> AT COCA-COLA, Dunn was obsessed with per capita consumption. "Per capita was my mantra," he says. But as he neared the end of his time there, he began to feel conflicted. It was still his job to sell more Coke. But people were drinking a lot of Coke. He talked to his father about it. "If you've got a per capita of three, four, five" -- 500 Cokes a year -- "that's fine. But there are places in the United States where you have per capitas of 1,000. I can't get my head around somebody drinking 1,000 Cokes a year," Dunn says. "This was before obesity had become as prevalent. But it was pretty clear that's where the world was going. And certainly sugar soft drinks had a direct role in that."
Reminds me of a David Foster Wallace aside:
> "On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it's become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job."
"People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled."
Try growing some carrots of your own. Way cheaper than buying them, gives you a sense of pride in your own work, really easy to grow, basically just requires sprinkling seeds in the spring and pulling them out of the ground and washing them off when they get big enough.
I stopped buying baby carrots when I found out that they are just big carrots cut down. They aren't picked early or anything. Thus, a lot of waste is created to make baby carrots.
According to the article, baby carrots were invented to reduce waste. Carrots grow into all sorts of shapes and sizes, but supermarkets only buy a narrow range; the rejects get used for animal feed, or factory food. With baby carrots, more of the carrot gets eaten by humans—and presumably the stuff that's cut off is still sold the way the rejects used to be.
Single, dual, multi-blade or electric? Seriously, do you go for the clean contoured shave or multifaceted polygonal surfacing? Is a shave effectively different from peeling?
Indeed, my time while waiting on some cooking process is effectively free to me [I'm already spending it a) cooking and b) listening to a podcast]. So I work things like peeling and cleaning carrots into that time.
I wonder if perhaps the slump in sales is the cause of slimy carrots rather than the effect. It sounds like they were dumping carrots into the pipeline at a tremendous pace, and it sounds like every carrot farmer has added "baby carrot" tracts to their farms so they could push them out faster. What if there became a huge glut in the market for these overpriced carrots, and they ended up sitting on the shelves longer...baby carrots are freshly peeled and washed and still moist when packed, and the longer they stay wet in the refrigerator, the more slimy they become.
Slimy carrots are unappealing, thus they ended up staying on the shelves even longer and selling even slower.
I buy baby carrots, and they are not always slimy. It's about 50/50, in my experience, and it depends on where I buy them, as well. I travel full-time, so in the past year I've bought baby carrots in a couple dozen cities. It varies widely. Organic produce, including baby carrots, from Trader Joe's or Henry's or other natural foods type markets tend to be better, though not always. And produce purchased in small towns and towns far from big civilization (like in Alaska or the desert or mountains) is consistently of lower quality and not as fresh.
I don't know that "the pipeline/process" is to blame, though supply chain management might be. If they've got twice as many baby carrots as the market wants, and they let them sit on shelves for days or weeks before they hit the supermarket shelves, I can see that leading to a self-reinforcing problem.
My wife won't eat carrots because they make her allergic (cooked ones are fine)... she only gets these reactions since moving here to the US from France.
Since this is a duopoly from the same region (Central CA), perhaps the dropoff in the past few years is due to the carrot quality?
Regarding carrot quality, both Bolthouse and Grimway Farms have been growing a different type of carrot specifically for the baby carrot products.
A family friend is an exec at one of the above companies and he mentioned that the taste of the baby carrots are indeed more bland than the 'regular' carrots. I just conducted a highly scientific experiment and tasted one of each at lunch - my conclusion: he is correct :)
I agree. They generally don't taste as good. My carrot consumption is down since I don't often eat the big ones.
There's also way too many baby carrots per bag and most of them go bad within a few days (crusty and dry with white blemishes on the skin). I'm sure you could re-peel them since it's just the skin, but that's a lot of effort for the size.
Out of curiosity: I have a friend who had the same allergy... she switched to purely organic carrots and it went away. Does it work the same way with your wife?
I've got the same thing myself: allergic to uncooked carrots and most fruits (e.g. pears, cantaloupes). Started when I was a teenager-- actually figured out what was going on for the first time eating a bag of baby carrots. I've tried organic pears and didn't notice any of the usual burning/itching. Still afraid to start eating them on a regular basis, though...
