Gary Taubes

That sugar is half fructose is what fundamentally differentiates it from starches and even the whitest, most refined flour.

What may be the single most incomprehensible aspect of the last half century of obesity research is the failure of those involved to grasp the fact that both hunger and sedentary behavior can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to grow fat, just as a lack of hunger and the impulse to engage in physical activity can be driven by a metabolic-hormonal disposition to burn calories rather than store them.

Despite myriad attempts, researchers were unable to establish that patients with atherosclerosis had significantly more cholesterol in their bloodstream than those who didn’t.

Children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing.

The documented failure of semi-starvation diets for the obese dates back at least half a century.

In those areas where human remains span the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to farmers, anthropologists have reported that both nutrition and health declined, rather than improved, with the adoption of agriculture.

“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”

It’s effectively impossible to restrict calories significantly without also reducing the carbohydrates.

Once the “truth” has been declared, even if it’s based on incomplete evidence, the overwhelming tendency is to interpret all future observations in support of that preconception.

That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles of themselves.

One of the most reproducible findings in obesity research, as I’ve said, is that fat people, on average, eat no more than lean people.

That the toxic-environment hypothesis is deeply immersed in moral and class judgments is evident by the observation that few or none of the condemnations of fast-food restaurants included a coffee chain such as Starbucks, despite the copious extra calories it peddles.