Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.
Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.
Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from the grocery store bought in 2011. Tell me how they are different.
So no, it's not just grains that are making us fat. It's how grains are typically available to us. Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners. It's a fact. People won't eat things that taste bad. If I gave you my great-grandmother's breakfast from 1914 (the Scottish one, you get oatmeal), you just might not eat it. I've heard she liked it with ham.
And, as other commenters point out, it doesn't hurt that people walked pretty much everywhere 100 years ago. And swept their floors, washed their laundry by hand, walked up lots of stairs as elevators were not in wide adoption.
> Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.
Have you actually done this? Do you really expect someone else to be able to do it? You've managed to come across as really patronizing but I can't tell if you actually have a point.
I'm no expert on milling technology, but I imagine today's flour is finer (just from the numbering system: 0, 00, 000, 0000 — I assume the finest flour in the system originally was 1!) but do you expect any other differences?
> Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners.
Extending flour with fillers is illegal now in the US, and it wasn't illegal in 1914. That's probably one big difference. It's just as "protein and fiber reduced" now as it was then (as the original article points out!) and it's not "soaked in sweeteners".
Likewise with the oats. What was oatmeal like in 1914? How do you know?
Flours today are more refined and more likely to be bleached.
Extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners is stated to be how "grains are typically available to us." Wonderbread is a fair example, and the "standard" muffin that typically has 30 or more grams of sugar is another. Oatmeal today, in its most common presentations, will have a great deal of sugar.
What does "more refined" mean in this context, and what makes that bad? In other words, is flour simply ground to smaller sizes, chemically altered to remove certain elements, ...?
Wheat germ is removed from white flour in order to increase shelf-life and rising ability, which removes useful fatty-acids, oils and nutrients as well as fiber and protein. Whole-wheat flour is flour that has not had the germ removed.
No, of course not. I was being metaphorical. However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:
There's a lot more to flour production than the milling. Or the bleaching. We think of flour as just being "ground wheat" -- turns out, there's plenty of kinds you never see, which have a greater nutritional value than what your standard preprepared-from-grains prepackaged food item is made from. Think of it as the difference between the coffee you buy in the supermarket in tins and the beans you pick up at Intelligentsia or Peets. Prepackaged foods are optimized for profit to the manufacturer, using the cheapest available ingredients.
What are your sources of grains? Specifically, if you taped a USDA Food Pyramid graphic to your refrigerator and kept track of how many servings of each as per those recommendations are you consuming a day? Remember that one sandwich is two servings of grain. (I am NOT endorsing the USDA food pyramid. Just using it as a reference point.) You might even get Mr Taubes to admit that not all grains are equal.
As for extending prepackaged foods with fillers, look for ingredients on the label such as carboxymethyl cellulose, carageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, agar, pectin or maltodextrin. These things are called stabilizers, thickening agents and bulking agents by the food industry. They are cheap, and some of them are not entirely bad for you, as they contain indigestible fibers, but for the most part, they are nutritionally empty. Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.
As a would-have-been pastry chef and baker, this is a topic somewhat dear to my heart. It's somewhat suspicious that I lived on bread, yogurt, cheese and pasta in CH for 19 months and still lost 65lbs. My hunch -- and it's only a hunch -- is that there's something in our food here in the US that's partly to blame.
Also, my great-grandmother would have used groats, not steamed, rolled quick-cooking oats. With no sugar.
Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken. I mean, how do you know what was in US flour in 1914? It was legal to mix it with chalk dust and cornstarch not very far before that, and I think it still was in 1914: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20810FB3D5C1...
To whiten bread, for example, bakers sometimes added
alum (…) and chalk to the flour, while mashed potatoes,
plaster of Paris (calcium sulphate), pipe clay and even
sawdust could be added to increase the weight of their
loaves. Rye flour or dried powdered beans could be used
to replace wheat flour and the sour taste of stale flour
could be disguised with ammonium carbonate.
Anyway, so at the time, I think there were already a lot of food additives in use. They just weren't systematically vetted for toxicity the way they are today.
> However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:
It's true that those are common additives, and as you say that they are generally not unhealthy (those are all fiber, protein, or a mixture of the two, aren't they? Except maltodextrin, which is a starch), but they are usually a tiny fraction of the food.
> Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.
