Luxury Spa Finder - May/June 2008 - (Page 57)

think that higher levels of insulin make people fatter, but they' re putting the carriage before the horse. Obesity causes higher insulin levels, not the other way around.º Kenney is espousing the conventional wisdom of diabetes scientists, founded on years of research, that the pancreas produces insulin to regulate blood sugar. Taubes retorts: ª The establishment disagrees with much of what I say in my book because they can' t imagine there could be an alternative hypothesis.º The other problem with Taubes' s argument is that carbs are not all created equal. Nutritionists distinguish between reﬁned carbs (the kind in candy and pasta) and unreﬁned, or complex, carbs (in broccoli, baked potatoes, and apples). It' s foods with the former that many nutritionists believe are responsible for obesity. They' re generally high in sugar and low in ﬁberÐ the perfect recipe for a binge food. Foods with the latter are the opposite, low in calories, high in ﬁber, and ﬁlling. Their nutritional proﬁles are also different: 1,000 calories of M&Ms and 1,000 calories of broccoli are going to have vastly different effects on your body. ª Most people can' t keep weight off because they focus on how much they eat rather than what they eat,º Kenney maintains. ª If you eat a lot of vegetables, soups with beans and whole grains, oatmeal, brown rice, and a little ﬁsh, you can lose weight and keep it off without counting calories or going hungry.º Bazilian says, ª I deﬁnitely think sugar has addictive qualities, but saying that carbs are bad is simplistic and unfair to what science has shown.º Taubes is right when he says that ª carbohydrates, especially the kinds we eat todayÐ reﬁned sugarsÐ are new to humans.º But not when he says, ªW e evolved eating relatively high-fat, high-protein diets.º There are plenty of cultures in which carbohydrates were (and still are) a dietary mainstay; for instance, rice in Southeast Asia. Both Taubes and Kenney claim their eating plans work, and you can ﬁnd studies to support both sides. Who' s right? To ﬁnd the answer, I consult the repository of diet success stories, the National Weight Control Registry, an ongoing study of 5,000 people who have dropped at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a year or more. In fact, the average NWCR member has lost 66 pounds, maintained the new weight more than ﬁve years, and has done so by adhering to a lowfat diet. Advantage: Kenney. Getting Exercised Genetic are as arguments swallow as reﬁned easy to Taubes emerges as a contrarian on another weight-loss front: the value of exercise. In a controversial article in New York magazine last fall, he argued that light exercise doesn' t burn many calories and strenuous exercise increases appetite, causing you to eat back the calories you' ve burned off. ª When your body gives up fat, it tries to get it back,º Taubes explains. When I mention the many studies showing that adding exercise while maintaining the same diet results in weight loss, he discounts them by saying that the subjects probably changed their diets, too. ª When you enroll people and say exercise but don' t diet, they see it as an opportunity. There are intervention effects. Subjects subconsciously decide to change their diet because they like having researchers help them lose weight.º This could be true, but Taubes has no proof. Moreover, he chooses to believe in the truthful- carbs. may· june 2008 57

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Luxury Spa Finder - May/June 2008

Luxury Spa Finder - May/June 2008 Contents Editor's Note Ask Susie Pulse Points Spa Road Trip Beauty & Brains Pound Wise Private Label Real Estate New Tuscan Trio The Real Bora Bora The Spa Collection The Insider's Guide: Ireland Spa Rx From the Sparchives

Luxury Spa Finder - May/June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.