The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes
Link to the webpage on Seth Yoder shown above
Update: In “Vindicating Gary Taubes: A Smackdown of Seth Yoder,” I retract my serious criticisms of Gary Taubes below. However, this post is still important in defending Gary’s substantive views.
Seth Yoder, in his post "The Case Against the Case Against Sugar" fully convinced me that Gary Taubes displays a serious lack of reportorial honesty in his book The Case Against Sugar. And Seth somehow made reading through the trainwreck of how Gary Taubes routinely misquotes or otherwise misrepresents dead people's views perversely entertaining.
Seth's devastating demonstration of Gary Taubes's lack of reliability as a historian means I need to examine places where I have relied on information from Gary, much as I had to reassess my reliance on Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff when the shoddiness of their statistical analysis came to light. (The spreadsheet error was only the tip of the iceberg. See "An Economist’s Mea Culpa: I Relied on Reinhart and Rogoff," "After Crunching Reinhart and Rogoff’s Data, We Find No Evidence That High Debt Slows Growth" and "Examining the Entrails: Is There Any Evidence for an Effect of Debt on Growth in the Reinhart and Rogoff Data?")
Fortunately, in the area of diet and health, Jason Fung is my guy (see "Five Books That Have Changed My Life"), not Gary Taubes. And I always took Gary Taubes's reasoning with a grain of salt. For example, in my post "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," I write:
First, I should say that I start out expecting less from journalists like Gary Taubes than the standard that Stephan Guyenet wants to judge them buy. Stephan mentions repeatedly the "Igon Value Problem," which refers to a term "coined by Steven Pinker in a review of Malcolm Gladwell's book What the Dog Saw." Malcolm Gladwell did not know what an eigenvalue was, and so misheard it as an "Igon value." Similarly, Gary Taubes is not himself a scientist and so does not fully understand everything he is talking about.
It was also pretty obvious to me that Gary Taubes was tilting his selection of what to tell and what not to tell toward things that helped his case against sugar. But I thought the "facts" that he did tell about would be accurate. Just after the passage above from "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," is this:
But [Gary Taubes] does give us a tour through the history of thought about nutrition and what he felt he learned by talking to many scientists, with an emphasis on what the more contrarian scientists said. This is a useful service.
After seeing the misquotations and misrepresentations that Seth Yoder identifies, I no longer know which bits of this history of nutritional though are true and which are false. But let me attempt to examine where I stand, post by post where I was in danger of relying too much on Gary Taubes. Using my blog search box identified only four posts where I mention Gary Taubes other than in referring to the title of another blog post. Below I analyze my degree of reliance on Gary Taubes for each. After that, I register a couple of disagreements with Seth.
The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes
In "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," I summarized what I thought I had learned from The Case Against Sugar thus:
Sugar is very, very bad. I will say more below on why convincing people of that is an important accomplishment.
What the nutrition establishment is telling us needs to be closely examined and cross-checked by scientists outside the nutrition establishment. It is very unwise to simply trust the nutrition establishment.
I think I could have gotten this much from Jason Fung alone. The basic reason sugar is very, very bad is that most foods with a substantial sugar content are quite high on the insulin index. See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid."
In "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," I actually disagree with Gary Taubes a lot. Here are some examples of my words in that post that disagree with Gary:
Gary argues that other than Western diets adding sugar and flour, every other aspect of Western diets was duplicated by at least some indigenous diet, so sugar and flour must be the culprit. This is a strong argument. However, I would add in the possibility that people in almost every indigenous population had substantial chunks of time when they had no food consumption. Whether their fasts were involuntary or not, they probably fasted reasonably frequently. So in my view, the key aspects of Western diets that brought Western Diseases were sugar, flour and a reduction in periods of time with no food consumption.
Gary Taubes is at his most confused when discussing calories in/calories out. This is one of the first things I had to straighten out theoretically in my own mind after readings Gary's books. That effort is reflected in the title of my early foray into a Twitter discussion on diet: "How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy."
[Contrary to what Gary Taubes claims,] I am inclined to agree with Stephan that rodent data do not support the idea that sugar is more harmful than fat (though it does seem to support the idea that fat plus sugar is worse than fat alone). But I am struck by the possibility that rodents might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans are.
Gary goes overboard in talking down the benefits of exercise.
After catching Gary in a serious misquotation, Stephan begins to wind down ...
Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
Seth Yoder promises to write a post in the future focusing on salt. (Is it out already? I couldn't find it.) I will be eager to read it.
The heart of my post "Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be" is discussing chunks of Gary Taubes's earlier book Good Calories, Bad Calories. These ideas are reprised in The Case Against Sugar. Readers of my post pointed me to very recent research about salt reported in Gina Kolata's May 8, 2017 New York Times article "Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong." This makes me continue to doubt that salt is the nutritional evil that standard advice says it is.
Although Seth thinks the connection to sugar is tenuous, he does take seriously the idea that insulin resistance is an important factor in hypertension. Seth writes:
Taubes eventually gets to some positive evidence for a link between sugar and hypertension, though it’s rather murky and kind of contradicts his point about sodium. It turns out that hyperinsulinemia may lead to an increase in blood pressure by increasing sodium retention.(87–89) So what causes hyperinsulinemia? The cited literature makes the case for insulin resistance as the primary factor. Taubes would have you believe that sugar intake causes insulin resistance and diabetes, but the evidence for that claim just is not very abundant nor is it mentioned as a risk factor in the texts. However, you might imagine someone who is constantly swilling sodas all day, every day to have elevated insulin levels.
To think that sugar is the only cause of insulin resistance and obesity is, of course, a straw man—that Gary Taubes has chosen to personify. In "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," I push these as the main reasons for the rise in insulin resistance and obesity:
The shift toward consumption of foods that are high on the insulin index. (See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.") Many of these are high in sugar, but some are not. For example, processed "lowfat" foods are higher on the insulin index than the corresponding full fat foods. So the spread of lowfat foods could be contributing to the rise in obesity even in a period when sugar consumption itself is declining somewhat.
The expansion of the "eating window" within each day, with the corresponding shortening of the biggest chunk of time with no food consumption. (See "Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts.")
If insulin resistance tends to lead to high blood pressure, then these would be contributing factors towards high blood pressure as well.
Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
Despite including large pro-meat quotations from Gary Taubes in my post "Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?" I end up being somewhat negative about meat. Here is the somewhat nuanced view I put forward:
In other words, meat, dairy and eggs, by providing an abundance of complete proteins may help build strong cancer cells, but there is no good evidence that they make people fat.
Since I wrote those words, my own experience and that of some of my fellow experimenters in our own lives has been that we often get hungry after eating things that are between 30 and 50 on the insulin index. This is a range that many types of meat fall into. (See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.) As far as the insulin kick is concerned, it isn't as bad as eating pancakes, rice, bananas or orange juice, but it isn't a nothing either. I continue to eat meat when I go to restaurants, but I often need to eat nuts afterwards to stave off the hunger induced by the medium-high insulin index of that meat.
In any case, even when I wrote that post, my position was very different from Gary Taubes's position on mat, and since then has moved a bit further away.
Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
In "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" I am embarrassed to have the word "excellent" in this phrase:
Gary Taubes, in his excellent history of nutritional thought Good Calories, Bad Calories ...
Indeed, I am embarrassed enough that I intend to update the word "excellent" out as soon as I have a few minutes to do that update. But although Gary Taubes is overly certain about what the key aspect of Westernization is the passage I actually quote is mainly focused on the remarkable transition to Western diseases itself, which I have not seen seriously disputed:
On April 16, 1913, Albert Schweitzer arrived at Lambaréné, a small village in the interior lowlands of West Africa, to establish a missionary hospital on the banks of the Ogowe River. Attended by his wife, Hélène, who had trained as a nurse, he began treating patients the very next morning. Schweitzer estimated that he saw almost two thousand patients in the first nine months, and then averaged thirty to forty a day and three operations a week for the better part of four decades. The chief complaints, at least in the beginning, were endemic diseases and infections: malaria, sleeping sickness, leprosy, elephantiasis, tropical dysentery, and scabies.
Forty-one years after Schweitzer’s arrival, and a year and a half after he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his missionary work, Schweitzer encountered his first case of appendicitis among the African natives. Appendicitis was not the only Western disease to which the natives seemed to be resistant. “On my arrival in Gabon,” he wrote, “I was astonished to encounter no cases of cancer…. I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all, but, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that if any cases existed they must have been quite rare.” In the decades that followed, he witnessed a steady increase in cancer victims. “My observations inclined me to attribute this to the fact that the natives were living more and more after the manner of the whites.”