I don't agree. I use cornstarch, arrowroot, or even white flour as bulking and thickening agents when I make real, good food the proper way, and I often use milk, mustard, or egg as stabilizers. I've used lemon peel as a stabilizer too when I made blackberry jam, because it contains pectin. I don't know how you propose we should make blackberry jam without adding stabilizers?
I don't know of any reason to believe that the more popular food additives you list are any more dangerous than the traditional ones I usually use. I just don't happen to have them in my pantry or have experience cooking with them. (Indeed, many traditional additives like sassafras and lead sugar have been discovered to be toxic in the last couple of centuries, but to my knowledge, there still hasn't been a systematic testing program.)
I recognize that you're probably a lot more experienced at cooking than I am, so maybe I'm totally off the wall here. Enlighten me!
Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.
Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle. http://www.foodpolitics.com/
It just so happens that I've got a stack of very old cookbooks that belonged to my great grandmother. Well, half of it. My mom has the other half. I started baking using recipes from those books around the age of 9. The backs of these books are full of notes written in her spidery handwriting. Notes about substitutions (she lived through two world wars), notes about compensating for ambient conditions, and the recipes from her childhood. Well, longer than that -- she didn't come to the US until she was 30. When my results did not match hers, I assumed her base ingredients were different from mine. This partly responsible for what lead to learning how flour is typed by ash in Europe. It's also how I learned that most of the oats consumed in the US around the time my great grandmother emigrated here would have been imported from Scotland and Canada, and that they would have been steel-cut to increase cooking time. And that rolled oats came into being sometime around 1910. It's also what eventually lead me to read _Day of St Anthony's Fire_, but that's a whole 'nother topic of conversation. From this, I'm making an "educated guess" as to what a cup of flour would have been like in 1914. And you have to admit, it read well.
This would be one of those deals where I have zero credentials to offer other than the claims made in the last paragraph. Or you can ask tptacek... pretty sure he'll provide a glowing reference for my cooking skills. Having no phone, television or computer in my childhood, I turned to the big stack of cookbooks and the abundance of fresh ingredients available on our small farm. Doesn't make me an expert, but I am quite facile at slinging some tasty hash.
As for non-grain foods, jam is, more or less, flavored pectin. Why is there pectin in Stonyfield Farms yogurt? So they have to put less actual yogurt in there. Why is there 'modified food starch' in Breakstones's cottage cheese? "Mouth feel," is what they'll tell you. But I've had hüttenkäse that had much better "mouth feel" with nothing in it but milk, salt and culture (likely due to higher fat content).
And thanks for the links. It amazes me to think that my great grandparents -- the ones I knew, at least -- lived into their late 90s with plaster, alum, strychnine, sawdust and bean flour in their food. Maybe the fact that the latest act cited in the second article was passed in 1899 helped, somehow.
Exactly. The average American's day starts in the kitchen. It then migrates to the seat of a car, then to a comfy chair at a desk, then back to the steering wheel, which, of course, gives way to the kitchen and the dinner table. Then to the sofa and to bed. Rather than what comprises our diets, I'd prefer to see a chart of obesity plotted against the average square feet of an American home during the same period. (The creeping size of homes being a indicator, in many cases, of sprawl and its related side-effects).
> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.
The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs.
What, exactly, is different about 1914's oatmeal?
Note - saying "they've added lots of stuff" isn't an answer unless you can show that "100%" is wrong. ("Rolled" is a mechanical crushing process and doesn't imply that anything was removed or added.)
Whole rolled oats are typically made by having the chaff removed from the groat. Then the groats are parcooked by steaming, rolled flat and sometimes baked. These are your "Old Fashioned Quaker Oats." "Quick-Cooking" varieties are made in a similar way, only the chaff AND the bran have been removed. The bran is the nutritious part.
Around the turn of the century, the US imported most of its oats from Scotland and Canada. These would have been "steel cut oats" with the bran left on them. Rolled oats would have been relatively new in 1914. I have no idea when quick-cooking oats appeared.
So the difference is in what you buy. Think 'pig' versus 'pork' -- to a food scientist, there's a word for the grain in every stage of it's processing. But to us, it's just an oat. It's convenient language for Quaker to put "100% Whole Rolled Oats" on the package, because that's what they are. Are they whole rolled groats with the bran still on them? Or are they whole rolled endosperms, which are mostly the high-calorie starch that the germ uses to become a plant?