I get allergies to them too (plus apples, bananas, strawberries, and a bunch of other fruit). The weird thing is that I could eat all of these things probably up until my early 20s (late 1990s), and now all I can do is stare and salivate.
Rather than thinking organic/inorganic, why not try different varieties of carrots? If you can't find a retailer that sells named varieties, try growing your own because seeds are always sold with the name. There's all sorts of types and colours:
Fiber slows digestion, which (according to my limited understanding) mitigates the blood insulin spike which is the main fault of fructose - but I wouldn't really call that mitigation an "antidote".
If you're implying this may be an extended joke, I'm pretty sure it isn't. I've seen other stories about this in the past couple of months that have nothing to do with April 1. I'm not in any of the test markets though, so I can't vouch that I've seen these personally.
It is not. I live in one of the test markets and the commercials run constantly. One of the commercials features an woman shooting a baby carrot mini-gun at a man while he jumps off a cliff.
I see 'extreme' commercials for baby carrots all the time on local television. They can put all the marketing they want behind baby carrots, there is still one big problem: raw carrots taste like shit. I'd honestly rather go hungry than eat raw carrots, and no amount of cool marketing is going to change that.
When they were a luxury food the baby carrots were actually 'young' carrots.
Now they are popular they are just sections of whole carrots put through a press to cut and shape them. They are basically carrot 'french fries' thats why the end up slimy
> I have no idea why but a couple of years back the carrots started getting slimy and it got progressively worse.
This reminds me:
The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten.
The inner core is very sweet, I have always looked at them as a sweet snack. Plus as a child I was told they would help me see in the dark better which I thought was a kind of super power.
When I was younger my Dad actually OD'd on carrots, he ate so many that his skin went orange.
Try some different brands. I realize the article says there are basically only two big baby carrot producers, but the brand at Safeway is noticeably worse than others, IME.
Kind of. They're cut down from carrots that are made to grow as long, thin and quickly as possibly. Not exactly from a carrot that you'd find in your garden. That's not to mention the peeling and washing they go through, which I can't imagine it not changing the taste.
If your point is that "baby carrots" taste like regular carrots, then I have my doubts that you've ever tasted a good carrot.
They are cut from regular carrots, but as the story indicates, the farms mostly responsible for baby carrots changed their growing techniques to make carrots skinny and as long as possible. Perhaps the change in growing technique has also effected the flavor.
I had thought of the change in growing technique as being the cause, but you may be correct. I assumed it had something to do with the processing, shipping and storage times, preservatives, etc.
Make sure you're eating fresh carrots. Old dried out ones are, in fact, awful.
Oh, and make sure to swallow. As a kid I hated carrots because I'd chew, suck the juicy life out of the mash, and chew some more, and suddenly the carrot mash would become dry and impossible to swallow.
Carrots don't cause the same insulin spike that candy bars do. Refined and processed sugars hit your bloodstream much more quickly than unprocessed foods.
Carrots also don't taste as good as a chocolate bar, so it would still be an epic sacrifice.
The technical term for "hit your bloodstream much more quickly than" is "has a higher glycemic index than". Carrots and chocolate bars both supposedly have the same glycemic index, 49: http://www.carbs-information.com/glycemic-index-food-chart.h... while Snickers bars are down at 41.
The reason carrots don't cause the same insulin spike is not that they don't hit your bloodstream as quickly, or any bullshit about refinement and processing. It's that they're mostly made of water and indigestible cellulose, so the total amount of sugar involved is much lower.
Glycemic load is a measure which attempts to address this problem.
Glycemic index measures the glucose response to consuming a fixed amount of carbohydrate. Since different foods contain different amounts of carbohydrate, the amount of food consumed is not constant. To consume 50g of carbohydrate, you can eat 100g of white bread...or 600g of carrots.
Which is why glycemic index is a loony way to determine your diet. Carrots aren't the most nutrient dense of vegetables, but they're vastly healthier than any candy bar, no matter what the glycemic index is. Insulinemic response might be a better measure, though even that is questionable, based on the preponderance of evidence.