As Schweitzer had suggested, his experience was not uncommon for the era. In 1902, Samuel Hutton, a University of Manchester–trained physician, began treating patients at a Moravian mission in the town of Nain, on the northern coast of Labrador, or about as far from the jungles of West Africa as can be imagined, in both climate and the nature of the indigenous population. As Hutton told it, his Eskimo patients fell into two categories: There were those who lived isolated from European settlements and ate a traditional Eskimo diet. “The Eskimo is a meat eater,” he wrote, “the vegetable part of his diet is a meager one.” Then there were those Eskimos living in Nain or near other European settlers who had taken to consuming a “settler’s dietary,” consisting primarily of “tea, bread, ship’s biscuits, molasses, and salt fish or pork.” Among the former, European diseases were uncommon or remarkably rare. ...
Most of these historical observations came from colonial and missionary physicians like Schweitzer and Hutton, administering to populations prior to and coincidental with their first substantial exposure to Western foods. The new diet inevitably included carbohydrate foods that could be transported around the world without spoiling or being devoured by rodents on the way: sugar, molasses, white flour, and white rice. Then diseases of civilization, or Western diseases, would appear: obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, various forms of cancer, cavities, periodontal disease, appendicitis, peptic ulcers, diverticulitis, gallstones, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and constipation. When any diseases of civilization appeared, all of them would eventually appear. This led investigators to propose that all these diseases had a single common cause—the consumption of easily digestible, refined carbohydrates. The hypothesis was rejected in the early 1970s, when it could not be reconciled with Keys’s hypothesis that fat was the problem, an attendant implication of which was that carbohydrates were part of the solution. But was this alternative carbohydrate hypothesis rejected because compelling evidence refuted it, or for reasons considerably less scientific?
That is the only context where Gary Taubes appears in "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon"
Two Points Where I Disagree with Seth
My first disagreement with Seth over the point he is trying to make in this passage:
Is anyone under the impression that we need MORE sugar in our diets? That we would be healthier if people drank MORE high-calorie sugar water and ate MORE Oreos? Are doctors and nutritionists and policy-makers saying things like “In order to fight this obesity epidemic, all we need to do is get people to start adding cokes, cookies, candy, cake, cream-puffs, and corn syrup into their diet”? Of course not.
I really don't think people realize how bad sugar is. To me, the key test is how many people would agree with the statement "For health, reducing sugar intake is more important than reducing fat intake." If that statement was conventional wisdom, I think it would be a huge step forward in public health.
I say something similar in "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes":
... Stephan writes:
The Case Against Sugar is a journey through sugar history and science that argues the point that sugar is the principal cause of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and many other common noncommunicable diseases. This differs from the prevailing view in the research and public health communities that obesity and noncommunicable disease are multi-factorial, with refined sugar playing a role among other things like excess calorie intake, physical inactivity, cigarette smoking, alcohol and illegal drug use, and various other diet and lifestyle factors. I side with the latter view.
Here Stephan seems to be saying "Sensible people like me realize that sugar is one of several coequal causes of obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc., not the only cause." But walking down the aisles of any grocery store and comparing the number of "lowfat" offerings to the number of "no sugar added" offerings makes it clear that in the popular imagination the dangers of sugar are rated far, far below the dangers of dietary fat. So there is a lot of work to be done to get people's perception of the dangers of sugar up to the level of being "sugar is bad on a par with four or five other things" that Stephan seems to give as his own view.
My other disagreement with Seth is that he writes as if one should be controlling for overall calorie consumption when judging the harms of sugar. In my view, one of the main harms of sugar (along with other foods high on the insulin index) is that it makes people hungry a couple of hours later so they eat more total. In addition, sugar adds a heavy dose of instant gratification to many many foods, causes people to eat more total in the first place when sugar is added. So with sugar, it isn't just the calories of the sugar, it is the calories of the other things the sugar encourages you to eat—both now and later—that is the issue.
Another way to say this is that holding total calories constant statistically when looking at the effects of sugar is not appropriate if the typical eater doesn't hold calories constant when shehe eats more sugar. Here are the two hypotheses I am putting forward in relation to sugar and fat:
Two Hypotheses:
In addition to the extra calories of the sugar itself, eating sugar tends to make people eat more nonsugar calories as well.
By contrast, if one avoids all foods that are high on the insulin index, eating more fat calories tends to make people reduce nonfat calories more than one-for-one.
Don't miss these other posts on diet and health:
The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes
Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners
Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'
Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life."
On the Achilles Heel of John Locke's Second Treatise: Slavery and Land Ownership
Link to the Wikipedia page "Achilles heel"
As the Wikipedia article on "Achilles heel" currently begins, "An Achilles' heel is a weakness in spite of overall strength." John Locke's Second Treatise on Government: Of Civil Government is an amazing achievement, that unlike Achilles, remains standing and strong to this day. But its weakest chapters are those where John Locke discusses slavery and land ownership. Even there, there a points where John Locke's arguments are very strong. But there are other points where he is trying to make a case that is difficult to make.
It has been very interesting for me to wrestle with both the strong and weak points of John Locke's treatment of slavery and land ownership in a series of blog posts every other week for six months. I have disagreed with John Locke much more in these posts than in the posts on earlier chapters that you can see laid out in "John Locke's State of Nature and State of War." Here are my posts reacting to John Locke's treatment of slavery and land ownership in his Second Treatise:
Chapter IV. Of Slavery
Chapter V. Of Property
John Locke: Rivalry in Consumption Makes Private Property Unavoidable
John Locke on How Things That Are No One's Property Become Someone's Property
John Locke Off Base with His Assumption That There Was Plenty of Land at the Time of Acquisition
John Locke: Land Title is Needed to Protect Buildings and Improvements from Expropriation
John Locke Pretends Land Ownership Goes Back to the Original Peopling of the Planet
Update: Links to posts on earlier and later chapters can be found in these aggregator posts:
Posts on Chapters I-III: John Locke's State of Nature and State of War
Posts on Chapters IV-V: On the Achilles Heel of John Locke's Second Treatise: Slavery and Land Ownership
Posts on Chapters VI-VII : John Locke Against Natural Hierarchy
Posts on Chapters VIII-XI: John Locke's Argument for Limited Government
On Being a Good Guy
Etymologically, it is too bad that many of our words for being a good person go back to the offensive idea that people of higher social rank are better people than those of lower social rank. The noun "gentleman," like the adjective "noble," is an example. So let me translate Peggy Noonan's word "gentleman" to "good guy." To me, that is a powerful phrase.
Peggy Noonan's context is the all-too-frequent mistreatment of women by men. But the elements of character she points to are just as wonderful in women. I am told by the many young people I hang around with as a professor that the word "guy" has been taking on more and more of a gender-neutral sense over time. But in the quotations, you will need to translate "gentleman" and "gentlemen" into the appropriate gender-neutral terms yourself. For example, take
A gentleman is an encourager of women.
Translated to apply to women, it says that a woman, to be a "good guy," needs to be an encourager of other women, just as a man to be a "good guy," needs to be an encourager of women. That is an important message.
My favorite bit from Peggy's piece is this, that she attributes to the Urban Dictionary:
The true gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will . . . whose self control is equal to all emergencies, who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity.
Note that this is the antithesis of standing on one's social rank. In a similar vein:
The 19th-century theologian John Henry Newman —an Anglican priest who became a Catholic cardinal—said a gentleman tries not to inflict pain. He tries to remove the obstacles “which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him.” He is “tender toward the bashful, gentle toward the distant, and merciful toward the absurd. . . . He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage.”
I also like this passage:
A gentleman is good to women because he has his own dignity and sees theirs. He takes opportunities to show them respect. He is not pushy, manipulative, belittling. He stands with them not because they are weak but because they deserve friendship.
However, I know there is one count on which I don't stand up very well to this standard: I am often pushy—especially for ideas. This can sometimes be hard for those around me to deal with.
Peggy's third-to-last paragraph says something obvious and documentable:
The age of social media has worked against the ideas of decorum, dignity and self-control—the idea of being a gentleman. You can, anonymously, be your lowest, most brutish self, and the lowering spreads like a virus.
One of the places this has been documented is in Economics Job Market Rumors. On that see these three posts:
- Signalling When Everyone Knows about Last-Place Aversion: An Application to Economics Job Market Rumors
- Matthew Shapiro, Martha Bailey and Tilman Borgers on the Economics Job Market Rumors Website
- Michael Weisbach: Posters on Finance Job Rumors Need to Clean Up Their Act, Too
To be a good guy in economics, don't follow the example of the most misogynist posters on Economics Job Market rumors. There are a few other things you should do to be a good guy within economics:
- Don't routinely assume that a female coauthor didn't contribute much to a paper. (See "When Women Don’t Get Any Credit for Coauthoring with Men.")
- Be sensitive to the extra burdens and hurdles that women often face in economics. (See "How Big is the Sexism Problem in Economics?")
