On navigating education, what good science means, and why we get fat.
Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar (2016), Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), published as The Diet Delusion in the UK. Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. Taubes graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in applied physics, and received a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and in journalism from Columbia.
Gary Taubes
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[00:00:00] Alex: Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder of the nonprofit Nutrition Science Initiative. He's the author of The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It, and Good Calories, Bad Calories, published as The Diet Delusion in the UK.
Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson foundation investigator award in health policy research and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. Taubes graduated from Harvard college with a bachelor's degree in applied physics and received a master's degree in engineering from Stanford and in journalism from Columbia.
Today, we talked about navigating education, what good science means and why we get fat. Hope you enjoy.
[00:00:45] Alex: That's where I wanted to to start off. I mean, how did you get into all of this? You studied what? Applied physics and aerospace engineering before getting a degree in journalism eventually. Right? Was, was that
[00:00:59] Gary: the plan? Well, no, there was no plan when I grew up in the sixties. Right. It was all, yeah. My generation, I, I want her to be an astronaut naive.
I read science fiction books. I had an older brother, went off to study physics who was a very intelligent man and I was competing with him. So I've studied physics, you know, I thought, what do astronauts study? By my junior year, when I got a C minus in quantum physics, my advisor. Very politely suggested that I find an alternative career path.
And at that time I had kind of fallen in love with writing. So the degree in applied physics was just it was easy. It was a degree I could get with three years of physics and a C minus in quantum physics. And I spent my senior year. Taking basically English courses and I applied to graduate school at Stanford because I wanted to go to the west coast.
I mean, I was it about as on serious, a student, as you could find at Harvard in the 1970s and studying physics Got a degree in aerospace engineering because Stanford was silly enough to give me a scholarship to go at the time. I think my advisor who was had been in the aerospace industry is still 50 years later, trying to get the scholarship money back.
He's still alive on anyway, while I'm somewhere along the way I read all the presidents. And I had switched from reading science fiction to like new D and somehow being an investigative reporter seemed like the late 1970s version of being Philip Marlowe or Sam spade, private detectives. And so I had, I had to journalism school at Columbia.
I got in because I had a science background and science writing was supposed to be the future. And a couple of years actually I didn't, I wanted to be an investigative journalist, but I couldn't get any serious job offers in journalism because I had no background in journalism. I didn't write for the Harvard papers.
I didn't write for my high school papers. I couldn't even get into journalism, symposia seminars at Harvard and Stanford because I didn't write for the papers. I had no experience. So Coming out of graduate school. The only job I could get that allowed me to stay in New York city was science, journalism, and a couple of years into science journalism, I realized that there's some pretty bad science out there.
And that if you think critically and you have common sense, you can challenge some of the research and. Everything's sort of developed from there.
[00:03:52] Alex: Interesting. And how did you know nutritional science, diet science? Like how did that all come into play? Was that sort of a natural progression for you? Is that of interest previously?
[00:04:02] Gary: No, not at all. Other than I had a mother who liked to tell us what the latest science said, she read a, the science times and she got, we had science news delivered back then, and she had two science-oriented sons. So she can kept up by telling us that the study say, we should do this, or we should eat that.
And I often would say, yeah, She would say, they say, we should do this. And I would respond who's they? Mom, do they know what they're talking about? And I used to joke that someday I would write a book called who's they mom about nutrition science. And I basically wrote that book eventually. I just gave it a different title, although it might've sold better.
And I called it. Who is the day? Mom on B.
My first book, I went to a live at the physics laboratory CERN and follow what I thought was going to be a great discovery in high interview physics. And it turned out that these physicists had screwed up and they, I spent 10 months, we would say today where I was embedded with the physicist, watching them realize how they had screwed up and learning about the check and history of the businesses.
See Italian. Businesses Harvard professor who ran the experiment and had been wrong on many of his claims in the past. So I ended up writing an expert today about high energy physics. When I finished that book it turned out and I continued doing science journalism, and it turned out that a lot of scientists had people similar to this physicist I had written about in their field.
So they would, I would tell them about this book. I had written about dreams and this physicist, Carla Rubia and they would say, oh, if you think Ruby was bad, you should write about so-and-so. Or you should cover this, or so suddenly I had people basically leaking me stories that the typical science journalist who sees himself as a translator of complex subjects to the lay public wouldn't have had access to.
