Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Big Fat Lies with Gary Taubes, Stevens Institute of Technology

Gary Taubes is a controversial figure in the nutrition world. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't - but he always inspires thought. This video was referred to me by a reader of this blog, for which I am grateful.

Taubes has probably less formal education in health and nutrition than I do, but he seems to be pretty self-educated, which no doubt allows him to think for himself. Yet this also allows him to adopt personal biases which have little or no foundation in research.

As an example, his stance on exercise being a hindrance to weight loss is just plain wrong, no matter what studies he cites. One can twist research in ways it was never intended to be used.

A little bio from Wikipedia.
Gary Taubes (born April 30, 1956) is an American science writer. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), which is titled The Diet Delusion in the UK [1]. He has won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times and was awarded an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97. [2]

Born in Rochester, New York, Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard and aerospace engineering at Stanford (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.[3] 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.

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. Bad Science is a chronicle of the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989.

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 questioned the efficacy and health benefits of low-fat diets, was seen as defending the Atkins diet against the medical establishment and became extremely controversial (Taubes himself has stated "Even though I knew the article would be the most controversial article the Times Magazine ran all year, [the reaction] still shocked me").[2] The Center for Science in the Public Interest published a rebuttal to the Times article in their November, 2002, newsletter [4]. According to Taubes, "[T]he CSPI is an advocacy group that has been pushing low-fat diets since the 1970s."[5].

In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, ISBN 978-1400040780 (published as The Diet Delusion in the UK, ISBN 978-0091891411). This aims to examine how a hypothesis 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 dietary research from as early as the 1800s.

Taubes' hypothesis is that the medical community and the 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.

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. Although Taubes has no formal training in nutrition or medicine, his book was praised as "raising interesting and valuable points" by Dr. Andrew Weil, a believer of alternative medicine, while Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Jillian Michaels who appeared on the same program disagreed with Taubes on many questions. [6]
This video is about his recent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.




2 comments:

teeny yogini said...

Gary Taubes to me is the equivalent of a scientific demagogue. He cherry-picks data to support certain hypotheses and then states those hypotheses in the strongest of terms in order to make himself controversial. It seems to work for him.

But I'm unimpressed with his central argument. I think most people, or all dietary ideologies, would agree that an extreme excess of refined carbs is unhealthy -- but carbohydrates in general form the basis of the diets of the vast majority of the world's poor people, and most of them are quite lean. Why? Because they are eating at subsistence calorie levels. (There are, in fact, some studies that show obesity increases as people who eat low-calorie starch-based diets shift away from them . . . )

Not carbohydrates, nor fats, nor exercise are the enemy. The enemy is overindulgence forged by overabundance.

Anonymous said...

You have a BELIEF about exercise. The EVIDENCE shows us that it is NOT particularly useful or effective to solve obesity.

You have not researched this. it is well known amonmg scientists such as Dr. Jeffrey Friedman that exercise is for HEALTH - NOT weight loss.