- Tell everyone, especially women, who might need the message more, "You can do it" when they are wondering if they can do math well. (See "There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't" and "Calculus is Hard. Women Are More Likely to Think That Means They’re Not Smart Enough for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.")
Literary Note: This post can be read in two slightly different ways:
- In the phrase "good guy," put the stress on the word "guy."
- In the phrase "good guy," put the stress on the word "good."
I intend both readings.
Broadening the Message: Take a look at "On Idealism Versus Cynicism," also sparked by a Peggy Noonan essay, which has a similar message, but on a broader them than gender relations.
Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners
Carola Binder
I was delighted to see that Carola Binder not only read Jason Fung's book The Obesity Code on my recommendation, but also wrote a nice blog post about it: "The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners."
Carola begins by praising economists as generalists, and modern economists as scholars ready to take on any question that their training has prepared them for, whether it is part of the traditional sphere of economics or not. This a view after my own heart, as you can see from my post "Defining Economics."
Carola then has a nice treatment of calories in/calories out as an accounting identity can only become a theory by adding assumptions—and can easily be converted into a pernicious theory by adding the assumption the assumption that calories out is unaffected by calories in. Let me quote at length from this section of Carola's blog post:
The Trouble with Accounting Identities (and Counting Calories)
Fung's book takes issue with the dominant "Calories In/Calories Out" paradigm for weight loss. This idea-- that to lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than you burn-- is based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed in an isolated system. Fung obviously doesn't dispute the Law, but he disputes its application to weight loss, premised on "Assumption 1: Calories In and Calories Out are independent of each other."
Fung argues that in response to a reduction in Calories In, the body will reduce Calories Out, citing a number of studies in which underfed participants started burning far fewer calories per day, becoming cold and unable to concentrate as the body expended fewer resources on heating itself and on brain functioning. ...
The First Law of Thermodynamics is also an accounting identity. It is true that if Calories In exceed Calories Out, we will gain weight, and vice versa. But it is not true that reducing Calories In leaves Calories Out unchanged. And according to Fung, Calories Out may respond so strongly to Calories In, almost one-for-one, that sustained weight loss will not occur.
Proximate and Ultimate Causes
A caloric deficit (Calories In < Calories Out) is a proximate cause of weight loss, and a caloric surplus a proximate cause of weight gain. But proximate causes are not useful for policy prescriptions. Think again about the GDP=C+I+G+NX accounting identity. This tells us that we can increase GDP by increasing consumption. Great! But how can we increase consumption? We need to know the deeper determinants of the components of GDP. Telling a patient to increase her caloric deficit to lose weight is as practical as advising a government to boost consumption to achieve higher GDP, and neither effort is likely to be very sustainable. So most of Fung's book is devoted to exploring what he claims are the ultimate causes of body weight and the policy implications that follow.
In discussing insulin as an underlying cause of weight gain and weight loss, Carola makes the analogy between the development of insulin resistance and the Phillips Curve shifting:
Persistence Creates Resistance
So how does the body's set point rise enough that a person becomes obese? Fung claims that the Calories In/Calories Out model neglects the time-dependence of obesity, noting that it is much easier for a person who has been overweight for only a short while to lose weight. If someone has been overweight a long time, it is much harder, because they have developed insulin resistance. Insulin levels normally rise and fall over the course of the day, not normally causing any problem. But persistently high levels of insulin, a hormonal imbalance, result in insulin resistance, leading to yet higher levels of insulin, and yet greater insulin resistance (and weight gain). Fung uses the cycle of antibiotic resistance as an analogy for the development of insulin resistance:
Exposure causes resistance...As we use an antibiotic more and more, organisms resistance to it are naturally selected to survive and reproduce. Evenually, these resistance organisms dominate, and the antibiotic becomes useless (p. 110).
He also uses the example of drug resistance: a cocaine user needs ever greater doses. "Drugs cause drug resistance" (p. 111). Macroeconomics provides its own metaphors. In the early conception of the Phillips Curve, it was believed that the inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation could be exploited by policymakers. Just as a doctor who wants to cure a bacterial infection may prescribe antibiotics, a policymaker who wants lower unemployment must just tolerate a little higher inflation. But the trouble with following such a policy is that as that higher inflation persists, people's expectations adapt. They come to expect higher inflation in the future, and that expectation is self-fulfilling, so it takes yet higher inflation to keep unemployment at or below its "set point."
Rats and Mice: One other thing that Carola mentions along the way is Jason Fung's distrust of the applicability of animal studies for key obesity issues:
At the beginning of the book, Fung announces his refusal to even consider animal studies. This somewhat surprises me, as I thought that finding a result consistently across species could strengthen our conclusions, and mechanisms are likely to be similar, but he seems to view animal studies as totally uninformative for humans. If that is true, then why do we use animals in medical research at all?
I had forgotten that Jason Fung took that position. But in "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes," I wrote:
I am inclined to agree with Stephan that rodent data do not support the idea that sugar is more harmful than fat (though it does seem to support the idea that fat plus sugar is worse than fat alone). But I am struck by the possibility that rodents might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans are. This may even allow them to eat sugar with less harm than humans. Am I wrong in thinking that for many, many generations rodents outside laboratories have tended to eat highcarb diets? The "many, many generations" is important. Even if rodents had only been eating highcarb diets for the same number of years as humans, the larger number of generations per century would have allowed rodents that hang around humans to be naturally selected to tolerate highcarb diets more than long-generationed humans.
Every discipline tends to develop conventions that the best research that is feasible for the typical researcher should be treated with respect. But if the best experimental research that is feasible is studies on rodents that might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans and small-sample-size human studies, it shouldn't make it any more persuasive to those of us who are not acculturated diet scientists for them to say "This is the state of the art."
Advocacy of Fasting as Jason Fung's Key Contribution: In her last two paragraphs, Carola says on the one hand "most of [Jason Fung's] advice is unlikely to be controversial" and then distances herself from the centerpiece of Jason Fung's advice: fasting, in the sense of going for periods time without any food. The reduction in obesity (and associated ills) to be had from eating a lowcarb diet are small compared to the reduction in obesity that is possible from scheduling in substantial chunks of time with no food.
A lowcarb diet does have some direct benefits, but the most important thing to know is that fasting is very hard when one is eating a lot of carbs when one does eat. More precisely, eating foods high on the insulin index when one does eat makes fasting very hard. (See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid" on what foods are high and what foods are low on the insulin index.) Conversely keeping one's insulin levels relatively low when one does eat makes the adjustment to an even lower insulin level while fasting much smoother.
Many pages in The Obesity Code and in Jason Fung's other book The Complete Guide to Fasting are devoted to arguing that fasting is not harmful and specifying the exceptions: such as that pregnant women and children should be wary of fasting. (Also, I would add that women who want to get pregnant should not fast. It is likely that the body takes no food as a signal it is not a good time to head toward having a baby.) There is not much scientific dispute over the claim that fasting will lead to weight loss. And there is an increasing amount of evidence that even modest increases in fasting can help. See "Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts."
The key dispute is over whether fasting is (a) hard and (b) dangerous. It is on these grounds that Jason Fung's contentions are the most important. Given individual differences, and the current state of knowledge, individual experimentation is important in helping to figure out the answer to whether fasting is hard. My claim is that fasting for up to 20 hours might not be all that hard for you if you have already starting eating lowcarb. For those who have no particular reason to think that fasting would be dangerous for them, widespread experience with fasting for religious reasons and the many situations our ancestors faced that meant they simply didn't have food for a 20 hour stretch of time suggests that fasting that length of time is not likely to be all that dangerous.
The bottom line is that Jason Fung minus the idea of fasting would not be the Jason Fung who is my hero. What makes Jason Fung important is his trenchant advocacy of fasting as a way to fight obesity and its accompanying ills.
Technical Note on Snacking: Carola speaks of her love of grazing. I don't think of snacking per se as bad. It is length of the eating window within a day that matters. If the total length of the eating window is kept to a reasonably short time—say ten or twelve hours if one is just trying to keep a steady weight—snacking as often as desired on things with a low insulin index during the eating window is fine in my book. A warning though: much of what is called "snack food" is quite high on the insulin index and would indeed be a problem. But my snack of choice, a mix of sugar-free roasted almonds and cashews, is no problem at all.
Don't miss these other posts on fighting obesity:
- Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts
- Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid
- Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
- Sugar as a Slow Poison
- How Sugar Makes People Hangry
- The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes
- The Keto Food Pyramid
- Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out
- Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
- Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
- Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression
- Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food
- Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
- Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
- Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So
- How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy
- Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
- Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
- Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
- Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities
- On Fighting Obesity
- Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
- Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'
Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life."
David Holland on the Mormon Church During the February 3, 2008–January 2, 2018 Monson Administration →
Link to the Wikipedia article on Thomas S. Monson
Thomas S. Monson, the President of the Mormon Church, died on January 2, 2018. This occasions a change in the leadership in the Mormon Church. The link on the title to this post is to a very interesting interview about Thomas Monson's administration and what comes next by Harvard Divinity School's Michael Naughton of David Holland, a Mormon who is Harvard Divinity School John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History.
