Gary Taubes
About
Science writer on diet, used for the weak/strong claim distinction
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Claims by Gary Taubes (20 of 131)
Low-carb beat low-fat on weight and risk factors
Randomized trials comparing a calorie-unrestricted Atkins-style high-fat diet against a calorie-restricted American Heart Association low-fat diet consistently showed the Atkins group lost more weight despite eating freely (implying calories don't really matter and that satiety comes sooner) and that their heart disease risk factors improved more — anomalous results contradicting both the overeating and the dietary-fat pillars.
Forcing obese children to eat less is torture
If the hormonal hypothesis is correct, treating obese children by pushing them to eat less and exercise more is effectively torturing them — subjecting them to constant hunger and discomfort that would be unacceptable for anyone — and instead everyone they consult should give consistent advice to avoid sugar and refined flour to be metabolically healthy.
Insulin is the most lipogenic hormone
By 1965 it was established, including by Yalow and Berson who created the radioimmunoassay, that insulin is the most lipogenic hormone — it tells lean tissue to take up glucose and tells fat tissue to take up and hold fat — so the more insulin in the blood, the more fat the body accumulates, and insulin is secreted in response to dietary carbohydrate.
Seven Countries Study cherry-picked nations
Ansel Keys's Seven Countries Study could have produced the opposite conclusion if it had included France and Switzerland — two countries with very high saturated-fat (cheese-based) diets and among the world's highest lifespans — instead of Greece and Italy, demonstrating that observational studies let researchers pick data that fit their preconceptions and are essentially uninterpretable.
Cutting sugar and refined flour is uncontested
Reducing sugar and highly refined flour intake and replacing them with low-glycemic-index, unrefined ('slow') carbohydrates while changing nothing else is now accepted by essentially everyone in the health community as a good idea, even though from the 1970s to the early 2000s official guidance pushed low-fat at the expense of attention to sugar.
Cephalic phase insulin response makes you hungry
Insulin secretion begins before eating — the cephalic phase insulin response triggered merely by thinking about or seeing food — and this empties the circulation of nutrients into storage, which actually makes a person hungrier, so 'appetite begins with the meal' and the function of an appetizer is to provoke hunger rather than satisfy it.
NuSI pilot study failed and was overinterpreted
The NuSI-funded metabolic ward pilot study with Kevin Hall could not infer causality because it was non-randomized and the subjects lost weight during the run-in instead of staying in energy balance; the researchers nonetheless interpreted it as showing the hormonal hypothesis was wrong, which Taubes regards as overinterpreting uninterpretable data — a textbook example of bad science.
Public health lowered standards for establishing causality
Rather than acknowledge it cannot establish reliable causal knowledge about diet given how messy human subjects are, the public health/nutrition community collectively lowered the standards of evidence it uses to make claims about what constitutes a healthy diet, treating rigorous experimental requirements as unaffordable luxuries.
Salt does not cause high blood pressure per RCTs
The belief that salt causes high blood pressure, which has been the basis of dietary advice since the 1980s, is not supported by the evidence from randomized controlled trials — you would never conclude salt causes hypertension from that evidence alone.
Cold fusion was error compounded by data fabrication
The cold fusion scandal was primarily an honest mistake, but the Utah researchers fabricated data because they believed their genuine (if premature) discovery was being stolen by a rival physicist, leading them to publish made-up numbers — technically fraud, though they may not have fully understood they were doing wrong.
Diabetes was vanishingly rare 120 years ago
Over a third of the US population is clinically obese and two-thirds overweight, and nearly one in ten Americans is diabetic — a disease that was vanishingly rare about 120 years ago — yet there is placid acceptance rather than urgent scientific inquiry into the cause.
Atkins diet derived from insulin biochemistry
Robert Atkins, a New York cardiologist, read the 1960s literature showing insulin drives fat storage and is secreted in response to carbohydrates, and reasoned that removing carbohydrates and replacing them with fat would lower insulin, mobilize stored fat, and cause weight loss — the basis of his best-selling 1973 diet book.
Calorie theory is an artifact of measurement technology
The energy-balance theory arose because nineteenth-century calorimeters could only measure the energy content of food and energy expenditure, so the field built a hypothesis around what it could measure ('a calorie is a calorie') rather than around the hormonal mechanisms that actually regulate fat — the theory is technology-dependent.
Obesity is a hormonal regulatory disorder
Obesity is best understood not as an energy-balance disorder but as a hormonal regulatory defect in which the quality of food eaten (especially easily digestible refined grains and sugars) elevates insulin, which signals fat tissue to store fat independently of caloric content, so some foods are literally fattening and others are not regardless of their calories.
Boys and girls partition fat differently at puberty
At puberty boys lose fat and gain muscle while girls gain fat in specific locations, even though both are taking in more calories than they expend, demonstrating that fat accumulation is hormonally regulated and the energy surplus is irrelevant to explaining where and whether fat is deposited.
Energy balance confuses correlation with causation of obesity
The energy-balance theory of obesity is misconceived because, like saying a person got rich by spending less than they earned, it confuses a thermodynamic necessity (taking in more energy than expended) with a causal explanation; the real question is why the body traps energy as fat, analogous to asking why the atmosphere traps heat rather than noting it absorbs more energy than it emits.
Obesity field deliberately removed endocrinology
Because the post-war American obesity researchers disliked the implication that a low-carb high-fat diet would prevent obesity (fearing it would cause heart disease) and believed fat people simply overeat, they effectively removed endocrinology from the field, to the point that a recent New England Journal of Medicine article on the pathophysiology of obesity contains zero discussion of the hormones and enzymes that regulate fat accumulation.
Epidemiology establishes causation only for huge effects
Observational epidemiology can establish causality only when effects are enormous and no alternative hypothesis is plausible — like the roughly 20-fold increased lung cancer risk in smokers — whereas the diet-disease effects on which public health policy is based are small (20% or 50% increased risk), for which countless confounding explanations are imaginable.
Small fields are vulnerable to a few bad scientists
Scientific paradigms are set when fields are small enough that a half-dozen people determine what counts as good science; in molecular biology removing Crick would have lost the understanding of DNA, but in obesity research the dominant half-dozen figures simply were not good scientists, so the field's paradigm was shaped by people who did not know how to do science.
Saturated-fat hypothesis failed in randomized trials
The hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease rests on observational studies like Ancel Keys's Seven Countries Study, which only show association and carry no causal information; when researchers conducted randomized controlled trials to test it directly, trial after trial failed to confirm that reducing saturated fat lowers heart disease.
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