In his concluding chapter of Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes comes
to ten inescapable conclusions based on his five years of research and
his attempt to put it all together. I'll paraphrase, but you can find
the actual ones around about page 427 or so.

1. Dietary fat doesn't cause obesity, heart problems, or other
chronic diseases of civilization.
2. Yes, carbs are the real problem. It's in how they work with
insulin and therefore the entire hormonal regulatory system.
3. Sugar is the worst. We're talking table sugar and HFCS here. And
it's the duality of glucose+fructose that's the real killer (OJ
Simpson's quest for the real killers not withstanding).
4. Carbs cause coronary heart disease and diabetes. They are the
most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer's, and other chronic
diseases of civilization.
5. Being overweight/obese is a disorder of excess fat accumulation,
not overeating and not couching around. The "too much to eat and too
little movement causes fat folks to be fat" crowd has it backwards.
Being fat makes you couch around and overeat.
6. Excess calories don't make you fatter. Excess energy use doesn't
lead to weight loss in the long term. It does lead to hunger.
7. Fattening is caused by an imbalance in the hormonal regulation
of fat tissue and fat metabolism. Fat creation and storage outpace fat
use. To get lean, you must get your hormones back into balance (i.e.
your insulin under control)
8. High insulin = fat goes into storage. Low insulin = an
environment where you can move fat out of fat cells.
9. Carbs stimulate insulin secretion, which leads to fat storage.
Fewer carbs = leaner us.
10. Carbs also make us hungry. If hunger/cravings are signals that
cells need nutrition and insulin is putting everything into storage,
you can imagine what chronic hyperinsulemia can do to your
"willpower". Carbs also make us move less, through the same fat
storage story. If you are chronically elevated, and your food is going
into storage, instead of use, the use cells will be starved and not
feel like doing anything. It's the same story, and it's the
explanation of why people have it backwards.

For the folks who maintain that it's the quantity of macronutrients
rather than the quality or that dietary fat is the enemy of
weightloss, I would like to see an alternative model that accounts for
the role of insulin vs. all other hormones in fat accumulation/fat
loss. I would like to see a hole punched in these "inescapable
conclusions" by Chung, Kaz, and all the other volume/calorie/fat
watchers out there who dismiss low carb, either as a calorie limiting
mechanism or as inferior to any other approach to weight loss.

For the rest of us, can we make this the Low Carb Equivalent of Martin
Luther's 95 Theses? The kind of thing we tack to the doors of our
local branches of the USDA, the AHA, both ADAs, local fitness
celebrities, etc? I live in the residential half of a complex that
houses the Diabetic ADA. I work about half a mile from USDA
headquarters. Are they in need of Martin Luther thesising?