The first paragraph of this article is priceless--basically a perfect description of the Export Land Model (ELM), except that it applies to food: FELM.
IMO, we are headed at hyperspeed to an emerging bilateral trade system where food exporters trade with energy exporters. Not a good time to be both a net food importer and a net energy importer, or for that matter, a net food consumer and a net energy consumer. Have I mentioned ELP in the last 30 minutes?
Rice Jumps to Record, Corn Near High as Demand Outpaces Supply
2008-04-03 07:31 (New York)
By Glenys Sim
April 3 (Bloomberg) -- Rice climbed to a record and corn traded near its highest ever on speculation the 3 percent annual increase in global demand for cereals will outstrip supply as governments curb exports to prevent protests.
You beat me on that one ;-). Note the 33 countries in danger of unrest and the potential problems of midwest flooding delaying planting - what happens if we have another flood year, like 1993?
If you have a link, you might post it. I don't get links from my Wall Street source. BTW, I don't know if you saw the following article about a CSA operation just outside Dallas:
Also, I quoted you at a Casey Research symposium. I described the Brother In Law On the Couch (BOC) Syndrome, as potentially "The most serious problem we face." I described BOC as an excellent reason to own a small organic garden/farm. You can put the in-laws and unemployed college graduates to work on the farm when they move in with you.
- what happens if we have another flood year, like 1993?
The way the Corp of Engineers has mismanaged the Mississippi floodplain the past century, massive floods are inevitable. Mark Twain himself warned about how stupid it is to try to "control" the mighty Mississip. What needs to be done is to rip the levees out & let the big ole river act like a river's supposed to. Farm the flood plain but don't live there. If people are stupid enuf to "develop" the floodplain, they shouldn't expect any taxpayer funded bailout when the river whacks them for their stupidity. Furthermore, the same mismanagement that has ruined the Mississippi floodplain has also ruined the delta buffer zone that once protected NOLA from hurricanes. Anyone dumb enuf to live in NOLA following Katrina deserves what they get when a cat 5 or 6 makes a direct hit one of these years.
The point is that if that section of the country faces flooding and therefore and inability to produce substantial amounts of crops, everyone in the US suffers, and therefore everyone in the world suffers (as food supply drops and therefore food prices skyrocket). It's not a case of "Us vs. Them," or "thats what you get for living there," its a case of, "we all need that area to grow our food."
The point is that if that section of the country faces flooding and therefore and inability to produce substantial amounts of crops, everyone... suffers
Allowing the river to periodically inundate its floodplain would renew the fertility of the alluvial soils. This would increase agricultural productivity in the North American Midwest, while reducing the amount of artificial fertilizer required. It would also allow the Mississippi to renew its delta, protecting the Gulf coastal plain from storm surges during hurricanes. Channelizing the Mississip only allows the precious topsoil that erodes due to agroindustrial stupidity to reach deep water. Eroded topsoil should be redeposited over the floodplain and in the delta, where it would do some good.
Oh don't get me wrong, restoring the natural flooding cycle of the floodplain would be hugely beneficial to long term crop production from the area.
What the thread has been referring to is a summer where flooding ruins crop production for that year and how devastating that would be to our food supplies. It only takes 1 winter for people without food to starve.
Okay, gotcha. But even in '93 farmers managed to grow a crop on the floodplain. Taking out the levees & allowing snowmelt to renew the floodplain might preclude winter wheat and delay working the fields some years, but it wouldn't eliminate an entire growing season's crop. The occasional short-term detriment to agriculture would be enormously offset by the long-term benefit.
A rise in food prices is a good thing because it will curb the obesity epidemic. We should use more corn and sugar for ethanol so food prices rise and people eat less.
Poor people are more prone to obesity than well-off people. Obesity has very little to do with how much you eat and very much to do with what you eat. Rising food prices effectively makes people poorer, which is far more likely to lead to an increase in obesity than a decrease, except of course for those who actually starve.
Obesity has very little to do with how much you eat and very much to do with what you eat.
This is not exactly true. While it is true that the poor who eat a lot of cheap fatty foods have a tendency to be obese it is absolutely not true that obesity has little to do with how much you eat. The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa. And you don't necessarily need to be starving not to be obese. Just burning slightly more calories every day than you consume will make you skinny. I grew up in poor rural Alabama. I knew a few really poor people who were obese but far, far more who were not obese. And our diet consisted mostly of cornbread, beans and taters with a little meat on Sunday.
