Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes is the American author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia.^[1] His book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It was released in December 2010. In December 2010, Taubes launched a blog at GaryTaubes.com to promote the book's release and to respond to critics. His main hypothesis: Carbohydrates stimulate the secretion of insulin, which causes the body to store fat.^[2]

Biography

Born in Rochester, New York, Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard University (BS, 1977)^[3] and aerospace engineering at Stanford University (MS, 1978). After receiving a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981, Taubes joined Discover magazine as a staff reporter in 1982.^[4] Since then he has written numerous articles for Discover, Science and other magazines. Originally focusing on physics issues, his interests have more recently turned to medicine and nutrition. His brother, Clifford Henry Taubes, is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.^[5]

Scientific controversies

Taubes' books have all dealt with scientific controversies.

Nobel Dreams takes a critical look at the politics and experimental techniques behind the Nobel Prize-winning work of physicist Carlo Rubbia.

In Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, he chronicles the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons–Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989. He opines in the book that heat generation in the experiments of Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was due entirely to difference in ionic conductivity of deuterated salts solutions compared to normal aqueous solutions.

He also formulated an allegation of fraud regarding the results from John Bockris's research group.^[6]

Dietary science

Gary Taubes on Bookbits radio.

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?". The article, which questioned the efficacy and health benefits of low-fat diets, was seen as defending the Atkins diet against the medical establishment, and it became extremely controversial. Some scholars interviewed for this article complained that Mr. Taubes misinterpreted their words or treated them out of context.^[7] Taubes himself stated: "[E]ven though I knew the article would be the most controversial article the Times Magazine ran all year, [the reaction] still shocked me."^[8] The Center for Science in the Public Interest published a rebuttal to the Times article in its November 2002 newsletter.^[9] According to Taubes: "[T]he CSPI is an advocacy group that has been pushing low-fat diets since the 1970s."^[10]

In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (published as The Diet Delusion in the UK). This book examines how a hypothesis — that dietary fat is the cause of obesity and heart disease — became dogma, and claims to show how the scientific method was circumvented so a contestable hypothesis could remain unchallenged. The book uses data and studies compiled from more than a century of dietary research to support what Taubes calls "the alternative hypothesis."^[11][12]

Taubes's hypothesis is that the medical community and the U.S. federal government have relied upon misinterpreted scientific data on nutrition to build the prevailing paradigm about what constitutes healthful eating. Taubes makes the case that — contrary to the conventional wisdom — it is refined carbohydrates that are responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many other "maladies of civilization". In the Epilogue to Good Calories, Bad Calories on page 454, Taubes notes ten "inescapable" conclusions, the first of which is:^[13]

Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.

Reception

Taubes includes information and studies which indicate that physical exercise increases appetite to a degree that makes it an inefficient tool in weight loss. He tracks the origins of commonly accepted dietary advice and aims to show that information that is filtered to the public often contradicts scientific evidence. On October 19, 2007 Taubes appeared on Larry King Live to discuss his book. His book was praised as "raising interesting and valuable points" by Andrew Weil, a proponent of alternative medicine, while Mehmet Oz and trainer Jillian Michaels who appeared on the same program disagreed with Taubes on many questions.^[14]

The reviews for Good Calories, Bad Calories have varied. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana notes in his review that the book "...has much useful information and is well worth reading." but "Obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones."^[15] Taubes, in a letter to the editor in the same journal, clarifies some of the comments made by Bray. Taubes notes, "The hypothesis favored by Bray and a half century of authorities on human obesity is that fat accumulation is fundamentally caused by positive energy balance." Taubes responds, "The alternative hypothesis begins with the fundamental observation that obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation and then asks the obvious question, what regulates fat accumulation. This was elucidated by 1965 and has never been controversial. 'Insulin is the principal regulator of fat metabolism'..."^[16]

John Tierney in his 2007 The New York Times review of Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories entitled "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus", discusses information cascades and the role of Ancel Keys in widely held beliefs related to diet and fat. Tierney follows Taubes in noting that a 2001 Cochrane meta-analysis of low-fat diets found that they had "no significant effect on mortality".^[17] Harriet A. Hall, however, takes Taubes to task for "selective quoting" of Cochrane in her negative review of his work (a review which, ironically, includes selective quoting of Taubes).^[18] Scott Gavura affirmed her view three years later, citing Yoni Freedhoff's The Diet Fix, "Calories do matter (Yes, Taubes is still wrong).".^[19]

Awards

Taubes has won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times and was awarded an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97.^[8] He is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy.^[20]

Publications

• Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. Random House. 1986. ISBN 978-0-394-54503-5. 
• Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion. Random House. 1993. ISBN 978-0-394-58456-0. 
• Epidemiology Faces Its Limits, Science, July 1995.
• Nobel Gas, Slate, October 11, 1997.
• The Soft Science of Dietary Fat, Science, March 2001.
• What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002.
• Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?, New York Times, September 17, 2007.
• Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. Knopf. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4000-4078-0.  (Also published as The Diet Delusion ISBN 978-0-09-189141-1)
• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. 2010. 
• Is Sugar Toxic?. The New York Times, April 13, 2011.

References

External links

• Webcast of Lecture by Gary Taubes at Stevens Institute of Technology, Center for Science Writings, Hoboken, NJ, USA, 2/6/2008 – "Big Fat Lies"
• Article by Gary Taubes questioning the efficacy of exercise in weight loss – "We Can't Work It Out"
• Excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories and NPR interview – "Not All Calories Are Created Equal, Author Says".
• Interview with Gary Taubes by Knight Fellowships at MIT
• Interview with Gary Taubes by John Horgan (Stevens Center for Science Writing, Cross-check): "Science Saturday: Why We Get Fat"
• Roberts, Russ. "Gary Taubes Podcasts". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.