That's a good question. Debunking of the glycemic index as a dietary guideline isn't where most diet-focused scientists spend their time, since it's not where gains are to be found (everyone, except people pushing GI-oriented diets, knows that carrots are healthier than candy bars).
I came to the conclusion that looking at GI was a loony way to determine diet while researching Gary Taubes and the Good Calories, Bad Calories theory. Taubes is a proponent of Atkins-style diets and is anti-carbohydrate with religious fervor. He, unfortunately, hasn't been thoroughly debunked in any mainstream media that I'm aware of, even though damned near every scientist he quotes and references has come out to say that he's quoted them out of context and come to conclusions that they in no way endorse or agree with.
Quackwatch (though not entirely free from bias on all things) has covered the low-carb thing pretty well:
The most damning portion (and most relevant to GI and low-carb diets) of which, I think, is on page three in the section titled "3,000 MIAS", which talks about the low percentage of Atkins (and other low-carb, low-GI) diet followers among the set of people who have lost 30+ lbs and kept it off.
It takes a tremendous amount of will-power to overlook the preponderance of evidence that Atkins and low-carb diets are not especially effective (though any diet that reduces your caloric intake will be effective), nor is there much science to back up the belief that high GI foods, in absence of obesity and other pre-diabetic factors, would lead to diabetes (which is another claim of low-GI proponents).
Any diet that claims that carrots are unhealthy is probably a diet you should throw out the window, because it flies in the face of a tremendous amount of science. That's not to say you should only eat carrots, but they certainly aren't going to make you fat, nor will they give you diabetes, and eating a bunch of Snickers bars every day very well could do both.
I'm not sure how relevant Gary Taubes is to the subject of carrots. In his latest book, "Why We Get Fat", carrots aren't mentioned in the text at all, only in an appendix which spells out a Duke University Medical Center diet.
For those who don't read all the way to the end of the sixth page at _Reason_, Taubes has a response[1] to his critic, Fumento.
Contrary to your assertion about Taubes "first making a name for himself" back in 2003, he's been a science writer for something like 30 years. He won an MIT journalism fellowship back in 1996 and he's won three awards from the National Association of Science Writers.[2]
I also don't know about the "religious fervor" of Taubes' anti-carbohydrate stance. He's made it clear, for example, that not all carbohydrates are the same, just as not all fats are bad for you. I think his main point is that the post WW2 infatuation with low-fat diets has been a disaster.
Both Taubes and Fumento are bright fellows who write about controversial areas of science, so it's not a big surprise that they might disagree on a topic. But it's pretty easy to tell the difference between them: Taubes is the one with masters degrees in engineering and journalism and writes articles for _Science_, while Fumento is the one whose degree is in law and writes articles for _Reason_.
"Contrary to your assertion about Taubes "first making a name for himself" back in 2003, he's been a science writer for something like 30 years."
I'll quote the wikipedia article you linked to: "Taubes gained prominence in the low-carb diet debate following the publication of his 2002 New York Times Magazine piece "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"."
That's how I know his name. If he was well-known before that, I was not aware of it.
I think there's a lot more to be said on the subject than a comparison of the degrees of Taubes and Fumento (and, really, since when is a masters degree in engineering and journalism qualification to tell people how to eat any more than a law degree?).
I'm not qualified to argue about whether Taubes is completely wrong about everything (which seems unlikely; even a broken clock is right twice a day) But, I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field. I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.
I'm willing to believe that the food industry has an unhealthy effect on the debate and the corn and cereal grain industries have a vested interest in seeing grains elevated to a holy position in the food pyramid. There may be a vasty wrongness about huge swaths of what we know about how we should be eating for maximum health. But, just like I have a hard time believing every scientist working in climate science is under the thumb of some great conspiracy to foist a global warming lie on the world...I can't really believe that every dietary scientist working would participate in a great scam, which is what you have to believe to believe that Taubes is mostly right.
"I think his main point is that the post WW2 infatuation with low-fat diets has been a disaster."
