Good Calories, Bad Calories
Gary Taubes · 2007
Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) is a book by Gary Taubes on Nutrition/Metabolism. Gary Taubes spent five years tearing through a century of nutrition research and emerged with a heretical verdict: dietary fat never caused our obesity and disease epidemics. Refined carbohydrates and sugar did, by hijacking the hormone insulin.
Influential, widely cited deep dive into carbs, fat, and metabolism that reshaped diet debates.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Good Calories, Bad Calories pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Stop counting calories and start watching carbohydrate quality. The form of a calorie matters more than the number. A diet that lowers insulin lets stored fat be burned, so cutting refined carbs and sugar beats grinding through a low-fat calorie deficit.
- Treat sugar (sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup) as the single worst offender. Its fructose half overloads the liver while its glucose half spikes insulin, a combination Taubes ties directly to insulin resistance, fatty liver, and metabolic disease.
The other 5 — and the full 9-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 10 chapters
The whole summary runs about 9 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Undertaker Who Cracked the Code
- How Fat Got Framed
- Policy Built on Sand
- The Diseases of Civilization
- Insulin: The Master Switch
- Sugar, the Sweetest Poison
- Beyond the Waistline
- Why Eating Less Backfires
- Exercise, Hunger, and Honest Expectations
- The Practical Verdict
Finish Good Calories, Bad Calories tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 9 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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