Viewpoint Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes; New York: AA Knopf G. A. Bray Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA, USA Received 11 February 2008; accepted 14 February 2008 Address for correspondence: GA Bray, Pennington Center, 6400 Perkins Road, Baton Rouge, LA 70808, USA. E-mail: brayga@pbrc.edu Summary Good Calories, Bad Calories has much useful information and is well worth reading. Gary Taubes’s tenets related to obesity can be summarized in four statements (i) He believes that you can gain weight and become obese without a positive energy balance; (ii) He also believes that dietary fat is unimportant for the development of obesity; (iii) Carbohydrate, in his view, is what produces obesity and (iv) Insulin secreted by the carbohydrate is the problem in obesity. However, some of the conclusions that the author reaches are not consistent with current concepts about obesity. There are many kinds of obesity, and only some depend on diet composition. Two dietary manipulations produce obesity in susceptible people: eating a high-fat diet and drinking sugar- or high-fructose corn syrup- sweetened beverages. Insulin is necessary but not sufficient in the diet-dependent obesities. When diet is important, it may be the combination of fat and fructose (the deadly duo) that is most important. Regardless of diet, it is a positive energy balance over months to years that is the sine qua non for obesity. Obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones, and food-intake records are notoriously unreliable, as documented by use of doubly labelled water. Underreporting of food intake is greater in obese than in normal-weight people and is worse for fat than for other macronutrient groups. Accepting the concept that obesity results from a positive energy balance does not tell us why energy balance is positive. This depends on a variety of environmental factors interacting with the genetic sus- ceptibility of certain individuals. Weight loss is related to adherence to the diet, not to its macronutrient composition. Keywords: Diet, energy expenditure, food intake, nutritian. obesity reviews (2008) 9, 251–263 Diseases of modern society and the nutrition transition I believe no age did ever afford more instances of corpu- lency than our own. Short, T. 1727 (1) If the increase of wealth and the refinement of modern times have tended to banish plague and pestilence from our cities, they have probably introduced to us the whole train of nervous disorders, and increased the frequency of corpulence. Wadd, W. 1810 (2) Some factor of diet and/or lifestyle must be driving weight upward, because human biology and our under- lying genetic code cannot change in such a short time. Taubes, G. 2007 (3) obesity reviews doi: 10.1111/j.1467-789X.2008.00476.x 251 © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 The International Association for the Study of Obesity. obesity reviews 9, 251–263