So I did a series of these investigations. I ended up writing a book on this scientific fiasco called cold fusion. And there's a big, great scientific fiasco of like the mid to late 20th century. I get it cause I needed a paycheck and that was offered a paycheck. This is by the way, a lesson and not how unimportant it often is to not know where your career is going to take.
At the time I was living in Los yeah. Angeles trying to write screenplays. So I could move back to Europe, which I had falling in love with writing Nobel dreams and my screen writing career you're needed financing, someone cold fusion happened. And my publisher asked me if I'd write a book on it. I said, yes, assuming the book had taken me nine months and I could make enough money to write scripts for two years.
And the book took me three years. And by the time I was done, I was $40,000 in debt to my father. I bonded a lot over the years with writers about how indebted we were to our parents and various courses in our career. And I had moved back to New York and the cold fusion book got good reviews, including a lengthy New York review.
And suddenly I was in sconce back and science journalism. As I was doing that book, I made a lot of friends in the physics community. Then my first book as well, they all always appreciated my critical take on science. And they said, if you think the science of cold fusion is bad, you should see the rap in public health science.
That's terrible. And at the time they were interested in this idea that electromagnetic fields from power lines cause. Cancer brain cancer and leukemia, which was terrible science. And it was based on the field of risk factor epidemiologist. Which is the kind of stuff you read about in the papers every day, when you read that you know, vegetable oils increase or decrease your risk of heart disease or coffee increases your risk of, you know, pick your cancer.
The most common one today is red and processed meats increase your risk of some cancer. That's all risk factor epidemiology or nutritional epidemiology. When it comes to factors like me and my physicists. Ali friends thought it was a sort of pseudoscience and it is a sort of pseudo science. And so I, I wrote a piece on electromagnetic fields for the Atlantic and that science.
And then I pitched an article on epidemiology itself to the journal science. And now I was suddenly a sort of public health writer. And about four years later, I stumbled into the nutrition field, but it turned out that the science there was almost from my perspective in comprehensively bad. Although I've come to understand why it's bad.
And I have never been able to get out. So I've been writing about that now for going on 25 years. That's
[00:09:13] Alex: quite the path. And, you know, I've, I've certainly got my unshare questions about a lot of the nutritional science stuff, but I mean more broadly speaking, having all this experience and sort of embedding yourself in a lot of these areas and identifying.
Good and bad science. Do you have any sort of framework you've developed or process you've developed to sort of identify what constitutes good science or bad science?
[00:09:36] Gary: It's interesting. A lot of it is kind of intuitive often. You're making judgements about the scientists themselves. Right? I used to describe this to my friends.
A lot of my writing friends are English majors in college. And I say, you know, you could read, say Norman mailer and John Grisham and make a judgment that Norman mailer is far the better writer. Even if John Grisham's books sell an order of magnitude or two more, you know, and you have no doubt you're right.
When it came to putting a sentence together, even a novel together, Norman mailers, or, you know, Saul bellow or pickier, your author is better than John Gresham. We understand why John Grisham is so marketable in science well, there's a good line I use in every pretty much every book I've written with the possible, exception of the first, which is from Richard Feynman the great Nobel Laureate physicist, who said the first principle of science is you must not fool yourself.
And you're the easiest person to fool. So if you're interviewing a scientist a researcher and he's using declarative sentences without condition, it's about what he thinks he's discovered. you begin to wonder, does he, is he aware how easy it is for him to be fooled? How the history of science suggests that no matter how confident he is The most likely scenario was that he's wrong about he or she is wrong about what they're telling you. And so you're dealing with a not very good scientist and then you should be skeptical of the science they're telling you. And then the question is, is that skepticism enough to follow through with, and is there a story there?
In fact, the first, very first story I did on, on nutrition, which was on this question, something we all. Still pretty much ubiquitously believe, which is that a salt, rich diet causes hypertension or high blood pressure. And I, healthy diet is a low salt diet, and I stumbled into that field by accident.
But the, one of the things that made me think was worth a story. As I was interviewing a fellow at Northwestern university in Chicago, who. Was telling me I had come to the conclusion that there's a controversy. There was a controversy over salt and high blood pressure, whether salt was the cause of high blood pressure.