And the scientists he quoted have said repeatedly that the disaster is that we eat 20% more calories per day, in general, than we did before WW2, and that increased fat consumption also occurred during that time. The belief that "low-fat = healthy" is certainly a dangerous belief to have. But, the belief that a diet of almost exclusively animal proteins and fats is healthy is also pretty dangerous, as far as I can tell.
I started reading Taubes work after reading 4 Hour Body, since some of the theories in 4HB come directly from Taubes, and some of the bonus materials on the website are written by Taubes. But, the more I read up on him the less confidence I had in his scientific integrity.
In short: I don't know all the answers. But I'm pretty confident Taubes doesn't know either.
As you can tell from your own reading, it's not the "fad diet" book that SwellJoe claims. The science is pretty clear on how insulin works, for instance.
Most of Taubes' critics mistake his case for restricting carb intake as being synonymous with the Atkins diet, which isn't really the case. (Taubes' wife mocks Atkins as "meat boy".) The logic seems to be: Atkins is icky, Taubes promotes restricting carbs like Atkins, he must be icky too, the science be damned.
"The science is pretty clear on how insulin works, for instance."
Is it? This is actually one of my core problems with Taubes. The science on insulin is nowhere near clear from what I can tell. Insulin can regulate hunger, may trigger storage of energy (or may not, depending on many confounding factors), and may be helpful in weight loss (or may not be). Taubes' assertion that insulin is well-understood, and his cherry-picking of studies to "prove" his assertion, is one of my problems with his work.
Again, I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying his assertions about what we know and don't know about diet are not as well-supported as his books and articles claim. It's easy to find conflicting studies of nearly every point he considers "proven". This is problematic, if I'm going to change the way I live and eat in dramatic ways. I'm not going to do that just because some guy recommends it, when there are many more qualified people recommending other practices.
He is, in short, a popular science writer, doing what popular science writers do. He might be a good popular science writer. He might even have the right idea about many things, but you don't get to pick and choose which studies you use to come to your conclusions based on how much they agree with your position.
"The logic seems to be: Atkins is icky, Taubes promotes restricting carbs like Atkins, he must be icky too, the science be damned."
And your logic seems to be: Taubes is awesome and I agree with him, so he must be right, science be damned.
Here's my point, which I think you've missed along the way: Science doesn't yet know all the answers. Taubes definitely doesn't know all the answers. I don't know all the answers. And you don't know all the answers. But, there are a large number of scientists who disagree strongly with Taubes, making me think I should take his advice with a grain of salt.
I've never said that Taubes has all the answers and neither has he. Indeed, on his blog Taubes himself has identified areas where he has a hunch about mechanisms but admits we simply won't know until better research is done.
Throughout this discussion you've made vague assertions about how scientists disagree with Taubes, but never cited specific points where got he facts wrong, only that some scientists don't like his using their data and words to support a conclusion they don't share. You made the bizarre claim that Americans have been eating more fat and that the Atkins diet is a disaster, both without any supporting evidence. I find this unpersuasive.
If the Atkins diet is such a disaster, for example, why is that when some of your "real scientists" conducted the relatively famous ATOZ diet study[1], it showed that the Atkins diet provided roughly twice the weight loss of the Zone, LEARN, and Ornish diets while providing as good or better secondary benefits (e.g. heart disease indicators). I mean, does that sound like "a disaster" to you?
Taubes is hardly alone in crying "foul" over the low-fat, high-carb diet fiasco. Watch Robert Lustig's UCSF talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"[2] He'll go into plenty of detail on the biochemistry involved. He starts out, however, by saying his goal is to debunk the last 30 years of nutrition information in America, and I think he makes a damn good case.
The money slide for our discussion appears at 0:09:40 in the talk. It shows, as I alluded to earlier, that the percentage of calories from fat in US adult diets has been steadily declining since the mid-1960s. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the percentage of prevalence of obesity is pretty stable, maybe ticking up a percent or so. But in 1982 the AHA, AMA, and USDA tell us we should cut our fat intake. Faced with low-fat processed foods that taste like cardboard, the manufacturers try to improve the taste with things like high-fructose corn syrup and guess what happens? In the mid-1980s the incidence of obesity shows a sudden, dramatic increase, doubling from 15% to 30% over the next two decades. Yes, there was a disaster all right, but it had nothing to do with increased fat intake or the Atkins diet.