When the President of the Mormon Church dies, the longest serving apostle becomes the next president. The next President will therefore be Russell M. Nelson. This link has a nice infographic showing seniority and ages for apostles for those interested in who is most likely to serve as President of the Mormon Church after Russell M. Nelson.
Don't miss these related posts on Mormonism!
- The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists
- How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America
- Will Women Ever Get the Mormon Priesthood?
- The Mormon Church Decides to Treat Gay Marriage as Rebellion on a Par with Polygamy
- Flexible Dogmatism: The Mormon Position on Infallibility
- Inside Mormonism: The Home Teachers Come Over
- The Mormon View of Jesus
Cousin Causality
It is often said, rightly, that "Correlation is not causation." But one can say even more: "Correlation between A and B with A coming earlier in time than B is not causation." Let's say A and B are correlated, and someone is interested in knowing if A causes B. The most common reasons for A being correlated with B are
A causes B
B causes A
C causes A and C causes B.
Given that someone is interested in whether or not A causes B, the second possibility, B causes A is called "reverse causality." Unfortunately, the third possibility does not have a snappy name that I am aware of. Over my entire teaching career I have ended up calling it "A third thing causes both ___ and ____." Unless someone knows a better name, let me propose calling the third possibility "cousin causality" of A and B.
The analogy is that for any pair of cousins, a grandparent helped cause both of those two cousins. The two cousins may never have interacted directly at all, and could have been adopted at birth by different families on opposite coasts, but they will share traits in common.
Vaping. Let me apply the old, but newly rechristened concept of cousin causality to article and associated editorial linked above. The article is "Trajectories of E-Cigarette and Conventional Cigarette Use Among Youth by Krysten W. Bold, Grace Kong, Deepa R. Camenga, Patricia Simon, Dana A. Cavallo, Meghan E. Morean and Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin." The "Conclusions" section of the abstract begins impressively:
E-cigarette use was associated with future cigarette use across 3 longitudinal waves, yet cigarette use was not associated with future e-cigarette use.
This is useful information. In this case it makes it harder to maintain a story of reverse causality. But it does nothing to rule out cousin causality. What if some kids
(a) think things like smoking are a cool symbol of rebellion,
(b) at a young enough age, both vaping and smoking count as "things like smoking," but
(c) at an older age, vaping no longer counts because it is the sort of thing that youngsters do,
(d) except for the growing realization that vaping is babyish just discussed, between vaping and smoking there is some tendency for kids to keep doing the one they started doing?
In this story, if you take away vaping, the kids who think smoking and the like are a cool symbol of rebellion will still take up smoking. The vaping didn't cause smoking, the desire to be cool caused both vaping and smoking. And we can explain the time sequence by saying that at older ages the desire to be cool tends to cause smoking relatively more compared to vaping.
The authors interpret their results as if there were no chance of cousin causality. Without much sign of caution, the abstract assumes causality from vaping to smoking:
Future research needs to examine mechanisms through which e-cigarette use leads to cigarette use.
In other words, "Because vaping allows one to predict later smoking, we now know that vaping causes smoking, it is just a matter of how vaping causes smoking." Just in case there is any doubt that the authors are claiming that vaping causes smoking, the next line is:
E-cigarette regulation and prevention programs may help prevent future use of cigarettes among youth.
At least this has the word "may" in it, but in combination with the previous sentence, it is a strong claim that vaping causes smoking.
The editorial by Jonathan Klein in the same issue of Pediatrics also has no qualms about asserting that this evidence points to vaping causing smoking:
"With this study, we add longitudinal, causal evidence that the transition from e-cigarettes to combustible products, at least for adolescents, is a one-way street,” wrote Jonathan Klein, MD, from the University of Illinois Pediatrics Department in Chicago, in an accompanying editorial.
If the word "causal" were dropped, the phrase "one-way street" might be a clever way to imply causality while having deniability that one had ever claimed causality:
With this study, we add longitudinal evidence that the transition from e-cigarettes to combustible products, at least for adolescents, is a one-way street
But with the word "causal" the claim that vaping causes smoking is overt.
Financial Education. There are many other applications where the possibility of cousin causality needs to be considered. For example, suppose we want to know to what extent a given dose of financial education causes people to make better financial decisions. Just looking at how well financial education predicts good financial decisions won't do the trick, because being smart through processes prior to the financial education can both lead someone to get financial education and make someone better at making financial decisions. Take away the financial education, and the intelligence that preceded the financial education will still lead to better financial decisions.
Holding the social environment fixed, I find it very difficult to think of anything that would make one person more likely to get financial education than another in the cross-section that doesn't also have a direct effect in improving financial decisions. For example, think about characteristics of parents. The sort of parent who would encourage a kid to get financial education would also be likely to transmit financial knowledge and savvy at home. Personally, I find it easy to believe that this knowledge and savvy transmitted at home might be much more powerful in its effects on financial decisions than a few semesters of formal financial education.
To get causality of financial education requires something like a randomized trial or the introduction of an additional financial education requirement in a particular state. And randomized trials are difficult because the dosage of financial education that would cause a detectable different in financial decision-making might be quite expensive.
Long-Term Bond Prices. I have been focusing on cousin causality, but there are cases where A coming before B in some sense can't even rule out reverse causality: B causing A. The standard theory of the term-structure of interest rates says that if the Fed is now expected to raise future short-term interest rates faster than was expected before, long-term bond prices will be driven down—which is equivalent to long-term interest rates going up. So in some sense the level of future short-term rates is causing the current level of long-term rates.
Of course, this isn't quite right. There is something already out there, now, that is likely to cause future short-term rates to be higher than they otherwise would be and is causing current long-term rates to be higher through people's thoughts now about future short-term rates. Seen that way, current long-term interest rates being able to predict future short-term rates is an example of cousin causality. Whatever is driving the Fed's plans is driving both future short-term rates and—through thoughts about future short-term rates—current long-term rates. In any case, the fact that the movement in long-term rates comes before the movement in short-term rates doesn't mean that the movement in long-term rates now caused the movement in short-term rates later.
Conclusion. I want to end with a challenge. Now that you know the handy term "cousin causality," look for examples of where this might be going on—especially where it might mean that someone's claim of causality is less of an open-and-shut case than they think. Examples won't be hard to find. For both people and nations, good things tend to cluster with good things and bad things tend to cluster with bad things. But in my view, most of the correlations come from cousin causality. It isn't so easy to single out the underlying causes that are the "grandparents" in the analogy behind the naming of cousin causality.
The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes
Although its practical advice is vastly inferior to Jason Fung's books The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting, I liked Gary Taubes's book The Case Against Sugar. As a result, more than one person has pointed me to Stephan Guyenet's blog post critical of The Case Against Sugar. Here, let me evaluate Stephan's arguments.
First, I should say that I start out expecting less from journalists like Gary Taubes than the standard that Stephan Guyenet wants to judge them by. Stephan mentions repeatedly the "Igon Value Problem," which refers to a term "coined by Steven Pinker in a review of Malcolm Gladwell's book What the Dog Saw." Malcolm Gladwell did not know what an eigenvalue was, and so misheard it as an "Igon value." Similarly, Gary Taubes is not himself a scientist and so does not fully understand everything he is talking about. But he does give us a tour through the history of thought about nutrition and what he felt he learned by talking to many scientists, with an emphasis on what the more contrarian scientists said. This is a useful service.
The second thing that needs to be said about The Case Against Sugar is that other than a few new ideas, it is mainly a dumbed-down version of Gary Taubes's book Why We Get Fat, which in turn is a dumbed-down version of Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Despite that, I found it well worth my time to read all three books. Given the importance of the topic, I think it was appropriate for Gary Taubes to write a dumbed-down version of his earlier books, even if that leads to some oversimplification relative to what Gary wrote in Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Third, whatever the flaws in Gary Taubes's books, he is ultimately convincing on two points:
Sugar is very, very bad. I will say more below on why convincing people of that is an important accomplishment.
What the nutrition establishment is telling us needs to be closely examined and cross-checked by scientists outside the nutrition establishment. It is very unwise to simply trust the nutrition establishment.
On the second point, what Stephan Guyenet says about nutrition scientists is not very reassuring. Gary Taubes emphasizes that many of the scientists who tried to exonerate sugar were in the pay of the sugar industry. Stephan does not inspire confidence in the interpretations made by nutrition scientists with his response that a key scientist who attacked sugar was in the pay of the egg, edible oil, and dairy industry. Stephan does say
... in 2017, research institutions and reputable scientific journals have policies in place for disclosing and limiting conflicts of interest. These policies aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than what we had two decades ago.
