My father-in-law quit all sweets four months ago. Lost 25 pounds, aches and pains are going away, his gout has pretty much resolved itself (no more pain meds!), and his cholesterol has plummeted to the lowest it has ever been. As a result, he has also quit his cholesterol meds and his level still stayed down. His doctor refuses to believe it was the dietary change, wants to know who else he's getting his cholesterol meds from. Probably thinks he's getting them on the cheap from Canada. He's 65, and hasn't felt this fantastic in years.

Sweet irony, my kids' nicknames for he and my mother-in-law are CandyGrampa and CandyGramma due to their previous insatiable sweet tooths, so this hasn't been easy for them. However the results are so compelling one cannot argue with them.

I was addicted to sugar, could and would polish off a bag of hershey's miniatures a day. No more! Now that Dh is out of town so much, a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad and I'm set for days.

Great to hear these stories. Changed my life, too. I snack on salami and cheese and I'm never hungry (not unless I go for long periods without food) -- not the way I was when I ate carbs. I do make sure I get plenty of fat and protein. I'll sometimes eat a whole package of buttered green beans, with emphasis on the butter. Now I'm having my bacon (three strips) and shortly I'll have my parsley, which I cook for three minutes in the pyrex dish with a lid I make my bacon in in the microwave. (I eat a big clump of Italian parsley every day for breakfast -- it gets all crunchy, which is how I like it, after micro-ing it for three minutes in the bacon grease.)

I will bug Chris Masterjohn to write about this :) He happens to do rat experiments with fructose and doesn't find any liver damage. Some of the studies Lustig cites unfortunately show statistically insignificant differences between fructose-fed and control mice.

The points he makes about the Japanese (and elsewhere in his work) about the Italians and their low consumption of sugar during the time Ancel "Selection Bias" Keys did his research make sense. (The Italians and Japanese were eating carbs then, and still do, but they ate little sugar, and had far less heart disease than cultures that ate more.)

Amy,
I just finished reading that article and I was pleased to see it linked to on your blog. Not to be a total cliche, but Why We Get Fat (and subsequently, Good Calories, Bad Calories) really changed my life. I never got to the point of being truly obese, but I was gaining weight and I saw what that eventually led to in several of my older relatives, especially my father who was seriously obese and diabetic, which eventually led to gastric bypass surgery.

After reading Taubes' work, I began avoiding sugar and flour, and most carbs in general. My diet mostly consists of meat, eggs, cheese, some nuts, and green veggies. I've dropped 15 pounds in a couple months and I feel better than ever. My energy levels are more consistent and I'm not always starving two hours after a meal like in the past.

The only depressing part is realizing how willfully blind the medical establishment can be to all the evidence that sugar and flour are terrible for the human body and are most likely responsible for the diseases of civilization that kill so many people. I don't preach uninvited to my friends and coworkers, but if they ever ask about my dietary choices, I do my best to be informative.

the interesting thing I find a lot in talking to many friends and others, is that most people, and most doctors, really, use the automotive method in thinking about the body.

You put fuel in, to do work. If not enough work is done, it gets stored.

The human body is astonishingly sophisticated in the methods it uses to store, and release those stores, the the Auto idea doesn't seem to apply. This is why a calorie isn't a calorie.

Just like a lot of other things, Joe Average wants a totally easy way to think about stuff, which is why the calorie in/out idea is so seductive. It would be helpfull if even your doctor would say as much, but they probably don't think you will understand...

These days i just nod my head at the doctor when they are going on about such things. Mine was grilling me about what I've been eating and the food pyramid and blah, blah... even though my cholestorol is 172, and VLDL and triglycerides are fabu. Some kind of broken record or something.

Add me to the list of people turning their lives around via a low-carb diet. After reading this blog and watching Tom Naughton's excellent documentary "Fat Head," I decided it was time to make some major changes. I haven't had more than 20g of carbs a day for three weeks, and it's making a huge difference already. The 40lbs I gained during my recent pregnancy are completely gone five weeks postpartum, and, despite having chronic fatigue problems and a hypoactive thyroid, I'm finding I have sufficient energy to be a good mom to my two girls (both under two years of age), as well as a more loving (and less neurotic) wife.

While I still have a lot of extra weight to lose, I finally feel healthy again, and more than capable of sticking with a low-carb eating style. I like that I never feel hungry, and I've honestly stopped missing all the sugary garbage I used to consume.

Keep spreading the word; it really does make a difference!

I'm really confused about this. Personally, I take quite a lot of sugar daily, but I'm not fat at all. In fact, my body size is towards the skinny side. How to explain this?