BTW, if you love oatmeal as much as I do, you will appreciate slow-cooked oats:
If I recall correctly, Taubes discusses that ~1914 was a historic low point of meat consumption because the supply could not keep up with all of the demand from the increased immigration. So 1914 is certainly not a good baseline either.
I don't think it is at all fair to say "they were already using white flour..". Much bread had very different qualities back then- more likely to be slow fermented instead of quick rise, much more likely to be local, etc.
I think this misses the point anyways- the quality of food was different- you see a large increase in sweeteners in the graph, oils transitioned away from natural animal fats to industrial processed seed oils- and in general food became much more processed.
The trouble with this subject is that everybody, including commenters in this thread, thinks they already know what the solution is, even before they have a good grasp of the problem.
I recommend reading Gary Taubes ("Good Calories, Bad Calories", "Why We Get Fat"), not because of what he thinks that the solution is, but to understand the range of facts that a theory of obesity must explain.
When Taubes starts to promote his own theory (carbs are bad, fats aren't, exercise is fairly useless, insulin is very important), he may or may not be right. Nevertheless his book is invaluable for learning about the extremely counter-intuitive facts of obesity.
To name a few:
- obese 6-month old babies
- morbidly obese mice starving to death
- obesity epidemics among native americans in 19th century
- lack of obesity among all animals
- prisoners on a forced 10K calorie diet barely gaining weight
We won't conquer the obesity problem until we start treating it as a huge, extremely complicated mystery to be solved, instead of as a problem of persuasion, where the solution is to convince other people that you have the obvious answer.
I haven't read anything recent from Taubes but is he still peddling the Atkins diet or has he moved on to the Paleo diet?! I find it irritating that Taubes ends up cherry picking data to support his hypothesis.
But then I subscribe to the Lyle McDonald-Mark Rippetoe line of thought when it comes to nutrition-fitness ideology.
.
Edit:If it interests anyone, here's a transcript from a Larry King Live episode hosted by Joy Behar with Gary Taubes on to talk about his book and Dr. Mehmet Oz + Gillian Michaels and Dr. Andrew Weil (an "integrative" medicine evangelist)
You cannot explain obese babies by saying they don't get enough exercise.
Also, you're recommending solutions before you understand the problem. Did Americans suddenly lose all self-control in 1980? And if they did, why?
Getting more exercise, and eating more green vegetables and less sugar is clearly a good idea, but the central mystery - why do people get fat - remains unexplained. We should unravel it.
"Experimental Obesity in Man: Cellular Character of the Adipose Tissue"
In this case, it is not as exciting as I expected it to be.
"Prolonged high caloric intake resulted in a mean weight gain of 16.2 kg in the group, with an individual range of from 9 to 19 kg. This represents a 20.9% increase in body weight for the group as a whole with individual gains ranging from 14.8 to 25.3%. Caloric restriction restored body weight to normal."
Personally, I wouldn't call it "barely gaining weight".
In 1914 far more jobs involved physical labor, even house work. Also, there wasn't as much opportunity to consume excess calories in 1914. The killer combination today is sedentary lifestyles PLUS too much food PLUS the wrong sorts of foods.
I'm not sure if this is behind a paywall (my uni has access to everything on Nature's site), so here is the salient bit:
RESULTS: Primarily, subjects aged 40 y have been studied (39.5±0.4 y, mean±s.e.m.) who are only moderately obese (92.7±0.9 kg, 33.2±0.5 body mass index (BMI), 33.4±0.7% body fat); for short durations (15.6±0.6 weeks). Exercise studies were of a shorter duration, used younger subjects who weighed less, had lower BMI and percentage body fat values, than diet or diet plus exercise studies. Despite these differences, weight lost through diet, exercise and diet plus exercise was 10.7±0.5, 2.9±0.4* and 11.0±0.6 kg, respectively.
I don't have a source, but when I worked construction during the summers, I would get fatter while also gaining muscle mass. I always felt hungry after working during the day and would consume massive amounts of calories.
I work in construction, my weight is currently balanced at around 260lbs and I'm around 5'9". By body mass index I'm way beyond morbidly obese. By waist-to-hip ratio for a man I'm way past what's recommended for men - I'm way past on the healthy side.