And he was telling me that there's no evidence that it is. And as soon as somebody says no evidence, they're not speaking scientifically, because if there's a controversy, clearly there's enough evidence to convince some people. That there is even if you don't personally find that evidence compelling and a good scientist speaks precisely about what the evidence does and does not show in a statement like there's no evidence if somebody's clearly not thinking precisely or speaking precisely.
So I actually got off the phone with this guy and I called up my editor at science and I said, one of I was on the phone with him for about an hour and a half. And he was clearly one of the worst scientists. I know. Interviewed in my life. And yeah, my second book on cold fusion was called bad science.
And I thought writing about that. I had interviewed the worst scientists in the world, but clearly I hadn't, I can't, you know, so I called him my editor and I said, look, one of the worst scientists I've ever interviewed in my life just took credit for putting us on the low salt diet we've been eating. I don't know what the story is here, but if this guy was substantively involved, there's a good story there because you could think of all of the scientific method and the critical, skeptical thinking that's institutionalized in sciences is trying to prevent this process of fooling yourself.
So you, you think you'll get the right answer. You know, you have a hypothesis or an idea that explains some phenomenon you're studying and then everything else is supposed to sort of check you from falling in love with your hypothesis, such that you interpret all the data as though it's correct. If you've ever been in love.
And I once used this metaphor with a university administrator at the university of Utah, talking about cold fusion. She said, why would all the scientists be so convinced? It's right. And I said, well, have you ever fallen in love? And all your friends are telling you what's the wrong woman or the wrong man.
And you've got an explanation for everything, for why they are wrong and you are right until of course, eventually it blows up in your face. So anyway, I make those judgements about scientists. Every time I interview one. And then for scientists, Sounds like a good scientist, the way Norman mailer, Saul bellow reads like a good writer, then I'm willing to trust what they're telling me.
And if they don't, then I'm skeptical. And depending on how big the story I start asking, is there a good story?
[00:14:33] Alex: Gotcha. Now, now to move into the space of nutritional science, you know, obviously a lot of your work has been in and around that over the last, like you mentioned a couple of decades, I mean, of, of course, lots of people are into diet, nutritional science and like a very casual sense.
You gave the explanation of your, your mother earlier on trying a diet. It's gone vegan gluten-free keto, any of this stuff. It's, it's become quite trendy over the last few years in many ways. What a lot of people, I guess, might not know. And something I've discovered in reading a lot of your work is that there, there is a bit of contention that exists behind the scenes with regard to cause and effect.
Right. So I thought we should probably start with where the greatest level of consensus is. Right. Which seems to be that there's basically, if you're talking about the, the, the fat argument. Sort of cause and effect argument there. It seems to be that there's basically a mismatch between I mean the, the environment in which humans evolved and the landscape of food today, right?
With this Mitch, Matt mismatch being sort of primarily responsible. More widespread obesity. Is that, is that the case?
[00:15:34] Gary: Yeah, I think that's, and that's a good assessment that that's where the area of consensus is. We all agree that somehow we're out of sync with our environment, that the foods we're eating and the lifestyle we're living are not conducive to the organisms that we've, we evolve.
So then the question is, you know, and another area of consensus on this somehow is if we ate the whole foods, unprocessed foods in something close to their natural state, that would take care of most of the problem or much of the problem. And, but the scientific controversy then becomes what's wrong with food to eat.
Is it way too much meat within the law? It made her within about it, the kind of meat we eat or. We didn't evolve P process meets, or is it the fat content would involve pizza as much saturated fat as we eat, or as much vegetable oils as we consume, or the kind of fats we consume. Is it the sugar content of the diet and argument that I've made?
We didn't involve the, excuse me you know, refined sugars, sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup. Anything, but the tiniest quantity found seasonally and fruit. Is it the kind of carbohydrates we consume that, you know, we're fine. Processed carbohydrates. The latest sort of buzzword is it's ultra processed foods.
In general, which is a way to sort of condemn everything there all ways to condemn everything in the middle aisles of the supermarket. Michael Pollan famously called these things food-like substances, which I refer to ultra processed foods, at least food-like substances. It doesn't pretend to be scientific ultra processed foods kind of does.
So there are all these. Different gender. Do we just see too much and exercise too little that our modern mechanized world and, you know, I live in Oakland, California. I leave my house roughly once every other day. You know, that humans arguably did not evolve to be even. You know, close to that sedentary, is that the problem?
