sleep, sans the sounds of Def Leppard’s Greatest Hits, at that hour. Do you play your stereo, or do I get to sleep?
Most people assume that the answer depends on who has the legal rights: yours to listen to your stereo, mine to be free of noise pollution. But actually, that needn’t be the case; you could pay me to let you listen. In fact, neighbors do this kind of thing all the time, with easements and such: they pay for the right to violate their neighbor’s rights.
So say you have the legal right to listen to your stereo (yes, I know you don’t in the real world; it’s a model. ‘Kay?) Now, say I would be willing to pay up to $200 a month – the price of moving to a new, noise free apartment – to get you to stop. You only value the ability to listen to your stereo at $100 a month – the price for the ear treatments you’ll need if you listen to that much Def Leppard with headphones. The result is quiet. Now, say I have the right to quiet. You’re only willing to pay me $100 a month – but it would take at least $200 a month to persuade me to let you play your stereo at 3am. The result is still quiet. With enforceable contracts and no transaction costs, the result is the same no matter who has the legal right.
But what does this have to do with spam? I hear you cry. Why, everything, my little chickadees. What is spam but the pollution of one’s mailbox? Or, as an economist might say, spammers impose substantial negative externalities on third parties in their quest for the small number of people who are interested in buying their wares (a recent article I saw put their hit rate at .0025%).
So if Coase is right, why isn’t the market taking care of it? After all, the dollar value of the amount of time wasted by US citizens deleting spam is certainly higher than the revenue spamming yields.
Well, for one thing, transaction costs aren’t nonexistent. The value of not getting any one piece of spam is probably less than 1 cent. There’s no system for remitting such small sums either way, and if there were, it would almost certainly cost more by itself than you would be willing to pay to get rid of a piece of spam, or than the spammer would be willing to pay to send it. Of course you and I, who would be glad to live in a spam-free environment, would revel in the inevitable result of putting such a system in place, which is no spam. But as attractive as it might be, it’s not a Coasean solution.
Another problem is that the rights involved are nowhere near as clear as noise pollution or the like. On the one hand, spammers are violating the private property of the ISP’s, who have made it clear that they don’t want spam sent or received on their networks. But on the other hand, there’s the first amendment, which the Supreme Court has ruled gives anyone the right to send you a letter (at least one that doesn’t contain, you know, anthrax). It’s not that much of a stretch to extend that right to mailboxes..But on the third hand, the extremely low costs of sending spam – much, much lower than mail or door-to-door canvassing – mean that so much of it is generated that the social disutility of the mailbox overload might outweigh the social utility of the speech. And on the fourth hand. . . as you can see, there’s no clear cut right to give us a starting point.
And a huge problem facing any attempt to resolve this in a market setting is that there’s no real way to enforce any contracts you make with spammers. When you make a contract with your neighbor not to play his music, enforcement is pretty easy. After all, he’s right there next door; you can drag him into court any time you want. But let’s say you make a contract with Spam Inc. not to send you any more advertisements for miracle hair growth products or pictures of Barely Legal Teenage Girls. So Spam Inc. doesn’t send you any more – but the founders of Spam Inc. open up shop as Junkmail.com and start sending you even more junk than ever. The anonymity of the internet makes it very hard to draw up binding contracts of this sort.
And finally there’s the question of moral hazard, a fancy economist’s word for the tendency of certain types of transactions to encourage the very problem they are designed to avoid; for example, federal flood insurance that encourages people to build their houses on flood plains and thereby increases the amount of damage that is done by floods.
If you make a contract with your neighbor not to play his music at 3 am, you probably have a limited number of other neighbors, of which few will be motivated to buy Def Leppard’s Greatest Hits and stay up until 3 am every night in order to extort from you a couple of hundred bucks a night. And due to the limitations of the 3 dimensional space-time topography in which we find ourselves, it would be hard for hordes of insomniac Def Leppard fans to build houses around yours in the hopes of getting a payout for something they enjoy already. Spam has no such inherent limitations. Pay off the 150 people who are estimated to send 90% of the spam in this country, and you’ll find you have 1500 more setting up spamming companies in order to get in on the payoff.
In short, there isn’t (gasp) a market based solution, and short of a technological breakthrough that either significantly lowers transaction costs, or improves filtering to the point where spammers won’t bother, there won’t be.
Oh, my stars and garters -- Norah Vincent has a blog! It's only got one entry so far, but what an entry. . . listen to Norah on Maureen Dowd:
As one (nameless remaining) pundit I respect said to me the other day, “She’s wasting the primest real-estate in journalism. She’s been writing since the mid-90s, and I can’t tell you a single thing she stands for.”
I concur. I haven’t heard a whisper of praise about her from any quarter in at least two years, and with good reason. She was an occasional mover once, an equal opportunity, though always at bottom DNC faithful gadfly to be reckoned with, but now she’s become little more than a formulaic stock pot cooking up the same tired stone soup every week. The recipe never varies: splice in the latest first run movie she’s seen, add one heaping tablespoon of the usual snider-than-thou palaver, a cup or two of that week’s Beltway rehash, and a dash of the good old Hibernian salt that she used to get by on, but can’t anymore. Sadly, she isn’t likely to get the steel toe of Howell Raines’ boot before she reaches Russell Baker’s age, so we’d better start bracing ourselves for menopause.
That's it, young lady -- you're going straight to the permalinks.
I warned my Democratic pals. I warned 'em and warned 'em and warned 'em that if they kept repeating "Bush and Enron" because they liked the sound of it, it was going to come back and bite 'em in the -- derriere.