Here's the funniest thing, and the prime reason why the BMI is totally useless for measuring obesity. I immigrated to Canada, and passed a full physical. My pulse is 60bpm (I actually hit full-blown bradycardic of <50bpm when I lived in the UK), my blood pressure was 125/80. But I'm allegedly morbidly obese.
I can lift 200+ lbs, I can climb a 20' ladder without getting out of breath when most skinny people I know get out of breath going up a flight of stairs (incidentally I live on the 11th floor of an apartment building and I started running out of breath at the 7th floor racing with my dog).
I can eat a double bigmac, large fries, large drink and two burgers off the dollar menu. I can do it regularly and it doesn't effect my weight. I've gone on diets eating mostly salad and calorie restricting myself, and it doesn't effect my weight. The only diet that genuinely works to make me lose weight has been the Atkins, and even coming off of the diet, my weight remains stable at that point like I reset my weight slider or something.
I get told by doctors who are flabbier than myself that I need to lose weight and all I can think is "I can Hulk-throw your fat ass out of your office window and you're struggling walking around the exam table with a coffee".
The obesity epidemic is a product of medical organizations adopting the BMI as a weight reference when it was deemed too inaccurate to study the weight changes in soldiers and was dropped. That was a height and age restricted group, and the BMI couldn't produce usable results to demonstrate fitness. So why medical organizations around the world have adopted it as a holy grail just clearly demonstrates their incompetence.
The other factor is increased sedation, but this isn't necessarily causing obesity. This is causing a general and whole shift in our society to being fat. I'm not talking obesity as a contagious disease, I'm talking that people are probably on average 30-40lbs heavier than what they should be.
Although, it should be noted that most western societies are facing a much more frightening anorexia and bulimia epidemic. Why is it more frightening? Because I'm 80lbs over the male long held 'average' of 180lbs, and likely 120+lbs past what my ideal is allegedly for my height. I can't go 80lbs below my ideal weight, and I certainly can't go 120lbs below my ideal. However I can quite easily go 200, 300, 400lbs above my ideal and have virtually no long term health complications for staying there for a decade and losing the weight. If I was at 60lbs, I would likely be dead or do serious permanent damage to my heart and organs even if I was only there for months and regained the weight.
We wholly don't understand weight in humans. We've got 7 year olds who are anorexic and 7 year olds who are morbidly obese, and no one is doing anything but blaming society when it's happening throughout dozens of cultures.
By the statistic, underweight and obese have significant increases in mortality. Whilst the overweight (by the BMI) have an overall decrease in mortality compared to the normal weight.
Obesity puts too much pressure on your joints negating the lubricants. But underweight reduces the lubrication in your joints. Overweight seems to be the ideal, as it has for thousands of years.
Obesity is correlated with higher LDL cholesterol, and underweight is correlated with low levels of cholesterol overall, which can reduce vitamin D production and in turn increase your risk to virtually every disease and cancer out there.
For my body fat percentage, I sit in the low 20's, which puts me into the overweight category. Which, incidentally means I'm likely at a reduced risk of stress on my organs and joints, as I've seen little to no evidence of a correlation between muscle mass and arthritis or other weight-related disease.
I don't know about physical laborers being fatter, but our bodies are horribly/wonderfully efficient when it comes to work. The amount eaten will be the larger factor.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate#Biochemist.... About 70% of a human's total energy expenditure is due to the basal life processes within the organs of the body (see table). About 20% of one's energy expenditure comes from physical activity and another 10% from thermogenesis, or digestion of food (postprandial thermogenesis).
The reference to the wikipedia article is misleading, and practically false.
Practicing physical activity indirectly increases a series the expenditure for the basal life processes, so it increases the calories consumption more than the raw amount of energy spent doing it.
If you look at the chart and treat the blue (sweeteners) and purple (fats and oils) streaks as a single one, together they increase 1.6 times from around 25% in 1914 to 40% in 2004. That's a huge increase! In fact, these two calorie sources are the only ones that consistently increased over the given period. I am surprised anyone is even talking about grains and meat.
FAO data shows US per capita consumption of sugar (raw equivalent) at 67 kg (approx. 148 lbs) as of 2007. I can't speak to the accuracy of the data, though, or how much of that consumption directly corresponds to diet.
