What I'm Reading This Week: Gary Taubes

I'm initiating a weekly (I hope) blog post about what I'm reading. I find all sorts of interesting things and I figure I'll pass them along.

I'm really excited about Gary Taubes new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. I'm tired of being relegated to the lunatic fringe or into the diet fads category. The food that I eat is more normal than the Standard American Diet. It looks like the wave that it is going to wash out low-fat dogma is building more and more.

Gary Taubes just had a feature article in the NYT Magazine that is worth checking out: Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? It is very eye opening about the unreliability of epidemiological studies. Additionally, he has responded to readers questions about his article and there is some great information there. Be sure to pay attention to the Q and A about relative risk vs. absolute risk. It is a commonly used statistical distortion and we should all be questioning medical recommendations that are based on relative risk.

If you're enjoying that go ahead and check out his 2001 article: What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?

Can't get enough Gary? Here ya go:

Interview with Gary Taubes

The Soft Science of Dietary Fat -This was originally published in the journal Science.

Cognitive Dissonance

This is old but for some reason I forgot to post it.


The more thoroughly I embrace my new view on nutrition, the more I am able to recognize the wide spread cognitive dissonance about diet. As a nation, we are so committed to the lipid hypothesis that we apply it even when it goes completely contrary to logic. Here is a great example from the New York Times:

But the notion that Americans ever ate well is suspect. In 1966, when Americans were still comparatively thin, more than two billion hamburgers already had been sold in McDonald’s restaurants, noted Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. The recent rise in obesity may have more to do with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles than with the quality of our diets.

“The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” he said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie.... The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories.”

“Nostalgia is going to get us nowhere,” he added. -For the Overweight, Bad Advice by the Spoonful

I forget that whole milk is an epithet. It's funny to see a doctor living in the fat-era calling the diet of pre-fat-era Americans bad, unhealthy, and possibly fattening. It's like saying, "Back when people were thinner, they ate more fattening food." It simply doesn't make sense. Logically, if people were thinner, than their food was less fattening. Now, I'm obviously leaving out the issue of our sedentary lifestyles to make my point clearer, but the funny part is that in the next few paragraphs of the article they assert that exercise has little influence on obesity and weight loss. This just adds to my point about the cognitive dissonance. This doctor says it's not food but lack of exercise, but then the data says that exercise has little effect, so isn't the obvious next step to reexamine the hypothesis about food?

This question is answered in the last paragraphs of the article:

According to several animal studies, conditions during pregnancy, including the mother’s diet, may determine how fat the offspring are as adults. Human studies have shown that women who eat little in pregnancy, surprisingly, more often have children who grow into fat adults. More than a dozen studies have found that children are more likely to be fat if their mothers smoke during pregnancy.

Blame mothers! Even better, blame poor, malnourished mothers! How about blame a government who doesn't offer universal health care for pregnant women? How about blame welfare reform? How about blame shitty WIC programs? They've also linked formula to obesity, so now we can blame those ignorant, selfish, bottle-feeding mothers too! Or should we blame hospitals for allowing Nestle to supply every new mother with a free gift of formula right as she and her baby are trying to learn to breastfeed even though it's disgusting!