Free Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes Page A

ACSM would like to think that maybe if we just put further effort into studying the relationshipbetween exercise and weight—if we do the experiments in just the right ways—we will finally confirm what von Noorden and Banting’s physician friend and a century of researchers and physicians and exercise aficionados ever since have argued somehow must be true.
    The history of science suggests another interpretation: if people have been thinking about this idea for more than a century and trying to test it for decades and they still can’t generate compelling evidence that it’s true, it’s probably not. We can’t say it’s not with absolute certainty, because science doesn’t work that way. But we can say that there’s now an exceedingly good chance it’s simply wrong, one of the many seemingly reasonable ideas in the history of science that never panned out. And if reducing calories-in doesn’t make us lose weight, and if increasing calories-out doesn’t even prevent us from gaining it, maybe we should rethink the whole thing and find out what does.
    * Chris Williams, who blogs under the name Asclepius, had this insight.
    * There are many ways to quantify this epidemic of physical activity. Health-club industry revenues, for example, increased from an estimated $200 million in 1972 to $16 billion in 2005—a seventeen-fold increase when adjusted for inflation. The first year that the Boston Marathon had more than 300 entrants was 1964; in 2009, more than 26,000 men and women ran. The first New York City Marathon was in 1970, with 137 entrants; in 1980, there were 16,000 official runners; and in 2008, 39,000, although nearly 60,000 applied. According to the website MarathonGuide.com , nearly 400 marathons were scheduled in the United States in 2009, not to mention countless half-marathons, more than 50 ultra-marathons (100 miles long), and 160-plus other “ultras” (up to 3,100 miles).
    * When researchers now discuss the relationship between physical activity and calorie intake in populations, as opposed to individuals, this is still perceived as a given: as Walter Willett and Meir Stampfer of Harvard noted in the 1998 textbook
Nutritional Epidemiology:
“In most instances, energy intake can be interpreted as a crude measure of physical activity.”
    * Mayer was exaggerating to make his point. He often did.
    * The Bengali research is a case study in how bad supposedly seminal research can be in the field of nutrition. The jobs of the men working in this Indian mill, as Mayer reported, ranged from “extraordinarily inert” stall holders “who sat at their shop all day long” to furnace tenders who “shoveled ashes and coal” for a living. The evidence reported in Mayer’s paper could have been used to demonstrate
any
point. The more active workers in the mill, for example, both weighed more
and
ate more than less active workers. As for the sedentary workers, the more sedentary they were, the
more
they ate, the
less
they weighed. The clerks who lived on the premises and sat all day long weighed ten to fifteen pounds
less
and were reported to have eaten four hundred calories
more
on average than clerks who had to walk three to six miles to work—or even than those clerks who walked to work and also played soccer every day.
    * That evidence was the “carefully controlled experiments” of Jean Mayer showing “that moderate amounts of exercise actually suppress appetite slightly.”

4
The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day
    Twenty calories.
    Next time someone tells us, as the World Health Organization does on its website, that the way to prevent “the burden of obesity” is “to achieve energy balance and a healthy weight,” this is the number that should come immediately to mind. Next time we’re told, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture tells us, that “to prevent gradual weight gain over time” all we need do is “make small decreases in food and beverage calories and increase physical