Gary Taubes - Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

ALSO BY GARY TAUBES

Good Calories, Bad Calories:
Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

Bad Science:
The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

Nobel Dreams:
Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by Gary Taubes

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taubes, Gary.
Why we get fat and what to do about it / Gary Taubes.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59551-5
1. Low-carbohydrate diet. 2. Weight loss. 3. ObesityEtiology. I. Title.
RM 237.73. T 39 2011
613.712dc22 2010034248

This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice of physicians. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. However, before starting the dietary recommendations in this book or any other diet regimen, you should consult your physician.

v3.1

To N.N.T.

This book has been in the works for more than a decade. It began with a series of investigative articles that I wrote for the journal Science and then the New York Times Magazine on the surprisingly dismal state of nutrition and chronic-disease research. It is an extension and distillation of the five years of further research that became my previous book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007). Its arguments were honed in lectures at medical schools, universities, and research institutions throughout the United States and Canada.

What I tried to make clear in Good Calories, Bad Calories was that nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War with the evaporation of the European community of scientists and physicians that did the pioneering work in those disciplines. It has since resisted all attempts to correct it. As a result, the individuals involved in this research have not only wasted decades of time, effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained impervious to an ever-growing body of evidence that refutes them while being embraced by public-health authorities and translated into precisely the wrong advice about what to eat and, more important, what not to eat if we want to maintain a healthy weight and live a long and healthy life.

I decided to write Why We Get Fat largely because of two common responses that I receive to Good Calories, Bad Calories.

The first comes from those researchers who made an effort to understand the arguments in Good Calories, Bad Calories, who read the book or listened to one of my lectures or discussed these ideas with me directly. Im often told by these people that what Im saying about why we get fat, and about the dietary causes of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, makes significant sense. It certainly could be right, they say, with the unspoken implication that what weve been told for the past half-century certainly could be wrong. We all agree that these competing ideas should be tested.

I believe, though, that this is an urgent matter. If so many people are getting fat and diabetic in large part because weve been getting the wrong advice, we should not be dawdling about determining that with certainty. The disease burdens of obesity and diabetes are already overwhelming not only hundreds of millions of individuals but our health-care systems as well.

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though, they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public-health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after one of my lectures, the kind of change Im advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.

That is simply too long to wait to get the right answers to these critical questions. So this book was written in part to speed up the process. I offer here the arguments against the conventional wisdom distilled down to their essence. If they certainly could be right, then lets test them, and lets do it sooner rather than later.

The other response I get frequently is from those lay readers, as well as an encouraging number of physicians, nutritionists, researchers, and health administrators, who say that they read Good Calories, Bad Calories or listened to my lectures, found the logic and the evidence compelling, and embraced the message implicit in it. They tell me their lives and their health have been transformed in ways they didnt think possible. They have lost weight almost effortlessly and have kept it off. Their risk factors for heart disease have improved dramatically. Some say they no longer need their hypertension and diabetes medications. They feel better and have more energy. Put simply, they feel healthy for the first time in far too long. You can see these kinds of comments on the Amazon web page for Good Calories, Bad Calories, where they represent a large proportion of the several hundred personal reviews at the site.

These comments, e-mails, and letters have often come with a request. Good Calories, Bad Calories is lengthy (nearly five hundred pages), dense with science and historical context, and densely annotated, all of which I believe was necessary to initiate a meaningful dialogue with the experts and assure that they (or any reader) take nothing I say on trust alone. The book demands that the reader devote considerable time and attention to following the evidence and the arguments. For this reason, many who read it have asked me to write another book, one that their husbands or wives, their aging parents, or their friends and siblings can read without difficulty. Many physicians have asked me to write a book that they can give to their patients, or even to their fellow physicians, a book that doesnt require such an investment of time and effort.

So this is the other reason I wrote Why We Get Fat. I hope by reading it you will understand, perhaps for the first time, why we do get fat and what to do about it.

My one request is that you think critically while youre reading. I want you to keep asking yourself as you read whether what Im saying really makes sense. To steal a phrase from Michael Pollan, this book is intended to be a thinkers manifesto. Its goal is to refute some of the misconceptions that pass for public-health and medical advice in this country and around the world, and to arm you with the necessary information and logic to take your health and well-being into your own hands.

One word of caution though: If you accept my arguments as valid and change your diet accordingly, you may be going against your doctors advice, and certainly that of the health organizations and government agencies that dictate the consensus opinion on what constitutes a healthy diet. In that sense, you read this book and act on it at your own risk. That situation can be rectified, though, by giving this book to your physician when youre done reading it, so that he or she, too, can decide who and what to believe. And you might give it to your congressional representatives as well, because the rising tides of obesity and diabetes in the United States and throughout the world are indeed massive public-health problems, not just our own individual burdens to bear. It would help if our elected representatives actually understood how we got into this situation, so they could act finally to resolve it, rather than perpetuate it.