I read Good Calories, Bad Calories several times. The last couple when severely brain-fogged from a very low carb diet.

So I was stunned when I read Denise Minger’s 2015 post In Defense of Low Fat.

I had been reading low carb blogs for years, and I had read Taubes seemingly reasoned take on the carbohyrdrate-insulin hypothesis with a history that discussed seminal figures in detail, like William Banting, but I had never noticed a discussion of Walter Kempner until reading Minger’s post.

Kempner. A German guy, who was truly a character and believed in good ol’ fashioned Prussian discipline (dietary and otherwise), treated thousands of people over the years for kidney disease and other diseases associated with morbid obesity. He treated them at The Rice House at Duke University, not exactly an unknown institution.

I had never heard of this. Get this — Kempner treated the morbidly obese with white rice, fruit and sugar. And their diabetes disappears almost immediately. And there are photos and graphs showing straight line weight loss to normalcy of morbidly obese people. There are people who lost 300 pounds.

Straight line weight loss to normal in some cases. My jaw dropped. You never see that in low carb/paleo.

These people, at least in the published cases, didn’t have to lie around in their basements in a weakened state listening to audiobooks and reading low carb blogs trying to lose “the last 20.”

How the hell is that not discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories? Is it too much like low carb “Asia problem” (which usually gets three sentences) or just an oversight?

I will buy the new Taubes book about sugar. The first thing I will do is look for a reference to the weird guyswho treated obesity and chronic disease with zero fat and salt and high simple sugar diets.

Seems like something that might be relevant to a book about sugar. I will look to see “Where’s Walter?”

I just looked in the index in GCBC, by the way. He’s not there. I didn’t miss him in my brain fog.