But even if the conflict-of-interest is currently completely solved (which I doubt) there is hysteresis (history dependence) in science. Points of view that became dominant in the industry-funding free-for-all period still affect where the science is coming from today.
Let me turn to a more point-by-point discussion of Stephan's post.
A. In his second paragraph Stephan writes:
The Case Against Sugar is a journey through sugar history and science that argues the point that sugar is the principal cause of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and many other common noncommunicable diseases. This differs from the prevailing view in the research and public health communities that obesity and noncommunicable disease are multi-factorial, with refined sugar playing a role among other things like excess calorie intake, physical inactivity, cigarette smoking, alcohol and illegal drug use, and various other diet and lifestyle factors. I side with the latter view.
Here Stephan seems to be saying "Sensible people like me realize that sugar is one of several coequal causes of obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc., not the only cause." But walking down the aisles of any grocery store and comparing the number of "lowfat" offerings to the number of "no sugar added" offerings makes it clear that in the popular imagination the dangers of sugar are rated far, far below the dangers of dietary fat. So there is a lot of work to be done to get people's perception of the dangers of sugar up to the level of being "sugar is bad on a par with four or five other things" that Stephan seems to give as his own view. If Gary overstates the harm from sugar (and I will argue Gary overstates the harm from sugar less than Stephan thinks) it may show Gary's inferiority to real scientists (a key part of Stephan's message), but it does not make Gary a danger to public health; given the public's underestimation of the dangers of sugar, Gary's overstatement is a countervailing error.
B. A little further down, this passage is an important part of Stephan's argument:
... sugar intake is higher today in the US than it was in the 1970s, and while obesity has increased three-fold, coronary heart disease mortality has declined by over 60 percent (4, 5, 6). Taubes neglects to inform the reader that sugar intake has been declining since 1999 in the US, a period over which obesity and diabetes rates have increased substantially (7, 8, 9).
Here, Gary has made himself a real-life straw man by pushing too hard the idea that sugar is the one and only problem. Here I won't defend Gary; let me defend instead my own view—which draws on the arguments in Gary's books, but interprets them by my own lights. In my view, which is very much in the spirit of what Gary is saying but I hope is more subtle, the two main causes of the rise in obesity are:
The shift toward consumption of foods that are high on the insulin index. (See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.") Many of these are high in sugar, but some are not. For example, processed "lowfat" foods are higher on the insulin index than the corresponding full fat foods. So the spread of lowfat foods could be contributing to the rise in obesity even in a period when sugar consumption itself is declining somewhat.
The expansion of the "eating window" within each day, with the corresponding shortening of the biggest chunk of time with no food consumption. (See "Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts.")
Unfortunately, good data on the timing of food consumption for a representative sample is not available, but having lived through the 1970s and all the decades after (I was born in 1960), it is my sense that attitudes have become much more favorable to snacking than they were when I was young. So I suspect that the average daily eating window has, in fact lengthened since the 1970s.
Looking over the last 120 years instead of just the last 45, there is little question that consumption of foods high on the insulin index (most of which have their insulin index raised by their sugar content) has gone up in a big way since the late 19th century.
C. Stephan's next paragraph is:
Taubes argues that sugar is the only factor that reliably shows up when a culture develops Western noncommunicable diseases, supporting the point with examples of cultures that adopted sugar-rich diets and became ill. Yet he makes no effort to look for a counterexample that could refute his argument: a traditionally-living culture that has a high intake of sugar and does not suffer from Western noncommunicable diseases. If such a culture can be found, this piece of evidence is sufficient to reject Taubes’s argument that sugar reliably associates with the onset of these diseases in a population. Let’s do Taubes’s research for him. A well-studied Tanzanian hunter-gatherer tribe called the Hadza gets 15 percent of its average year-round calorie intake from honey, plus fruit sugar on top of it. This approximates US sugar intake, yet the Hadza do not exhibit obesity, cardiovascular disease, or any of the other disorders Taubes attributes to sugar (10, 11). In fact, many hunter-gatherer groups relied heavily on honey historically, including the Mbuti of the Congo whose diet was up to 80 percent honey during the rainy season (10). Yet they do not exhibit obesity or insulin resistance (12).
What are I thought were some of Gary's best arguments were his arguments about the likely role of sugar and flour in bringing to indigenous populations what in an age before political correctness were called the "Diseases of Civilization." These discussions about the transition to the "Diseases of Civilization" or "Western Diseases" are some of the best parts of Gary's books. Stephan does not discuss all of the places where Gary's historical argument based on the transition from indigenous diets to Western diets looks good, and I cannot do it justice here.
Gary argues that other than Western diets adding sugar and flour, every other aspect of Western diets was duplicated by at least some indigenous diet, so sugar and flour must be the culprit. This is a strong argument. However, I would add in the possibility that people in almost every indigenous population had substantial chunks of time when they had no food consumption. Whether their fasts were involuntary or not, they probably fasted reasonably frequently. So in my view, the key aspects of Western diets that brought Western Diseases were sugar, flour and a reduction in periods of time with no food consumption.
The protective effects of fasting could be crucial for explaining the lack of Western diseases among the Hadza and the Mbuti that Stephan points to as evidence against the evils of sugar. Following Jason Fung's logic that I lay out in "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon," the periods when the Hadza and Mbuti ate a lot of sugar would have been high-insulin periods, but those high-insulin periods would have been counteracted by the low-insulin periods of low or zero food consumption. I wouldn't recommend to anyone an alternation between high sugar consumption and fasting—it would be quite painful because sugar consumption when you do eat makes fasting a lot harder (or so I believe based on my own experience and hope to demonstrate for other people someday if no one else has)—but the fasting component might be sufficient to avoid the worst of the Western Diseases.
D. Next, after invoking the "Igon Value Problem," to remind his readers of the greater merit of scientists as compared to journalists, Stephan writes:
Taubes repeatedly asserts that researchers, physicians, and nutritionists simply assume that obesity causes diabetes. In fact, there is abundant and compelling evidence supporting this “assumption”, and such evidence is only a few keystrokes away on Google Scholar (13, 14, 15, 16). Yet it receives no mention in the book. Instead, the reader is gravely informed that today’s scientists, physicians, and nutritionists simply inherited the idea from the previous generation of scientists, who themselves essentially plucked it out of thin air. This is followed by Taubes’s alternative viewpoint, which seems downright reasonable by comparison despite the weak evidence offered to support it.
If you actually read the abstracts of the four papers that Stephan flags, and assume that there isn't something brilliant in the papers that the authors didn't bother to put in the abstracts, they don't contradict the idea that both obesity and diabetes are caused (probabilistically) by chronic high insulin levels rather than diabetes being caused by obesity per se. This distinction matters for the reason I give in my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon":
There is an interesting theoretical case in which chronically high insulin levels would be de-linked from obesity. Suppose the fat cells of someone caught in a carb rebound cycle became resistant to insulin, but his or her muscle cells retained their normal sensitivity to insulin. Because the fat cells would not respond much to the insulin signal telling them to take in glucose from the bloodstream and convert it into triglycerides and then fat, he or she would not gain much weight. But to keep blood glucose levels in line, insulin levels would have to go up even further to get the job done just from the muscle cell response to insulin. If high insulin levels cause most of the chronic diseases we associate with obesity, then while still normal in weight, he or she would be at risk for all of these chronic diseases. This is someone others might envy for being able to eat anything without gaining weight—right up until he or she died of a heart attack.
The abstracts emphasize two results:
Lifestyle changes that reduce obesity in experimental subjects also tend to reduce symptoms of diabetes.
Diabetes is correlated with obesity.
Both of these results are consistent with the idea that it is chronically high levels of insulin that tend to cause both obesity and diabetes, rather than obesity per se causing diabetes. There is a third result mentioned:
Metformin, which reduces the liver's production of blood sugar, reduces diabetes. Metformin has relatively little effect on weight.
Although quite indirectly, if anything this supports the idea that sugar tends to cause diabetes.
E. Gary Taubes is at his most confused when discussing calories in/calories out. This is one of the first things I had to straighten out theoretically in my own mind after readings Gary's books. That effort is reflected in the title of my early foray into a Twitter discussion on diet: "How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy." In my view, two key channels through which high insulin makes people fat are
making people hungry so they want to eat more and
making people feel sluggish so they want to do less activity.
Keep that in mind as you read the following passage from Stephan:
Taubes upbraids the research community for its belief that body fatness is determined by calorie intake, rather than the impact of foods on insulin. He supports the latter proposition with semi-anecdotal observations from Africa suggesting that a group of people eating a high-sugar diet supplying “as little as sixteen hundred calories per day” were sometimes obese and diabetic.
A person who actually wants to get to the bottom of this question should conduct their investigation in a very different manner. The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness. This is true across a wide range of carbohydrate-to-fat ratios and sugar intakes, and a correspondingly wide range of insulin levels (17).