"Faced with low-fat processed foods that taste like cardboard, the manufacturers try to improve the taste with things like high-fructose corn syrup and guess what happens? In the mid-1980s the incidence of obesity shows a sudden, dramatic increase, doubling from 15% to 30% over the next two decades."
Here's where we can all agree. But, I don't think the "low-fat" foods are the sole culprit. I think all of our processed foods are the culprit. The choices of what to eat are not just "low fat" processed foods or high animal protein fatty foods. We have other options; there's a whole produce section in the grocery and damned near everything in it is healthier for you than a microwaved "low fat" dinner. The processed foods, I believe, are contributing mightily to the weight problem in our society. If you go to the store and buy a bunch of "low carb" processed foods, you'll still get fat, and feel bad.
If people lose weight on Atkins, that is a net positive for their health. Heart disease or complications from diabetes is probably what's going to kill a really fat person. So, if they remove weight as a contributing factor in those problems, they might live past the average lifespan of someone who dies of those diseases. However, there is quite a bit of evidence that diets very high in animal proteins and fats contribute to higher incidence of many kinds of cancer, as well as heart disease.
The thing is, I suspect you and I agree about what people should eat a lot more than we disagree. My problem is with picking one specific macronutrient and calling it the cause of all of our troubles. Because Taubes recommends eating wholes foods most of the time, I think following his recommendations are better for you than Weight Watchers or similar processed food-based diets. But, the science still seems to indicate that there are long-term health consequences to eating large amounts of animal protein and animal fats. I know Taubes has done a lot of hand-waving about the China Study, and the book itself probably does deserve some of the thrashing he gave it; but the actual study is one of the largest and most impressive studies of human diet ever undertaken. I don't think you can simply ignore all that data, and the healthiest populations did generally have quite low intake of animal proteins.
All I'm saying is that the human body is among the most complex systems we study (there are billions of moving parts in the bacterial flora in our digestive system, we have barely a clue how any of that works), and Taubes sometimes has hunches based on correlation that are probably wrong.
"Watch Robert Lustig's UCSF talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"[2] He'll go into plenty of detail on the biochemistry involved."
We can both agree on the danger of sugar, as well. Humans have just gotten really good at making foods that have almost no nutrition and loads of energy, and sugar helps. Lustig's treatise is that too much sugar and not enough fiber are key to some of our problems, which doesn't have much overlap with recommending a high protein/high fat diet (his first slide is "What do the Atkins diet and Japanese diet have in common?").
But, if you're including this link as evidence that we understand insulin, I would mention dairy. Dairy causes a tremendous insulinemic response, several times what it's glycemic index indicates it should. And yet, numerous studies have shown that eating dairy can help with weight loss. There are many other areas where insulin doesn't behave in a simplistic way; we don't actually know what insulin does in many circumstances.
One more point about Lustig's video. In the graph of fat intake vs. obesity, he leaves out one very important line: Total caloric intake. I think that's an important omission.
"You made the bizarre claim that Americans have been eating more fat and that the Atkins diet is a disaster, both without any supporting evidence."
I don't know. I've read quite a bit of his stuff, including a number of excerpts from Good Calories, Bad Calories. Some of it is sensible; we, as a culture, do eat a lot of stuff that isn't actually food, and it makes it easy to overeat without ever feeling satisfied, and not eating those processed food-like items (which happen to be packed full of carbs in a lot of cases) would improve your health and probably reduce your waistline. If someone is choosing between eating a steak with some spinach on the side and eating a microwave-able dinner (even one from Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice), I'm pretty sure the steak and spinach would be healthier. But, those aren't the only options.