So, you know, in all these spaces, there are people making arguments for what the cause of these common chronic diseases are. All of which associated with obesity and diabetes. So obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, you know, they all dementia, even. They all sort of associate together in populations and they tend to cluster together and patients.
And so it's reasonable to believe that what causes one of them causes all of them. And then the question is what aspect of this out of sync food environment or lifestyle environment is causing it? That's where the contrary.
[00:18:28] Alex: Gotcha. And so to narrow in on that a little bit, right? Like. Correct me if I'm wrong here, obviously that a large portion of the disagreement in the obesity debate in particular is whether cause and effect points to the brain versus fat cells or insulin as like the primary determinant of fatness in general.
And then your argument is, as far as I understand it, that the brain is responding to what happens in the body. Rather than, than causing it, right. Like basically that we don't get fat because we eat too much. We eat too much because we're getting fatter. Is that
[00:19:04] Gary: right? Yeah, basically. Yeah, the this is one of my primary contributions and the fact that this comes from a journalist makes it effectively impossible to believe, but nonetheless, I'm going to argue that.
Undeniable since 1930, roughly the conventional was until 1930, the conventional wisdom thinking on obesity was that maybe it's caused by eating too much, but a lot of overweight people don't eat very much at all. And so it's clearly a hereditary because obesity tends to run in families. So maybe there's some hormonal endocrine constitutional issue going on.
And the entire science of obesity was maybe a half dozen physician scientists around the world who were using on this causality question. There was no way to experiment on obesity. So on 1930 The university of Michigan physician named Louis Newburgh claims to establish definitively the overeating hypothesis of obesity and from Iran.
And you can never say that obesity is, could all hormonal defect that some people get fat because some part of the endocrine system is dysregulated at the end. By 19, late 1930s, new Berg's ideas have been once they have animal models of obesity, you can now do experiments. And the new Berg's overeating thinking is used to interpret the animal experiments and post-World war to a whole community of researchers grows up.
Believing obesity is caused by overeating, taking in too many calories and you expend and over readings of behavior. Not a physiological state. It's a behavior eating too much and sedentary behavior. So by the 1960s, you've got to feel that it's actually dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists who are trying to get people to add people, to eat less, to put it bluntly.
And the field kind of goes off the rails from then when the hormone leptin is discovered in 1994, turning obesity into a subdiscipline of molecular biology. The assumption is leptin is a satiety hormone, the fat tissues way of telling the brain that you got to stop eating so much. And every virtually everything else has been interpreted in that light in fact of life, essentially.
And, you know, I'm sure a few papers haven't, but 99.999% of the literature is interpreted in this energy balance thing. And obesity research will tell you it's obvious it's the laws of thermodynamics and anyone who argues otherwise doesn't believe in physics. The counter argument is that it's all hormone would be.
So some people just, as some people are constitutionally pre-disposed to grow tall, some people are constitutionally predisposed to go fat. And that's a sort of hormonal endocrine regulatory, you know, when height it's growth, hormone and something called insulin-like growth factor in fat accumulation, it turns out it's the hormone ins.
Responding to the brain and the, all of this was worked out in the field of researchers studying fat metabolism. But the weird thing about this history is a researcher studying obesity. The disorder of excess fat accumulation had no context, no contact with the researchers studying fat accumulation itself.
They were like physiologists working with lab moms. So you have a science of obesity it's caused by eating too much. That is completely disassociated from the science of fat storage, which is it's dominated by the hormone insulin, which responds to the carbohydrate content of the diet and links, obesity, intimately to type two diabetes, which it is linked.
So anyway, this is what I've sort of, I was the first one to ever go back into this research. Thanks to them. You can venture to the internet. I did this between 2002 and 2007 and put together this history and the history is pretty clear. Once obesity researchers decided that we get fax, we too much.
Started studying why obese people might eat too much as opposed to studying why these people might accumulate too much fat, which is the fundamental disorder. And I've been trying it and others now. And in fact, there's a paper coming out two weeks, a big review and the American journal of nutrition, excuse me, between my
anyway, there's a review article coming out in the. American journal of clinical nutrition, September 13th, making the arguments basically that I just gave you and short form. And we have first author, the principal author is David Ludwig, a professor at Harvard, and we have self and then 15 other barriers.