What makes Taubes’s oversight so extraordinary is that he was involved in funding one of these metabolic ward studies, which compared two diets that differed more than tenfold in sugar content. The results showed that a 25 percent sugar, high-carbohydrate diet caused slightly more body fat loss than a 2 percent sugar, very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet of equal calories (18). Despite these clear and consistent findings, Taubes continues to insist that calorie intake is not an important determinant of body fatness, and he offers the reader questionable evidence in support of this while omitting high-quality evidence to the contrary. All while exuding righteous indignation about the scientific community’s misguided beliefs.
In a metabolic ward, the number of calories consumed is so tightly controlled that the first channel can't operate and the range of possible activity is probably less than normal, reducing the magnitude of the second effect. Unless a metabolic ward study is exceptionally high-powered, it may then be unable to detect the remaining effects on activity levels plus the reduction in resting metabolism that high insulin levels might lead to.
On the low power of metabolic ward studies to identify effects, this quotation from the second flagged study is revealing:
Seventeen overweight or obese men were admitted to metabolic wards
The abstract of the first flagged study doesn't mention sample size at all, and the rest of the paper is still behind a paywall. (If funded by the government, I think it has to come out from behind its paywall a year or so after publication, which is in a couple of months.)
Gary Taubes' invocation of folks in Africa who sometimes become obese or diabetic on a diet of 1600 calories with a lot of sugar is only a research topic. I wouldn't dismiss the possibility too quickly, but it needs verification or disproof, perhaps with a study putting people on a 1600 calorie high-sugar diet for a longer period of time. If I were on a human subjects review panel, I don't know that I would approve such a study. If I am right about that, it speaks to people's beliefs (correct or not) that sugar is likely to be harmful.
F. After scolding Gary for not recognizing the great interest diet scientists have had in hormones, including insulin, Stephan writes this about insulin and sugar:
In the final chapters of The Case Against Sugar, Taubes argues that insulin resistance is the primary cause of common noncommunicable diseases like coronary heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and gout, and that sugar is the primary cause of insulin resistance (he goes out of his way to emphasize that dietary fat, calorie intake, and physical activity are irrelevant). The former proposition can be reasonably argued, while the latter is a case of Taubes cramming a square peg into a round hole. Taubes leans heavily on the animal literature, correctly stating that high intakes of refined sugar sometimes cause insulin resistance in rodent models. But he omits two inconvenient facts: First, sugar is not very fattening in rodents, particularly relative to added fats like lard; and second, added fats also tend to cause more severe insulin resistance than sugar (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24).
The combination of added fat and sugar is even more harmful than fat alone, and the most fattening and insulin-resistance-inducing diet of all is to give rodents free access to a variety of highly palatable human foods (25, 26). Sugar alone cannot remotely explain the effects of palatable human food on body fatness and health in rodents– or in humans– although it does contribute.
Let me emphasize that Stephan thinks the idea "that insulin resistance is the primary cause of common noncommunicable diseases like coronary heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and gout ... can be reasonably argued." What Stephan questions is the role of sugar in causing insulin resistance.
I am inclined to agree with Stephan that rodent data do not support the idea that sugar is more harmful than fat (though it does seem to support the idea that fat plus sugar is worse than fat alone). But I am struck by the possibility that rodents might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans are. This may even allow them to eat sugar with less harm than humans. Am I wrong in thinking that for many, many generations rodents outside laboratories have tended to eat highcarb diets? The "many, many generations" is important. Even if rodents had only been eating highcarb diets for the same number of years as humans, the larger number of generations per century would have allowed rodents that hang around humans to be naturally selected to tolerate highcarb diets more than long-generationed humans.
Every discipline tends to develop conventions that the best research that is feasible for the typical researcher should be treated with respect. But if the best experimental research that is feasible is studies on rodents that might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans and small-sample-size human studies, it shouldn't make it any more persuasive to those of us who are not acculturated diet scientists for them to say "This is the state of the art."
G. Stephan's next paragraph is consistent with my hypothesis that involuntary fasting protected the Hadza from Western Diseases despite their high sugar consumption:
The mechanism Taubes proposes for how sugar causes insulin resistance is that the fructose component, making up 50 percent of table sugar, overloads the liver, rendering it less sensitive to the insulin signal, and this eventually causes whole-body insulin resistance. Taubes is correct about the impact of fructose on the liver, although again he leaves out critical information: realistic doses of fructose primarily overload the liver if a person is overconsuming calories and liver energy stores are already full (25). This is probably why hunter-gatherer groups such as the Hadza can eat as much sugar as Americans and not develop health problems (26, 27). These facts do not fit Taubes’s narrative that calories are irrelevant, and they are not shared with the reader.
Of course, Stephan is emphasizing the number of calories consumed. But I think of the number of calories consumed as highly endogenous. Outside of metabolic wards—and a few people with freakishly strong self-control applied to a misguided task—the number of calories people consume (relative to how big they are) is mostly determined
by how active they are—or more generally, by how many calories they burn
by what types of food they eat
by when they eat.
Because eating sugar or other high-insulin-index foods makes people feel hungry a couple of hours later, sugar helps induce the food overconsumption that in combination with the fructose from the sugar itself can overload the liver.
H. One of my contentions has been that for a high fraction of people, chronically high insulin levels lead to obesity. Chronically high insulin levels also lead at a somewhat later stage to insulin resistance, which leads the body to amp up its insulin production. Although exercise is, in general, disappointing to people hoping it will lead to weight loss (see the article I linked to on my blog with the retitling "Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies"), it is effective in averting or reducing the great danger of insulin resistance—and through averting insulin resistance averting more severe weight gain. Gary goes overboard in talking down the benefits of exercise. Leaving aside what he says here about calories (where I would definitely recast things) on exercise, I think Stephan is more on target than Gary when he writes:
Here are two other inconvenient facts that Taubes omits from his finely crafted narrative: Both sedentary behavior and overeating calories cause pronounced insulin resistance, and conversely, physical activity and eating fewer calories powerfully combat insulin resistance (28, 29, 30, 31). Physical activity almost instantaneously increases the insulin sensitivity of muscle tissue, which is a major determinant of whole-body insulin sensitivity. Again, abundant evidence of this is only a few keystrokes away on Google Scholar, yet Taubes dismisses the idea out of hand.
I. After catching Gary in a serious misquotation, Stephan begins to wind down with this positive note:
In The Case Against Sugar, Taubes finally acknowledges the importance of food reward in eating behavior and obesity. As a reminder, food reward is the seductiveness of certain foods (like ice cream and chips) that motivates us to eat them, and as common sense suggests, it’s an important influence on what and how much we eat. Previously on his blog, Taubes argued at length that food reward has nothing to do with obesity, and (remarkably) that the brain itself is unimportant (33). In The Case Against Sugar, he argues that the seductiveness of sugar is precisely why we eat it, ultimately leading to obesity. He even briefly discusses dopamine, the chemical mediator of reward, acknowledging both the importance of food reward and the brain generally in food intake and obesity. This is progress.
When people in the food industry want to redesign food to make it more attractive to us, one of the first things they usually do is to add sugar. But unlike Stephan, I don't think it is just about the immediate rewards of eating things with sugar in them. Those immediate rewards are there, and they matter. But in addition, sugar in any serious quantity causes an insulin spike that pushes blood sugar down below its normal range a little while later, leading to hunger.
Conclusion. I learned a lot from reading Gary Taubes's books. But I am also grateful to Gary Taubes as providing part of the trail that led me to Jason Fung's The Obesity Code. Jason Fung's The Obesity Code is one of the five books I featured in "Five Books That Have Changed My Life." Where I think Gary Taubes's work has value added even given the existence of Jason Fung's work is in providing a much more detailed history of nutritional thought. I would love to read a comparably detailed history of nutritional thought by another author with a different point of view that was as engaging as Gary Taubes's books, but I don't know of any.
Let me end by repeating the two things Gary Taubes convinced me of:
Sugar is very, very bad.
What the nutrition establishment is telling us needs to be closely examined and cross-checked by scientists outside the nutrition establishment.
Link to the Facebook discussion of this post
Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:
I. The Basics
Jason Fung's Single Best Weight Loss Tip: Don't Eat All the Time
What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet
David Ludwig: It Takes Time to Adapt to a Lowcarb, Highfat Diet
II. Sugar as a Slow Poison
Best Health Guide: 10 Surprising Changes When You Quit Sugar
Heidi Turner, Michael Schwartz and Kristen Domonell on How Bad Sugar Is
Michael Lowe and Heidi Mitchell: Is Getting ‘Hangry’ Actually a Thing?