I'm pretty sure, from the non-Taubes/non-Atkins reading I've done, that you don't have to limit yourself to almost nothing but meat and eggs and a few vegetables to lose weight or be healthy, and following Taubes/Atkins guidelines might cause you to die early of heart disease or some of the cancers caused by animal proteins. Or, you might have other problems caused by missing out on a lot of great nutrients found in fruits (which the low-carb thing tends to lead to avoiding). Again, there's some pretty damning evidence that Atkins does not work for sustainable weight loss on a large scale.
In short, I think it is a fad diet. Like most fad diets, you can lose weight on it, as long as it leads to consuming fewer calories. Like most fad diets, it is based on some sweeping generalizations pulled from a few highly selective bits of research. It's what happens when someone from the mainstream media writes about science. They don't qualify their statements enough, they make claims with absolute confidence when the science just isn't there.
I've been pretty interested in food and diet lately, and the absolute best books I've read on the subject have been Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Both are utterly lovely. The claims it makes are humble, based on science (and tradition), and realistic.
The main thing I've come away with from reading a huge variety of books and websites on diet and nutrition is that we shouldn't be eating about 80+% of the "food" you find at Safeway or Walmart or even Whole Foods and Trader Joe's (though the percentage is probably 70% of those stores). Most of what people eat these days simply isn't food and humans shouldn't be consuming it, and certainly not in the quantities most Americans eat it. If it says "Low-fat" or "Low-carb" on the label, it should probably be on the "do not eat this, it isn't food" list.
This, I guess, means that we can all agree that there are good calories and bad calories...I just think Taubes doesn't have much science to back up what he believes constitute the good and bad calories; there's too much good science that conflicts with his claims. The science seems to indicate that nutrient-dense low-energy foods are the best foods to eat, in general. Whole foods seem to deliver the best balance of nutrition per calorie, while processed foods tend to have all the good stuff processed right out and some bits and pieces crammed back in via fortification. A lot of those non-foods are very high in carbs; but picking one macro-nutrient to be the devil and ignoring all the other important facets of food is probably a bad idea.
And, one final, snarky point: Taubes is pudgy. Looks to me like he's carrying around at least 20 extra pounds. I'm not sure I want to take diet advice from a guy who needs to lose more weight than I do (I'm carrying about 10 extra pounds, and it's nowhere near as noticeable as Taubes spare tire).
I mentioned Taubes' earlier bona fides because it was presumably his track record with articles and books on cold fusion and particle physics research that convinced the editors of _Science_ to give him the go-ahead on his 2001 journal article that preceded the 2002 NY Times article and the 2007 book. I think his track record demonstrates his concern for both good science and good journalism.
I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field.
Oh dear. Even if you had data to back that up, are you really going to embrace science as a popularity contest?
I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.
I'm not as interested in scientists' opinions as I am in the underlying science. I'm unaware of any studies that show the Atkins diet is really a disaster, but feel free to cite away. But to repeat myself, don't conflate warnings on the dangers of carb consumption with being a proponent of the Atkins diet.
Taubes' focus for most of his career is about how good science is perverted for not-so-good human motives. So for example when some of your "real scientists" offer a "real controlled scientific study"[1] showing that people lost weight on both low-fat and low-carb diets, Taubes asks[2] the rather logical question, how is that a weight-loss study would restrict total calorie intake on only one (low-fat) of the two diets. I mean, if you're studying weight loss, shouldn't you be controlling total calorie intake for all groups?
the scientists he quoted have said repeatedly that the disaster is that we eat 20% more calories per day, in general, than we did before WW2, and that increased fat consumption also occurred during that time
Well if those scientists really said that, which I doubt, I'm pretty sure they're wrong on the facts. I haven't digested the whole NHANES data set from the CDC, but a quick Google check found this nutritionist's summary[3]:
"In 1964 Americans ate 39 percent of their calories from fat and only 13 percent were obese. Now, while most Americans get only about 33 percent of their calories from fat, two-thirds, more than 190 million Americans are overweight or obese."
In short: Fat is not your enemy, but keep your eyes on both calories and carbs.
Maybe I'm missing something, but on the page you linked, it says that a 15g serving of baby carrots (raw) contains 1g of sugars (and 1g of carbohydrates in total.)
Reminds me of a David Foster Wallace aside:
> "On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it's become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job."