Well-respected academic researcher saying in effect, look, we've been laboring under the wrong paradigm. Literally. Kuhnian sense. Anyway, and, and if you fix the paradigm, it's not about how much you eat or exercise. It's about the carbohydrates.
You eat, creating this sort of hormonal milieu that fosters fat storage on you begin to make progress against the problem, right? This, this idea, I was to obesity associates with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, and dementia. All this thinking on obesity and energy balance and facts, all those other fields as well.
Right. And like I said, because I'm a journalist, not obesity research are the odds that I'm right about what I told you compelling as it may sound or.
[00:24:55] Alex: Hmm. So T to get into the case for Quito here and tying in what you were talking about with this, this sort of endocrine hypothesis, is it, is it, what is it about high fat, low carb diets that, that work does it just boil down to avoiding elevated insulin levels? Because from, from what I understand what you were talking about before elevated insulin basically shuts down.
Do you so fatty acids as fuel, right? So you burn less fat and you become fatter. Is that sort of the idea?
[00:25:27] Gary: That's the idea. Yeah. And when you so insulin is created in response to the carbohydrates in the diet and you also get simplest way to say it. And and the idea is it's trying to keep blood sugar low.
Cause high blood sugar is toxic in one way. It does that as by signaling lean tissue, your muscles and organs to take up the blood sugar as blood sugar starts rising to take up the glucose and burn it for fuel. And the other way it does add is it signals the fat cells to take up all the fat that might be circulating and just keep that stored.
So you could think of it as it wants. Blood sugar burn taken off. So it wants to get the alternative fuel out of the way. And it's telling the cells look, burn the carbs. Cause we got carbs coming in and we can't let that situation get out of control. And meanwhile, we'll hold onto the fat and the carbs get taken care of.
And then some levels start coming down. The fat starts to get released from the fat cells and mobilize and use for fuel. So you burn carbs, you know, while you're eating and after the meal. And then as carbs start coming in, your blood sugar starts coming down. You replace that fuel source with fat ideal world that flip-flops back and forth all day long.
So the idea is, and this was
Demonstrating inclusively by the 1960s, fat cells are exquisitely sensitive to insulin. That's the term that the fat metabolism researchers would often use exquisitely sensitive. It's the most sensitive tissue in your body to insulin. So when insulin is secreted bad cells, even if there's just a little bit left in the circulation, fat cells are going to try and hold onto the fat they've stored.
And so the idea is if you want to get the fat out of your fat cells and burn it for fuel, you have to minimize your insulin levels. The fat will come out and be used for fuel and insulins at a minimum. And the way you do that is you remember of the carbohydrates in the diet and you replace it with fat.
So a ketogenic diet is a diet that's sort of. Maximally removes carbs and replaces it with fat because fats, the one macronutrient that doesn't stimulate instance of creation, some big C percent of the amino acids and protein are converted to glucose carbohydrates. So they'll stimulate some insulin secretion.
That doesn't. So that's the logic mind, the ketogenic diet, the case for keto is an effect that some of us are so sensitive to insulin. For whatever reason that if we want to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, we basically have to remove, you know, again, effectively all the carbohydrates from the diet and replace those calories with fat.
Then you're in ketosis, the diet. Technically ketogenic, but what'd you try to achieve as minimal insulin levels
[00:28:27] Alex: seems like pretty straightforward
[00:28:29] Gary: advice. And the argument is, you know, like lean people are fine. They don't have this problem. They can eat carbs and they're, they're, you know, fat cells will take up some fat and then it'll release it and it'll, they'll stay lean.
This is what I don't, you know, it's funny. Cause a lot of the pushback I get particularly on Twitter. Media I should stay off of is from like the bodybuilders who say, look at what I did with my body. And I eat 400 carbs a day. Therefore you can say carbs or fat. And I have to say, have you ever considered the fact that what your body does when it eats carbohydrates is different than what an obese person, a person with obesity body does when they had carbohydrates and.
I don't get reasonable answers from the body nobody's ever said to me. And that's a good point. I think you might be right.
[00:29:25] Alex: Well for the rest of us, I guess it's, it's pretty straightforward. Thank you for doing this. This has been a really great experience.
[00:29:32] Gary: Okay.
My pleasure, take care Alex.
Bye-bye bye-bye.