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Authors: Gary Taubes
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loss was published in 1989 by a team of Danish researchers. The Danes actually did train sedentary subjects to run marathons (26.2 miles). After eighteen months of training, and after actually running a marathon, the eighteen men in the study had lost an average of five pounds of body fat. As for the nine women subjects, the Danes reported, “no change in body composition was observed.” That same year, Xavier Pi-Sunyer, director of the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Obesity Research Center in New York, reviewed the existing trials testing the notion that increasing exercise would lead to weight loss. His conclusion was identical to that of the Finnish review in 2000: “Decreases, increases, and no changes in body weight and body composition have been observed.”
We bought into the idea that we could exercise more and not compensate by eating more because the health reporters bought it, and their articles in the lay press were widely read. The research literature itself was not.
In 1977, for instance, in the midst of the exercise explosion, the National Institutes of Health hosted its second ever conference on obesity and weight control, and the assembled experts concluded that “the importance of exercise in weight control is less than might be believed, because increases in energy expenditure due to exercise also tend to increase food consumption, and it is not possible to predict whether the increased caloric output will be outweighed by the greater food intake.” That same year, the
New York Times Magazine
reported that there was “now strong evidence that regular exercise can and does result in substantial and—so long as the exercise is continued—permanent weight loss.” *
By 1983, Jane Brody, personal-health reporter for the
Times
,was counting the numerous ways that exercise was “the key” to successful weight loss. By 1989, the same year Pi-Sunyer gave his pessimistic assessment of the actual evidence,
Newsweek
declared exercise an “essential” element of any weight-loss program. Now, according to the
Times
, on those infrequent occasions “when exercise isn’t enough” to induce sufficient weight loss, “you must also make sure you don’t overeat.”
Why the obesity researchers and public-health authorities eventually came to believe this story is a different question. Umberto Eco offered a likely answer in his novel
Foucault’s Pendulum
. “I believe that you can reach the point,” Eco wrote, “where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”
From the late 1970s onward, the primary factor fueling the belief that we can maintain or lose weight through exercise seemed to be the researchers’ desire to believe it was true and their reluctance to acknowledge otherwise publicly. Although one couldn’t help being “underwhelmed” by the actual evidence, as Judith Stern, Mayer’s former student, wrote in 1986, it would be “shortsighted” to say that exercise was ineffective, because it meant ignoring the
possible
contributions of exercise to the prevention of obesity and to the maintenance of any weight loss that might have been induced by diet. These, of course, had never been demonstrated, either.
This philosophy came to dominate even the scientific discussions of exercise and weight, but it couldn’t be reconciled with the simple notion that appetite and the amount we eat can be expected to increase the more we exercise. And so the idea of working up an appetite was jettisoned along the way. Physicians, researchers, exercise physiologists, even personal trainers at the gym took to thinking about hunger as though it were something that existed only in the brain, a question of willpower (whatever that is), not the natural consequence of a body’s effort to get back the energy it has expended.
As for the researchers themselves, they invariably found a way to write their articles and reviews
We bought into the idea that we could exercise more and not compensate by eating more because the health reporters bought it, and their articles in the lay press were widely read. The research literature itself was not.
In 1977, for instance, in the midst of the exercise explosion, the National Institutes of Health hosted its second ever conference on obesity and weight control, and the assembled experts concluded that “the importance of exercise in weight control is less than might be believed, because increases in energy expenditure due to exercise also tend to increase food consumption, and it is not possible to predict whether the increased caloric output will be outweighed by the greater food intake.” That same year, the
New York Times Magazine
reported that there was “now strong evidence that regular exercise can and does result in substantial and—so long as the exercise is continued—permanent weight loss.” *
By 1983, Jane Brody, personal-health reporter for the
Times
,was counting the numerous ways that exercise was “the key” to successful weight loss. By 1989, the same year Pi-Sunyer gave his pessimistic assessment of the actual evidence,
Newsweek
declared exercise an “essential” element of any weight-loss program. Now, according to the
Times
, on those infrequent occasions “when exercise isn’t enough” to induce sufficient weight loss, “you must also make sure you don’t overeat.”
Why the obesity researchers and public-health authorities eventually came to believe this story is a different question. Umberto Eco offered a likely answer in his novel
Foucault’s Pendulum
. “I believe that you can reach the point,” Eco wrote, “where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.”
From the late 1970s onward, the primary factor fueling the belief that we can maintain or lose weight through exercise seemed to be the researchers’ desire to believe it was true and their reluctance to acknowledge otherwise publicly. Although one couldn’t help being “underwhelmed” by the actual evidence, as Judith Stern, Mayer’s former student, wrote in 1986, it would be “shortsighted” to say that exercise was ineffective, because it meant ignoring the
possible
contributions of exercise to the prevention of obesity and to the maintenance of any weight loss that might have been induced by diet. These, of course, had never been demonstrated, either.
This philosophy came to dominate even the scientific discussions of exercise and weight, but it couldn’t be reconciled with the simple notion that appetite and the amount we eat can be expected to increase the more we exercise. And so the idea of working up an appetite was jettisoned along the way. Physicians, researchers, exercise physiologists, even personal trainers at the gym took to thinking about hunger as though it were something that existed only in the brain, a question of willpower (whatever that is), not the natural consequence of a body’s effort to get back the energy it has expended.
As for the researchers themselves, they invariably found a way to write their articles and reviews
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