The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa.
This is simply untrue. Go ask the Inuit or the Masai who eat native diets. Or ask the Pima Indians once they went off a natural diet and started to eat the white man's food.
It is refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, that causes obesity.
Obesity is a disease of civilization. What is unique to civilized diets is refined carbohydrates, especially with excessive amounts of sugar. Many populations eat extraordinarily high concentrations of fat in their diet (the Inuit and Masai, for example), and obesity is virutally unknown among, until they change their diet to eat the food brought by "civilized" people.
People have been peddling the "fat makes you obese" snake oil for decades, and all it has done is to make Americans eat more carbohydrates and get fatter and fatter.
It is refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, that causes obesity.
Doubly untrue! Obesity is caused by consuming more calories than you burn. Yes, it is that simple. Your body burns carbohydrates. They are oxidized in your blood and expelled via the lungs. You breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and water vapor. Some of the water is expelled via the kidneys. The carbon in carbohydrates becomes carbon dioxide and the hydrogen in carbohydrates becomes water.
When you consume more calories than you burn your body stores them in the form of fat for later use. It doesn't matter whether those calories comes from Granola bars or seal blubber you will still get fat. A calorie is a unit of energy and must either be burned or stored. (Sometimes calories are excreted without either being burned of stored but that is another story.)
The so called "fat gene" that a lot of people have is a Darwinian adaptation. They are able to store fat in times of plenty and burn them in leaner times. But when most all times are times of plenty, they simply get obese. This is why many Native Americans, especially those that lived in the desert climes of the Southwest, have a strong tendency to become obese. They had a lot of very lean times in their past and only those who were able to store a lot of fat were the only ones who survived.
(Actually there is no such thing as a fat gene, it is a combination of several genes, but that is a thread for another day.)
In his book 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' Gary Taubes thoroughly refutes virtually every claim you make here. He does a comprehensive review and analysis of nutritional research since the late 19th century and finds that the current conventional wisdom of what constitutes a healthy diet is simply wrong. Also wrong are our notions about obesity and what causes it (for example, puncturing the 'thrifty gene' hypothesis).
At a certain basic level, the "calories are calories, input>output = weight gain" argument is certainly true. However, it appears to be quite likely that something more complex than that is going on.
What causes people to eat what they do? What causes them to feel full and quit eating - or to keep on eating when they should have already eaten enough to feel full? What causes people to favor and eat more of some types of foods than others. Do some foods cause people to feel more energetic and to become more active, while others cause people to feel and act lethargic? Does the body metabolize all Kcals equally fast, or do the Kcals from some types of foods get metabolized faster than others? Does the combination of foods eaten make a difference?
These are all interesting questions, and I'm not at all sure that we've got the final answers for them yet. However, I suspect that they do touch upon what is really going on with the food consumption & weight gain issue.
I call the ideal diet "meat and leaves" which these days means you have to be either quite wealthy, or living so far out in the boonies/bush/bayou that you're gathering and catching your own food.
The "Paleolithic" diet is a good example, except a lot of Paleo enthusiasts go overboard and think it means all-raw and extremes like that.
9 is greater than 4. but when you eat 4 it stimulates your appetite and you eat even more. when you eat the 9 you feel sated and will in the end eat less. I you are so certain, how about citing some scientific studies to back up your position as I have done below. I can provide references to hundreds of other research articles from medical journals, dietetician journals and basic science journals.
A small amount of fat will satisfy your hunger, so eating fat may actually make you consume fewer calories. Eating carbohydrates, especially sugar, generates a surge in insulin production, which then lowers your blood sugar and makes you hungry again. So eating sweets can actually result in "binge eating", in an effort to get your blood sugar back up and keep it there. (Low blood sugar produces hunger).
That's the difference between first-world poor and third-world poor. If the people you saw were averaging $1 a day in current $, then they were making the equivalent of about a dime per day in Depression $. That just wasn't enough to survive back then. To help nail down the difference, can anyone recall what the original national minimum wage was?
I grew up when and where there was a mix of first-world poor and third-world, or Depression, type poor. We were the 2nd type. But we had neighbors and friends who were poor but not nearly as poor as us, still considered poor though, who could afford enough food to get quite fat.