III. Anti-Cancer Eating
How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed
Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
IV. Eating Tips
Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index
Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
Which Nonsugar Sweeteners are OK? An Insulin-Index Perspective
V. Calories In/Calories Out
VI. Other Health Issues
VII. Wonkish
Framingham State Food Study: Lowcarb Diets Make Us Burn More Calories
Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes
Don't Tar Fasting by those of Normal or High Weight with the Brush of Anorexia
Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners
After Gastric Bypass Surgery, Insulin Goes Down Before Weight Loss has Time to Happen
A Low-Glycemic-Index Vegan Diet as a Moderately-Low-Insulin-Index Diet
Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
Layne Norton Discusses the Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes Debate (a Debate on Joe Rogan’s Podcast)
VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise
Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt
Eggs May Be a Type of Food You Should Eat Sparingly, But Don't Blame Cholesterol Yet
Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
IX. Gary Taubes
X. Twitter Discussions
Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets
Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'
Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health
See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography. I defend the ability of economists like me to make a contribution to understanding diet and health in “On the Epistemology of Diet and Health: Miles Refuses to `Stay in His Lane’.”
John Locke and the Share of Land
Sections 36-51 of John Locke's 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (the last half of Chapter V "Of Property") has one main theme: land by itself, without labor, produces relatively little. (You can see the text of those sections at the end of this post.) John Locke is at pains to minimize the importance of land by itself because the doubtful basis of the original ownership of land to which current legal ownership harks back is one of the weakest points of his effort to derive ownership of whatever is owned from people's ownership of themselves.
In the beginning of Chapter V, John Locke's case for a labor theory of property relies on land contributing relatively little to production relative to labor. The last half of Chapter V, though ostensibly repeating that message, also functions as an argument that land by itself is relatively unimportant, so that even if John Locke's labor theory of property has holes in it, the gravity of that flaw in his theory is not that great.
There is one way in which John Locke is just wrong. As David Ricardo later pointed out, in crowded countries that have relatively low agricultural yields, land rents go up. This is of considerable practical relevance in the world today. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization reports:
- "Agriculture merely contributes 3 percent to global GDP
- This is one third of the contribution a few decades ago
- However, more than 25 percent of GDP is derived from agriculture in many least developed countries"
However, in countries with high-yielding advanced agriculture, John Locke is not too far off in the world today. Economists calculate "land's share of GDP" by looking at rents to land divided by GDP. The idea is that the amount people pay to rent land is a good guide to how valuable that land is in production.
However, total land rents as a share of GDP are a big overstatement of the implicit contribution of raw land to GDP. First, agricultural land is often improved by being cleared of trees and weeds, and sometimes by the digging of irrigation ditches.
Second, even leaving aside the value of the buildings directly on top, non-agricultural land is usually valuable because of its proximity to other buildings on land nearby and the people who are often in those buildings on land nearby. For many people, the most attractive thing in relation to residential land is to be like the Emperor of Japan: having a big open estate in the middle of a highly populated, commercially impressive city like Tokyo. To give an American example that is not literally about land, I have read that (at least in normal times) some of the most desirable offices in the country are tiny offices that happen to be close to the Oval Office in the White House. The realtor's motto of "Location, location, location" is not really about location itself but about relative location: what other buildings are you near to. The closest thing to an exception is beach property, but even beach property far from any populated area is of modest expense compared to otherwise unremarkable pieces of land in the heart of giant cities.
To estimate raw land's share of GDP, I will overestimate by leaving in the productive value of improvements, but I will leave out the attraction of "location, location, location" relative to buildings on nearby land by applying the average rent of agricultural land to all the land in the Continental US plus Hawaii. In equilibrium, absent government subsidies or other government-induced distortion, most agriculture takes place on land that doesn't have a big urban location premium. So agricultural rents are a reasonable way to get closer to the value of land absent an urban location premium. One can get an upper bound on agricultural rents as a fraction of GDP by looking at the total agricultural share of GDP, which includes contribution of labor and capital as well. The graphs at the top give some idea there.
With all the ag econ departments in existence, I thought it would be easier to google up nice graphs of agricultural rent as a fraction of GDP, but it wasn't so easy. Here is where I got my rent per acre figures:
I will use this figure even for urban land in order to strip out the "location, location, location" part of urban land rents. I will use the term "agriculture-equivalent rent" for this imputation.
Leaving out Alaska, where most of the land is unsuitable for agriculture (and so would have a very cheap rent for agricultural purposes), the US has about 1.9 billion acres total, based on this source. Let me approximate by treating the agriculture-equivalent rent in Alaska as zero and the agriculture-equivalent rent for the rest of the US as $140 an acre, based on the graph just above. Multiplying 1.9 billion acres by a rent of $140 per acre implies total agriculture-equivalent rent of $266 billion per year. Rounding down, nominal US GDP in 2012 was $16 trillion (see FRED), so agriculture-equivalent rent is about 1.7% of GDP. That is, indeed, a relatively small fraction of the value of GDP.
Coda A. Given that the Second Treatise was published in 1689, John Locke deals well with the confusing fact that, while the rents of agricultural land are a small fraction of GDP, the purchase prices of agricultural land would be substantial relative to GDP. This is because ownership of a piece of land entitles one to the rents on that land for many years. John Locke didn't have the tools to talk clearly about the capitalized value of land relative to rents, but I interpret his discussion of the importance of money for land values as a gesture toward the capitalization of rents. He talks about the durability of money, but the real point is the durability of the land itself. (See below for all of this.)
According to William Larson of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, all US land was worth $23 trillion in current prices in 2009, which was 23/14.5 or about 159% of GDP in 2009. William Larson also writes that "Agricultural land is 47% of the total land area of the U.S., while consisting of 8% of its total value." That implies that agricultural land was worth about 13% of one year's worth of GDP in 2009. The value as a fraction of GDP will have fluctuated since then, but it is probably somewhere around there now.
Coda B. While the rents from raw land can be taxed away without distortion in Henry George fashion, it is not at all clear that the "location, location, location" portion of the urban land rent can be taxed without distortion, since it might discourage developers from trying to put together useful urban combinations. Note that this "location, location, location" portion of the rent is still distinct from the rent of the building on top of the land. Developers try to internalize the value of having buildings on land nearby by also owning the land nearby and building on it or otherwise developing it in ways they hope are appealing. To the extent they create some of the "location, location, location" value by making a piece of land an attractive location through building nearby, they should be rewarded for this activity. Taxing away the "location, location, location" value takes away that reward.
Coda C. One of the things much scarcer and more expensive than land to be owned within an existing political system is land that is politically virgin land that would allow one to do a new political experiment without going through the cost of a rebellion. John Locke would be sympathetic to the desire for politically virgin land. Looking toward the future, there is the possibility that water, rock and metal from asteroids will enable people to construct space stations that can serve as politically virgin "land." If so, we may see more political experiments in the future.
Don't miss other John Locke posts. Links at "John Locke's State of Nature and State of War."
In particular, here are other John Locke posts about land and land ownership:
- On John Locke's Labor Theory of Property
- John Locke: Property in the State of Nature
- Private Property Reduces Decision-Making Costs
- John Locke on How Things That Are No One's Property Become Someone's Property
- John Locke on Diminishing Marginal Utility as a Limit to Legitimately Claiming Works of Nature as Property
- John Locke's Song of Praise for Work
- John Locke Off Base with His Assumption That There Was Plenty of Land at the Time of Acquisition
- John Locke: Land Title is Needed to Protect Buildings and Improvements from Expropriation
- John Locke Pretends Land Ownership Goes Back to the Original Peopling of the Planet
§. 36. The measure of property nature has well set by the extent of men’s labour and the conveniences of life; no man’s labour could subdue, or appropriate all; nor could his enjoyment consume more than a small part; so that it was impossible for any man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another, or acquire to himself a property to the prejudice of his neighbour, who would still have room for as good, and as large a possession (after the other had taken out his) as before it was appropriated. This measuredid confine every man’s possession to a very moderate proportion, and such as he might appropriate to himself, without injury to any body, in the first ages of the world, when men were more in danger to be lost, by wandering from their company in the then vast wilderness of the earth, than to be straitened for want of room to plant in. And the same measure may be allowed still without prejudice to any body, as full as the world seems: for supposing a man, or family, in the state they were at first peopling of the world by the children of Adam, or Noah; let him plant in some inland, vacant places of America, we shall find that the possessions he could make himself upon the measures we have given, would not be very large, nor, even to this day, prejudice the rest of mankind, or give them reason to complain, or think themselves injured by this man’s encroachment, though the race of men have now spread themselves to all the corners of the world, and do infinitely exceed the small number was at the beginning. Nay, the extent of ground is of so little value, without labour, that I have heard it affirmed, that in Spain itself a man may be permitted to plough, sow and reap, without being disturbed, upon land he has no other title to, but only his making use of it. But, on the contrary, the inhabitants think themselves beholden to him, who, by his industry on neglected, and consequently waste land, has increased the stock of corn, which they wanted. But be this as it will, which I lay no stress on; this I dare boldly affirm, that the same rule of propriety, (viz.) that every man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the world, without straitening any body: since there is land enough in the world to suffice double the inhabitants, had not the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced by consent, larger possessions, and a right to them; which, how it has done, I shall by and by shew more at large.