Seems like to me that almost (probably) all nutrition articles try to find a silver bullet to beat obesity/overweight.
My theory is that modern culture keeps searching such illusory silver bullets because acknowledging the working solution, which is practising sports and stop eating junk food (fast food, fat food, sweets) would be much more challenging.
=of course clinical cases must be dealt separately
=given a certain cultural context. in a more healthy cultural context, eating cleanly is much easier.
The key thing here is that we've been putting caffeine alongside saturated fat for quite a while - coffee and chocolate or pastries, burger/fries/soda, etc. Although one of these meals screws up our blood sugar for about 1/4th of the day, apparently that wasn't enough to make us fat by itself.
Then in the last 30-40 years we have the trend towards increased use of sweeteners and soft drink consumption, whose effect will be magnified among anyone consuming the sat-fat/caffeine combo. But low-carb diets work because the "sugar drink" of the study, given six hours later, never appears. In fact, low-carb diets will (from the dieter's perspective) reinforce their apparent effectiveness, as going off any fat-heavy diet will have exaggerated effects.
"So, kids, in 2020 it was discovered that X was making people fat. Before that, nobody knew that it had any adverse effects. In fact, they used it almost everywhere, from X, Y and Z to J."
Basically, they'll be talking about X the same way we talk about X-rays or DDT or whatnot.
The obesity epidemic had a start date. It was not a gradual trend, or something that ebbed and flowed over the decades. People first got obese in large numbers in the early 1980s.
Whatever is making everybody huge can be traced to a change in the 1980s. That is a useful data point in that it rules out a lot of things. It's not exercise. It's probably not starch.
Personally I suspect it's a mix of telling everybody to cut out saturated fat and the increased prevalence of fructose.
You aren't going to find dramatic changes in 1980. The human body is remarkably adaptable and many health problems accumulate over years or possibly even generations (epigenetics). Obesity implies an impaired metabolism, which takes years (used to be decades) to develop. Moreover, health problems have been epidemic in our society pre 1980 (just with less dramatic consequences). I think you are going to really limit yourself with a 1980 cutoff, and that it is more likely that the same factors just got worse around that time.
This doesn't ring true. Epigenetics may take a lot of time, but memetics don't. Social changes can produce sharp changes in diet very quickly. Many epidemics predate 1980, but obesity, by the numbers, does not appear to.
Yes, social changes could produce dramatic changes. But social changes themselves are usually very slow, and I know of few exceptions to this in the context of health. Normally people blame obesity on social aspects (like exercise) which 1) have changed very gradually and 2) don't matter anyways (explaining that would make this a much longer discussion). If someone could come up with an example of just 1 social change that dramatically shifted in 1980 I would be very open to the idea. The only thing I know of is weight-training- the obesity numbers used are normally just based on BMI- they don't take into account that muscle isn't fat.
Before 1980, 1/3 of Americans were overweight. Every overweight person has the same metabolic problem as the obese, just to a lesser extent. The fact that 1/3 of Americans are now obese 20 years later is what I would expect due to a gradual decline of American health that hit a tipping point for obesity around 1980.
Not just fructose. In fruit fructose is fine. High fructose corn syrup is different and became prevelent in the 80's because of the sugar tariffs in the late 1970's in the USA.
not really, fructose no matter the form is ot broken down in the gut so its shunted to the liver (much like other toxins). There it does all sorts of crazy stuff.
Modern fruit (due to selective breeding) is ultra sweet with what I can assume were pretty bland flavored fruit back in the day. Natures Candy.
Fruit has always been selectively bred. It's a bribe to animals.
My experience is that supermarket varieties of fruits are bigger and look better than local, traditional produce, or are more practical in other ways (thinner skin, less or no seeds) but are often insipid in comparison.
On the other hand (and this is just speculation), in the northern hemisphere most fruit is naturally available in the fall season. Fattening prior to winter was probably a desirable effect.
Yes really, the delivery mechanism can change how fast it hits your system, and that makes all the difference. Your liver can handle X amount an hour but not Y amount an hour before shit starts acting up.
Yes, it's a matter of quantity, not quality. An Apple contains something like 7 grams of fructose. One can of soda contains 25 grams of fructose. According to the National Soft Drink Association, average consumption in the U.S. is nearly two cans of soda per day. (One can per day is enough to add 16 pounds of fat per year)
That's roughly equivalent to 7 apples, every day of the year. That's way, way above our actual fruit consumption levels.