In general though in the 1970s there were just not as many fat people as now, and a degree of thinness I considered "normal" in myself, looking at old photos now, looks medically malnourished.
The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa.
Hi Ron. I see a lot of new research suggesting processed carbohydrates may be the biggest culprit in the poor/obese problem...in the US. I don't see many fat poor people we I travel abroad.
Thank You! Why do discussions of obesity always devolve into a shouting match over eating, with no one discussing the lack of exercise? I have no reason to believe that food prices are going to reduce obesity problems, but if people have to get off their butts and walk/bike again for all or part of their transportation, I predict obesity problems will go away.
Of course, Taubes is a very good journalist - not a researcher, so "found" may not be the best word to use. His "favorite" study, as he indicates in the New York Magazine article he wrote based on his book, found that at least for non-athletic men being trained for running a marathon, the men did indeed lose body fat, though there was no body composition change for the women. I assume that study didn't look at overweight people, or he would have indicated that.
I'll have to read his book at some point to see if he makes more of a case there. Between this article and his article in Science, he seems to conclude that the problem is carbohydrates.
I think "found" is a pretty good word to use. He may not have done the research, but he looked at it with fresh eyes, and saw things that would be obvious to anyone - if not for "confirmation bias."
The example he starts the book with is of William Banting, who did try exercise to lose weight, but found that his appetite increased to make up for the calories expended.
And you see professional athletes struggling with their weight all the time. You'd think if exercise was the solution, a pro athlete wouldn't have to worry about weight.
What about the Danish study that he points out and that I mentioned above?
Many professional athletes are required as part of their sport to maintain unusually low body fat for performance reasons. Professional cyclists maintain low body fat levels because body fat is extra weight that slows you down with no benefit. Same for swimmers and runners. In sports where body fat is not an issue, like sumo wrestling, they don't worry about it.
Also,
UCSD study cites lack of vigorous exercise as primary factor in adolescent obesity
Lack of vigorous physical activity is the main contributor to obesity in adolescents ages 11 to 15, according to a study of 878 adolescents by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, in collaboration with investigators at San Diego State University.
One of the largest studies ever to look at the multiple factors of diet, physical activity and sedentary behavior on obesity in adolescents, the report was published in the April 2004 issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know. His interest is not in nutrition per se, but in science, and how it goes wrong. When it comes to human health, it's very difficult to do the kind of scientific studies needed to tease apart correlation and causation. Studies are often contradictory, and even scientists who should know better end up just ignoring the ones that don't support the results they expect to get.
For example, in the study you quote...isn't it possible that cause and effect are reversed? Maybe overweight children are more likely to be sedentary, rather than lack of exercise causing them to be overweight.
Similarly, studies have shown that people who have lost a lot of weight are more likely to keep it off if they exercise...but it's possible that exercising regularly is linked with more dedication to maintaining the weight loss, rather than being beneficial in and of itself.
""Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know.""
Actually, we do know, but don't want to.
Take hominids that evolved to live on whatever it scrounged from an African savanna, let it live with an uncertain food supply and many other dangers, allow it to breed freely to ensure that its poplation reaches carrying capacity quickly, as geologic time goes. Then, due to its 'intelligence,' it will eventually figure out a way to store information outside of its brain. Hominid-developed cultures can grow at exponential rates.
Some of these cultures allow members of a hominid species to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Genetically controlled desires plus nutritional ignorance is a guarantee that 'bad' choices will be made. Throw in a sound and light box that entertains so well that the average TV viewer is burning as many calories awake or asleep for hours each day (Sitting and doing nothing burns more calories). Add a concentrated energy source or two that is easily harvested, so machines can do most of the work.
Food & energy boys and girls. . . food & energy
The first paragraph of this article is priceless--basically a perfect description of the Export Land Model (ELM), except that it applies to food: FELM.
IMO, we are headed at hyperspeed to an emerging bilateral trade system where food exporters trade with energy exporters. Not a good time to be both a net food importer and a net energy importer, or for that matter, a net food consumer and a net energy consumer. Have I mentioned ELP in the last 30 minutes?
Rice Jumps to Record, Corn Near High as Demand Outpaces Supply
2008-04-03 07:31 (New York)
By Glenys Sim
You beat me on that one ;-). Note the 33 countries in danger of unrest and the potential problems of midwest flooding delaying planting - what happens if we have another flood year, like 1993?
