I think some people have exaggerated the message of Gary Taubes in regards to carbohydrates. This is partly his fault, because early in his book he talks about the problems with "refined carbohydrates", but by the end of the book, he often lumps all carbohydrates together. He even refers to his hypothesis as "the fattening carbohydrate", which obviously puts the focus on carbohydrates, and not refined carbohydrates in particular.
Recently, Taubes answered a few reader questions over at Michael Eades' blog. One the first questions dealt with this topic - is it carbohydrates or refined carbohydrates that are the problem? Here is the end of his response:
"The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem. Ultimately we can only guess at causes using this kind of observational evidence."
From his answer, he clearly states that carbohydrates per se are not the problem, but instead it is the presence of refined carbohydrates. Unfortunately, many people in favor of low-carb diets do not point this out.
A related issue is what's the appropriate diet if a person has damaged their metabolism from refined carbohydrate consumption? Some people argue for low-carb, but this is just one possible route. Also, this deals with the treatment end of the metabolic syndrome, not the cause. If someone is asking, "what is causing the obesity epidemic", then based on the evidence Taubes (and I) would say it is refined carbohydrates. Obviously then, removing refined carbohydrates but not carbohydrates in general would stop future generations from becoming obese. The secondary issue is how to treat those already affected by the metabolic syndrome - is removing refined carbohydrate enough, or do all carbohydrates need to be limited because of damage to the metabolism. This second question is interesting, but much more research needs to be done.