I was not disagreeing that fiber is important, only pointing out that even when eliminating any other considerations the difference in quantity is enough to account for the trend.
From the article: "...the grain figure doesn't even include the two hundred pounds of potatoes Americans ate every year in the early 20th century."
Table 4 of the original report gives more detailed numbers. In the period 1909-1919, grains, potatoes and sweeteners together contributed 54.4% of American calories. In 2004, it was down to 43%.
In terms of GI, the Glycemic Index, sure they are. However, the more important measure it GL, the Glycemic Load, which is basically the GI multiplied with the average amount.
For example, even though a cherry has much higher GI than a potato, you eat more sugar/carbohydrates in one potato than in one cherry, so a potato has higher GL and thus higher insulin response.
How many people would think to compare a single cherry to a single potato though? Most people would think in terms of roughly equal mass (x grams of cherries vs. y grams of potatoes where x is approx. y).
A potato is basically sugar, as far as digestion is concerned.
The "complex carb" and glycemic index thing is pretty well nonsense. A carb is a carb. The only question is whether you have a properly functioning metabolism and insulin sensitivity. They call a screwed up insulin sensitivity "metabolic syndrome". If you've developed one, typically through many years of poor eating, you need to cut out starch, because your fat cells and pancreas can't handle it properly. If you're thin, well then the glycemic index thing is useless. Your pancreas and fat cells work fine.
A carb is a not a carb. Sucrose is composed of equal parts glucose and fructose, while starch is pure glucose. Fructose and glucose are two different 'carbs' and handled much differently by the body.
You posted my exact reaction. Having read Gary Taubes' book and seen film interviews with him on the subject, I don't once recall him focusing solely on grains.
I think that the overall causes of obesity are fairly complex --- there's not some simple cause one can point to that is "the problem". But, threads like this one and the recent HN thread about Western diets remind me of this set of photos on "what the world eats":
For this kind of article we need a new word like Steven Colbert's "truthiness". Scienciness? It has a lot of that. This is the reason we don't let MBAs and economists do medical research. The tonnage of grains consumed says nothing about the form in which the grains were eaten. If you want to maintain that a slice of bread and a chunk of beef is equivalent to the same wheat- and meat-equivalent in Hot Pockets, this article will be food for thought.
From the article: Was it that all the grain consumed before 1950 was healthier whole grain? No. As flour became an industrial product in the late 19th century, mills began processing out the germ and other "whole wheat" elements because the fats in the germ caused the flour to go rancid. By 1914, your great grandmothers were mostly baking with white flour. Polished ("white") rice was similarly well established, and for some of the same reasons. And of course corn, the other major American grain, does not have a healthier "whole" alternative.
The author doesn't address meat since she is focusing on the hypothesis that carbs are making us fat.
That is absolutely true, at least in my family. My grandfather ate more calories for breakfast than I do all day. He was thin as a rail, and I'm... not.
We spend enormous amounts of mental energy thinking about types and combinations of calories, but not much time burning them. We pay huge signup and monthly fees to gyms that we never find the time to visit, meanwhile we never walk our streets.
So we agree, then, that a person should dramatically increase his or her activity level throughout the day (e.g. walk the streets).
However, I'm going to nitpick and say that you're wrong about the gym. Currently, I burn about 1,000 calories on each trip to the gym, every other day. That's a 500 calorie deficit that I'm adding each day. In addition, my body is using additional calories to rebuild muscle, and the additional muscle is consuming calories to maintain itself. It's kind of like compounding interest.
The gyms have an economic incentive to make people sign up, but not go to them. It's hardly a failure of people to want to go to the gym but stop, if the gym is purposely designed to be as boring as possible.
Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.
Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from the grocery store bought in 2011. Tell me how they are different.
So no, it's not just grains that are making us fat. It's how grains are typically available to us. Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners. It's a fact. People won't eat things that taste bad. If I gave you my great-grandmother's breakfast from 1914 (the Scottish one, you get oatmeal), you just might not eat it. I've heard she liked it with ham.
And, as other commenters point out, it doesn't hurt that people walked pretty much everywhere 100 years ago. And swept their floors, washed their laundry by hand, walked up lots of stairs as elevators were not in wide adoption.