Sharon
If you have a link, you might post it. I don't get links from my Wall Street source. BTW, I don't know if you saw the following article about a CSA operation just outside Dallas:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN...
Also, I quoted you at a Casey Research symposium. I described the Brother In Law On the Couch (BOC) Syndrome, as potentially "The most serious problem we face." I described BOC as an excellent reason to own a small organic garden/farm. You can put the in-laws and unemployed college graduates to work on the farm when they move in with you.
Here you go, found the article on http://news.google.com , entering "rice jumps" in the search field
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=acnqou1542Qs&refer=h...
The article cites a 3% annual increase in grain demand, and an expected 3.5% decrease in rice exports. Why does this scenario seem so familiar?
Actually both observations come from the article you posted that I was going to - they are quoted in your link ;-).
I'm currently writing an article about the Land Export Food Model, so the quoting will be mutual ;-).
Sharon
Here's a link to that story:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aBeY9Sy_lkBA
The way the Corp of Engineers has mismanaged the Mississippi floodplain the past century, massive floods are inevitable. Mark Twain himself warned about how stupid it is to try to "control" the mighty Mississip. What needs to be done is to rip the levees out & let the big ole river act like a river's supposed to. Farm the flood plain but don't live there. If people are stupid enuf to "develop" the floodplain, they shouldn't expect any taxpayer funded bailout when the river whacks them for their stupidity. Furthermore, the same mismanagement that has ruined the Mississippi floodplain has also ruined the delta buffer zone that once protected NOLA from hurricanes. Anyone dumb enuf to live in NOLA following Katrina deserves what they get when a cat 5 or 6 makes a direct hit one of these years.
The point is that if that section of the country faces flooding and therefore and inability to produce substantial amounts of crops, everyone in the US suffers, and therefore everyone in the world suffers (as food supply drops and therefore food prices skyrocket). It's not a case of "Us vs. Them," or "thats what you get for living there," its a case of, "we all need that area to grow our food."
Allowing the river to periodically inundate its floodplain would renew the fertility of the alluvial soils. This would increase agricultural productivity in the North American Midwest, while reducing the amount of artificial fertilizer required. It would also allow the Mississippi to renew its delta, protecting the Gulf coastal plain from storm surges during hurricanes. Channelizing the Mississip only allows the precious topsoil that erodes due to agroindustrial stupidity to reach deep water. Eroded topsoil should be redeposited over the floodplain and in the delta, where it would do some good.
Oh don't get me wrong, restoring the natural flooding cycle of the floodplain would be hugely beneficial to long term crop production from the area.
What the thread has been referring to is a summer where flooding ruins crop production for that year and how devastating that would be to our food supplies. It only takes 1 winter for people without food to starve.
Okay, gotcha. But even in '93 farmers managed to grow a crop on the floodplain. Taking out the levees & allowing snowmelt to renew the floodplain might preclude winter wheat and delay working the fields some years, but it wouldn't eliminate an entire growing season's crop. The occasional short-term detriment to agriculture would be enormously offset by the long-term benefit.
Your ignorance of hydrology, economics, culture, public law and value is astounding !
For he knew the price of everything and the value of nothing
Alan
A rise in food prices is a good thing because it will curb the obesity epidemic. We should use more corn and sugar for ethanol so food prices rise and people eat less.
An even better idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Poor people are more prone to obesity than well-off people. Obesity has very little to do with how much you eat and very much to do with what you eat. Rising food prices effectively makes people poorer, which is far more likely to lead to an increase in obesity than a decrease, except of course for those who actually starve.
This is not exactly true. While it is true that the poor who eat a lot of cheap fatty foods have a tendency to be obese it is absolutely not true that obesity has little to do with how much you eat. The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa. And you don't necessarily need to be starving not to be obese. Just burning slightly more calories every day than you consume will make you skinny. I grew up in poor rural Alabama. I knew a few really poor people who were obese but far, far more who were not obese. And our diet consisted mostly of cornbread, beans and taters with a little meat on Sunday.
Ron Patterson
This is simply untrue. Go ask the Inuit or the Masai who eat native diets. Or ask the Pima Indians once they went off a natural diet and started to eat the white man's food.
It is refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, that causes obesity.
Obesity is a disease of civilization. What is unique to civilized diets is refined carbohydrates, especially with excessive amounts of sugar. Many populations eat extraordinarily high concentrations of fat in their diet (the Inuit and Masai, for example), and obesity is virutally unknown among, until they change their diet to eat the food brought by "civilized" people.
