Gary Taubes

All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon.

The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.

Conflict of interest is an accusation invariably wielded to discredit those viewpoints with which one disagrees.

From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day…. The facts did not support these claims, but the myths served a purpose, and so they remained unquestioned.

The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis—that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it—and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations.

Obesity levels in the United States remained relatively constant from the early 1960s through 1980, between 12 and 14 percent of the population; over the next twenty-five years, coincident with the official recommendations to eat less fat and so more carbohydrates, it surged to over 30 percent.

Five of these trials tested the diet on obese adults, one on adolescents. Together they included considerably more than six hundred obese subjects. In every case, the weight loss after three to six months was two to three times greater on the low-carbohydrate diet—unrestricted in calories—than on the calorie-restricted, low-fat diet.

In preventative medicine, benefits without risks are nonexistent.

Because sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) are both effectively half glucose and half fructose, they offer the worst of both sugars.

A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. Lost in this distillation is the fact that the effects of these different nutrients on metabolism and hormone secretion are so radically different, as is the manner in which the body employs the nutrients, that the energetically equivalence of the calories themselves is largely irrelevant to why we gain weight.

When I interviewed Grundy in May 2004, he acknowledged that metabolic syndrome was the cause of most heart disease in America, and that this syndrome is probably caused by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. Yet in his three reports—representing the official NIH, AHA, and ADA positions—all remained firmly wedded to the fat-cholesterol dogma.

By the 1920s, insulin was discovered and found to be essential for the utilization of carbohydrates for energy. Without insulin, diabetic patients could still mitigate the symptoms of the disease by restricting the starches and sugar in their diet. And yet diabetologists would come to reject categorically the notion that sugar and refined carbohydrates could somehow be responsible for the disease—another example of powerful authority figures winning out over science.