§. 37. This is certain, that in the beginning, before the desire of having more than man needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of man: or had agreed that a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn; though men had a right to appropriate, by their labour, each one to himself, as much of the things of nature, as he could use: yet this could not be much, nor to the prejudice of others, where the same plenty was still left to those who would use the same industry. To which let me add, that he, who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind: for his labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common. I have here rated the improved land very low, in making its product but as ten to one, when it is much nearer an hundred to one: for I ask, whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life, as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.
Before the appropriation of land, he who gathered as much of the wild fruit, killed, caught, or tamed, as many of the beasts, as he could; he that so employed his pains about any of the spontaneous products of nature, as any way to alter them from the state which nature put them in, by placing any of his labour on them, did thereby acquire a propriety in them: but if they perished, in his possession, without their due use; if the fruits rotted, or the venison putrified, before he could spend it, he offended against the common law of nature, and was liable to be punished; he invaded his neighbour’s share; for he had no right farther than his use called, for any of them, and they might serve to afford him conveniences of life.
§. 38. The same measures governed the possession of land too: whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoiled, that was his peculiar right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed, and make use of, the cattle and product was also his. But if either the grass of his inclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his inclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other. Thus, at the beginning, Cain might take as much ground as he could till, and make it his own land, and yet leave enough to Abel’s sheep to feed on; a few acres would serve for both their possessions. But as families increased, and industry enlarged their stocks, their possessions enlarged with the need of them; but yet it was commonly without any fixed property in the ground they made use of, till they incorporated, settled themselves together, and built cities; and then, by consent, they came in time, to set out the bounds of their distinct territories, and agree on limits between them and their neighbours; and by laws within themselves, settled the properties of those of the same society: for we see, that in that part of the world which was first inhabited, and therefore like to be best peopled, even as low down as Abraham’s time, they wandered with their flocks, and their herds, which was their substance, freely up and down; and this Abraham did, in a country where he was a stranger. Whence it is plain, that at least a great part of the land lay in common; that the inhabitants valued it not, nor claimed property in any more than they made use of. But when there was not room enough in the same place, for their herds to feed together, they by consent, as Abraham and Lot did, Gen. xiii. 5. separated and enlarged their pasture, where it best liked them. And for the same reason Esau went from his father, and his brother, and planted in mount Seir, Gen. xxxvi. 6.
§. 39. And thus, without supposing any private dominion, and property in Adam, over all the world, exclusive of all other men, which can no way be proved, nor any one’s property be made out from it; but supposing the world given, as it was, to the children of men in common, we see how labour could make men distinct titles to several parcels of it, for their private uses; wherein there could be no doubt of right, no room for quarrel.
§. 40. Nor is it so strange, as perhaps before consideration it may appear, that the property of labour should be able to over-balance the community of land: for it is labourindeed that puts the difference of value on every thing; and let any one consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common, without any husbandry upon it, and he will find, that the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value. I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labour: nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expences about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour.
§. 41. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i. e.a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniences we enjoy; and a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.
§. 42. To make this a little clearer, let us but trace some of the ordinary provisions of life through their several progresses, before they come to our use, and see how much they receive of their value from human industry. Bread, wine and cloth, are things of daily use, and great plenty; yet notwithstanding, acorns, water and leaves, or skins, must be our bread, drink and cloathing, did not labour furnish us with these more useful commodities: for whatever bread is more worth than acorns, wine than water, and clothor silk, than leaves, skins or moss, that is wholly owing to labour and industry; the one of these being the food and raiment which unassisted nature furnishes us with; the other, provisions which our industry and pains prepare for us, which how much they exceed the other in value, when any one hath computed, he will then see how much labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things we enjoy in this world: and the ground which produces the materials, is scarce to be reckoned in, as any, or at most, but a very small part of it; so little, that even amongst us, land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.
This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right employing of them, is the great art of government: and that prince, who shall be so wise and godlike, as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbours: but this by the by. To return to the argument in hand,
§. 43. An acre of land, that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in America, which with the same husbandry, would do the like, are, without doubt, of the same natural intrinsic value: but yet the benefit mankind receives from one in a year, is worth 5l. and from the other possibly not worth a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it were to be valued and sold here; at least I may truly say, not one thousandth. It is labour then which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: it is to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land, which lies waste, is all the effect of labour: for it is not barely the ploughman’s pains, the reaper’s and thresher’s toil, and the baker’s sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its being seed to be sown to its being made bread, must all be charged onthe account of labour, and received as an effect of that: nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials, as in themselves. It would be a strange catalogue of things, that industry provided and made use of, about every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dying drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work; all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long to reckon up.
§. 44. From all which it is evident, that though the things of nature are given in common, yet man, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that, which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had improved the conveniences of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others.
§. 45. Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property, wherever any one was pleased to employ it upon what was common, which remained a long while the far greater part, and is yet more than mankind makes use of. Men, at first, for the most part, contented themselves with what unassisted nature offered to their necessities; and though afterwards, in some parts of the world, (where the increase of people and stock, with the use of money, had made land scarce, and so of some value) the several communitiessettled the bounds of their distinct territories, and by laws within themselves regulated the properties of the private men of their society, and so, by compact and agreement, settled the property which labour and industry began; and the leagues that have been made between several states and kingdoms, either expressly or tacitly disowning all claim and right to the land in the other’s possession, have, by common consent, given up their pretences to their natural common right, which originally they had to those countries, and so have, by positive agreement, settled a property amongst themselves, in distinct parts and parcels of the earth; yet there are still great tracts of ground to be found, which (the inhabitants thereof not having joined with the rest of mankind, in the consent of the use of their common money) lie waste, and are more than the people who dwell on it do, or can make use of, and so still lie in common; though this can scarce happen amongst that part of mankind that have consented to the use of money.
§. 46. The greatest part of things really useful to the life of man, and such as the necessity of subsisting made the first commoners of the world look after, as it doth the Americans now, are generally things of short duration; such as, if they are not consumed by use, will decay and perish of themselves: gold, silver, and diamonds, are things that fancy or agreement hath put the value on, more than real use, and the necessary support of life. Now of those good things which nature hath provided in common, every one had a right (as hath been said) to as much as he could use, and property in all that he could effect with his labour; all that his industry could extend to, to alter from the state nature had put it in, was his. He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, had thereby a property in them, they were his goods as soon as gathered. He was only to look, that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robbed others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of. If he gave away a part to any body else, so that it perished not uselessly in his possession, these he also made use of. And if he also bartered away plums, that would have rotted in a week, for nuts that would last good for his eating a whole year, he did no injury; he wasted not the common stock; destroyed no part of the portion of goods that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hand. Again, if he would give his nuts for a piece of metal, pleased with its colour; or exchange his sheep for shells, or wool for a sparkling pebble or a diamond, and keep those by him all his life, he invaded not the right of others, he might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased: the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it.
§. 47. And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life.
§. 48. And as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them: for supposing an island, separate from all possible commerce with the rest of the world, wherein there were but an hundred families, but there were sheep, horses, and cows, with other useful animals, wholsome fruits, and land enough for corn for a hundred thousand times as many, but nothing in the island, either because of its commonness, or perishableness, fit to supply the place of money; what reason could any one have there to enlarge his possessions beyond the use of his family, and a plentiful supply to its consumption, either in what their own industry produced, or they could barter for like perishable, useful commodities with others? Where there is not some thing, both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there men will be apt to enlarge their possessions of land, were it never so rich, never so free for them to take: for I ask, what would a man value ten thousand, or an hundred thousand acres of excellent land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with cattle, in the middle of the inland parts of America, where he had no hopes of commerce with other parts of the world, to draw money to him by the sale of the product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild common of nature, whatever was more than would supply the conveniences of life to be had there for him and his family.
§. 49. Thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known. Find out something that hath the use and value of money amongst his neighbours, you shall see the same man will begin presently to enlarge his possessions.
§. 50. But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.
§. 51. And thus, I think, it is very easy to conceive, without any difficulty, how labour could at first begin a title of property in the common things of nature, and how the spending it upon our uses bounded it. So that there could then be no reason of quarrelling about title, nor any doubt about the largeness of possession it gave. Right and conveniency went together; for as a man had a right to all he could employ his labour upon, so he had no temptation to labour for more than he could make use of. This left no room for controversy about the title, nor for incroachment on the right of others; what portion a man carved to himself was easily seen; and it was useless, as well as dishonest, to carve himself too much, or take more than he needed.