People have been peddling the "fat makes you obese" snake oil for decades, and all it has done is to make Americans eat more carbohydrates and get fatter and fatter.
Doubly untrue! Obesity is caused by consuming more calories than you burn. Yes, it is that simple. Your body burns carbohydrates. They are oxidized in your blood and expelled via the lungs. You breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and water vapor. Some of the water is expelled via the kidneys. The carbon in carbohydrates becomes carbon dioxide and the hydrogen in carbohydrates becomes water.
When you consume more calories than you burn your body stores them in the form of fat for later use. It doesn't matter whether those calories comes from Granola bars or seal blubber you will still get fat. A calorie is a unit of energy and must either be burned or stored. (Sometimes calories are excreted without either being burned of stored but that is another story.)
The so called "fat gene" that a lot of people have is a Darwinian adaptation. They are able to store fat in times of plenty and burn them in leaner times. But when most all times are times of plenty, they simply get obese. This is why many Native Americans, especially those that lived in the desert climes of the Southwest, have a strong tendency to become obese. They had a lot of very lean times in their past and only those who were able to store a lot of fat were the only ones who survived.
(Actually there is no such thing as a fat gene, it is a combination of several genes, but that is a thread for another day.)
Ron Patterson
In his book 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' Gary Taubes thoroughly refutes virtually every claim you make here. He does a comprehensive review and analysis of nutritional research since the late 19th century and finds that the current conventional wisdom of what constitutes a healthy diet is simply wrong. Also wrong are our notions about obesity and what causes it (for example, puncturing the 'thrifty gene' hypothesis).
Read the book. Learn something.
At a certain basic level, the "calories are calories, input>output = weight gain" argument is certainly true. However, it appears to be quite likely that something more complex than that is going on.
What causes people to eat what they do? What causes them to feel full and quit eating - or to keep on eating when they should have already eaten enough to feel full? What causes people to favor and eat more of some types of foods than others. Do some foods cause people to feel more energetic and to become more active, while others cause people to feel and act lethargic? Does the body metabolize all Kcals equally fast, or do the Kcals from some types of foods get metabolized faster than others? Does the combination of foods eaten make a difference?
These are all interesting questions, and I'm not at all sure that we've got the final answers for them yet. However, I suspect that they do touch upon what is really going on with the food consumption & weight gain issue.
Get real:
Carbs: 4 Kcal g^-1
Proteins: 4 Kcal g^-1
Ethanol: 7 Kcal g^-1
Lipids: 9 Kcal g^-1
You didn't buy into that Atkins nonsense, did you? He's dead you know.
He's probably right, see my comments below.
And by the way, Atkins died of a head injury, completely unrelated to his dietary habits.
Phineas Gage, MD
9 > 4 QED
And dead is dead.
It's looking more and more like Atkins was right. I'm with ET. Read Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's an amazing book.
I call the ideal diet "meat and leaves" which these days means you have to be either quite wealthy, or living so far out in the boonies/bush/bayou that you're gathering and catching your own food.
The "Paleolithic" diet is a good example, except a lot of Paleo enthusiasts go overboard and think it means all-raw and extremes like that.
9 is greater than 4. but when you eat 4 it stimulates your appetite and you eat even more. when you eat the 9 you feel sated and will in the end eat less. I you are so certain, how about citing some scientific studies to back up your position as I have done below. I can provide references to hundreds of other research articles from medical journals, dietetician journals and basic science journals.
Phineas Gage, MD
A small amount of fat will satisfy your hunger, so eating fat may actually make you consume fewer calories. Eating carbohydrates, especially sugar, generates a surge in insulin production, which then lowers your blood sugar and makes you hungry again. So eating sweets can actually result in "binge eating", in an effort to get your blood sugar back up and keep it there. (Low blood sugar produces hunger).
I grew up in poor rural Alabama. I knew a few really poor people who were obese but far, far more who were not obese.
Ron, when I was recently in India, I certainly didn't see too many fat people - and saw a heck of a lot of people. Many of them were bone-thin.
That's the difference between first-world poor and third-world poor. If the people you saw were averaging $1 a day in current $, then they were making the equivalent of about a dime per day in Depression $. That just wasn't enough to survive back then. To help nail down the difference, can anyone recall what the original national minimum wage was?
