When last I posted, oh so long ago, I promised next to discuss the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity and why I find it so uncompelling and more than a little bit disheartening. Why, in effect, I think it is the kind of bad science that begs to be challenged, as I did, when it is presented in a public forum, as Dr. Stephan Guyenet of Whole Health Source did at the Ancestral Health Symposium back in August. This is the first of five posts to address this and I promise (really) that it will be days between posts, not months.
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And because I think the energy balance paradigm of obesity is more or less the root of all scientific evil in this business — not just because it’s taken obesity researchers down a century-long blind alley, but because of its implications that fat people just can’t control their urges the way lean people do — I find Dr. Guyenet’s promotion of this hypothesis and its acceptance, limited as it may be, in the paleo and low-carb blogospheres to be very disheartening. I could be wrong (of course) about the scientific bankruptcy of this hypothesis, but I’m going to argue (of course) that I’m not.
In my next post—just a few days from now, I promise (barring extenuating circumstances like the Hayward fault underlying our neighborhood deciding to go off with a magnitude significantly higher than the 3 to 4s we’ve been getting for the past two weeks) — we’ll continue this discussion by looking at the other major limitations of this hypothesis, beginning with some recent observations that it can’t seem to explain.
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