Pål Jåbekk

I’ve been reading through many (not all) of the comments on Guyenet’s rebuttal of the carbohydrate hypothesis. Although it can be rather tedious, especially because of the apparent mental hospital escapee ItsTheWoo2 (who does have a few good points but a complete lack of putting those point out there in a sane way), but Stephan finally got to his senses and blocked the comments from her (him?).

After reading both the blog post and the comments I find that I am rather unsure of what we are discussing. It seems we are dealing with to poorly defined theories and that much of the seemingly contradictory nature of those theories stem from a lack of clear definition.

The only comment I felt was really worth noting was that of Dave “Spark of reason” Dixon who had this to say:

@Stephan,
Just to clarify (and apologies if already discussed, I haven’t gone through all of the comments): what precisely is the «carbohydrate hypothesis» under discussion? Is it that carbohydrate is *necessary* for obesity, or *sufficient*? My reading of Taubes is the former, that you need carbohydrate to drive fat storage, but not that just eating carbohydrates will make you fat.
I don’t find anything in what you presented which is inconsistent with that view, e.g. examples of lean cultures with traditionally high-carbohydrate diets may simply indicate that other factors are needed to drive obesity, and particularly metabolic syndrome. Are there any examples of obesity occurring in the absence of dietary carbohydrate?

Isn’t this actually an important point? Does the carbohydrate hypothesis being discussed say that carbohydrates are necessary or sufficient for causing obesity? If, as Dave interprets GCBC, the theory says carbohydrates are necessary, then what exactly are people arguing about?

I don’ get it!