Sorry, my math was off; it was 5 cents per day in Depression $.
I grew up when and where there was a mix of first-world poor and third-world, or Depression, type poor. We were the 2nd type. But we had neighbors and friends who were poor but not nearly as poor as us, still considered poor though, who could afford enough food to get quite fat.
In general though in the 1970s there were just not as many fat people as now, and a degree of thinness I considered "normal" in myself, looking at old photos now, looks medically malnourished.
The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa.
Hi Ron. I see a lot of new research suggesting processed carbohydrates may be the biggest culprit in the poor/obese problem...in the US. I don't see many fat poor people we I travel abroad.
My battle is with local cuisine.
Last night lightly fried calamari (best calamari I have ever had !) followed by roast ducks in plum sauce and pumpkin seeds :-)
Superb !
Best Hopes for BMI < 27
Alan
I did walk 7 blocks to restaurant, friend took streetcar.
Thank You! Why do discussions of obesity always devolve into a shouting match over eating, with no one discussing the lack of exercise? I have no reason to believe that food prices are going to reduce obesity problems, but if people have to get off their butts and walk/bike again for all or part of their transportation, I predict obesity problems will go away.
Taubes found there wasn't much evidence that exercise helped with obesity. There may be other good reasons to exercise, of course.
Such as the beauty of the walk. I went up on Prytania and came back on St. Charles.
The last of the azalea blooms are left, but others are flowering.
Best Hopes for Daily Beauty in One's Life,
Alan
More Photos at
http://www.asergeev.com/pictures/archives/compress/2005/441/06.htm
Of course, Taubes is a very good journalist - not a researcher, so "found" may not be the best word to use. His "favorite" study, as he indicates in the New York Magazine article he wrote based on his book, found that at least for non-athletic men being trained for running a marathon, the men did indeed lose body fat, though there was no body composition change for the women. I assume that study didn't look at overweight people, or he would have indicated that.
I'll have to read his book at some point to see if he makes more of a case there. Between this article and his article in Science, he seems to conclude that the problem is carbohydrates.
I think "found" is a pretty good word to use. He may not have done the research, but he looked at it with fresh eyes, and saw things that would be obvious to anyone - if not for "confirmation bias."
The example he starts the book with is of William Banting, who did try exercise to lose weight, but found that his appetite increased to make up for the calories expended.
And you see professional athletes struggling with their weight all the time. You'd think if exercise was the solution, a pro athlete wouldn't have to worry about weight.
What about the Danish study that he points out and that I mentioned above?
Many professional athletes are required as part of their sport to maintain unusually low body fat for performance reasons. Professional cyclists maintain low body fat levels because body fat is extra weight that slows you down with no benefit. Same for swimmers and runners. In sports where body fat is not an issue, like sumo wrestling, they don't worry about it.
Also,
at Eurekalert.org.
Are you sure Taubes hasn't cherry-picked a little to make his case?
Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know. His interest is not in nutrition per se, but in science, and how it goes wrong. When it comes to human health, it's very difficult to do the kind of scientific studies needed to tease apart correlation and causation. Studies are often contradictory, and even scientists who should know better end up just ignoring the ones that don't support the results they expect to get.
For example, in the study you quote...isn't it possible that cause and effect are reversed? Maybe overweight children are more likely to be sedentary, rather than lack of exercise causing them to be overweight.
Similarly, studies have shown that people who have lost a lot of weight are more likely to keep it off if they exercise...but it's possible that exercising regularly is linked with more dedication to maintaining the weight loss, rather than being beneficial in and of itself.
""Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know.""
Actually, we do know, but don't want to.
Take hominids that evolved to live on whatever it scrounged from an African savanna, let it live with an uncertain food supply and many other dangers, allow it to breed freely to ensure that its poplation reaches carrying capacity quickly, as geologic time goes. Then, due to its 'intelligence,' it will eventually figure out a way to store information outside of its brain. Hominid-developed cultures can grow at exponential rates.
Some of these cultures allow members of a hominid species to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Genetically controlled desires plus nutritional ignorance is a guarantee that 'bad' choices will be made. Throw in a sound and light box that entertains so well that the average TV viewer is burning as many calories awake or asleep for hours each day (Sitting and doing nothing burns more calories). Add a concentrated energy source or two that is easily harvested, so machines can do most of the work.
That is one massive gorilla to overlook.