Gary Taubes: Pseudoscientific Dietary Dogma Caused Obesity And Diabetes Disasters

“People get fat because they eat too many calories.” “A calorie is a calorie.” “Saturated fats are bad.”

America’s leading dietary experts, the US government, and food manufacturers agreed on the above for decades. During that time, rates of overweight, obesity, and diabetes skyrocketed.

Either the experts are wrong or people didn’t follow the advice of experts.

Two journalists, Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz, say the experts are wrong. Saturated fats are good, not bad, and a calorie is not a calorie. The body doesn’t process a 60-calorie serving of bacon the same way it does a 60-calorie slice of cake. Obesity and diabetes are a result of a hormone imbalance caused by eating more carbohydrates than the body can handle, they say. When we eat carbohydrates, they believe, the body works to keep the fat locked away in storage. The best diet is a high-fat, high-protein, and low-carb diet known as the keto diet.

Naturally, many in the diet establishment, including at academic institutions like Berkeley and Harvard, have taken issue with the conclusions of Taubes and Teicholz. Mainstream experts argue that Taubes and Teicholz have misunderstood or misrepresented the science and downplayed the difficulty of sticking to the keto diet.

Teicholz and Taubes have responded at length to their critics at their terrific Substack, Unsettled Science. And, now, Taubes is out with a response to his critics in the form of a major new book, Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. At 750 pages, Taubes clearly intended for this to be the best available review of the scientific evidence and history published to date. Any serious person who disagrees with Taubes’ unorthodox views on diet and diabetes will need to contend with it.

I interviewed Taubes about it for today’s podcast. We talked about his critics and the challenge of sticking to keto, including for me. He told me that the book on diabetes flowed out of his 2016 book, The Case Against Sugar. “The liver has never evolved to see the doses of fructose that they get today… Biochemistry in the 60s and 70s demonstrated how fructose could cause this condition called ‘insulin resistance,’ which is the fundamental disorder of type 2 diabetes.”

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