SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 3/24/08, updated 7/16/08
Ever wonder why nutrition science seems to be so %!$@! half-baked? Read this book to find out.
Important update, early 2011: Mr. Taubes has a new book out, Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It, which has now been warmly reviewed by eSkeptic. Taubes has earned many harsh critics since the publication of GCBC, but he is defended by many other critical thinkers.
Gary Taubes. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control, and disease. Knopf, 2007.
Pros: exhaustively researched and credible, offering countless fascinating insights into nutrition science that simply aren’t available anywhere else.
Cons: heavy reading, not for the faint of heart.
It’s no accident that it’s hard to know what we should eat. It’s not just because it’s a difficult subject. There are reasons why we are bombarded by half-baked, conflicting nutritional advice from birth to death.
It’s the government’s fault.
Gary Taubes explains the reasons. He tells many stories about the history of nutrition science that will stand your hair on end — and the most disturbing of all is the story of the American government’s good intentions gone wrong.
In the middle of the 20th Century, the American government got involved in telling people what to eat. It was an unprecedented thing to do, new under the sun: Governments had never done anything like that before. Motivated by earnest public health idealism, they nevertheless messed up. Governments can make a mess of anything!
Just a few well-meaning men, civil servants who weren’t scientists and didn’t understand science, used (and abused) a frightening power to cherry-pick from scientific opinion and elevate it to the status of “conventional wisdom.” They bought into a single scientific opinion tirelessly rammed down their throats by a doctor-zealot, Ancel Keys, who believed, without adequate evidence, that fat was the root of dietary evil.
Governments can make a mess of anything!Keys’ idea was controversial among scientists at the time. The government believed Keys not because he was right or had better evidence than other scientists — he really wasn’t and he really didn’t, as Taubes easily persuades us — but because he lobbied them more effectively, because he won a political battle against less politically savvy scientists. Such a battle had never even really been fought before. It was over before his opponents really even knew what had happened.
Imagine if the government parachuted into a debate in physics. Imagine hundreds of smart men and women devoting their lives to a physics question, debating, truth-seeking, testing themselves and each other … and then the government steps in, arbitrarily chooses a single one of those scientific opinions, and starts spending hundreds of millions of dollars on telling the public “this is how it is.” Every dissenting scientist is suddenly on the defensive, on the outside looking in, and can’t get funding to ask any hard questions — and the new conventional wisdom is never tested properly because “everyone” agrees that it’s correct.
That’s what happened to nutrition science!
What happened to nutrition science was so drastic that, a half century later, conventional wisdom about nutrition is in many ways more primitive than it was in WWII. At the end of his book, only after an astonishing amount of heavily researched storytelling, Taubes comes to the scathing conclusion that most of the nutrition and obesity experts in world today do not deserve to be called scientists — that what they have been passing off as science is nothing of the kind, a travesty of the idea.
For hundreds of pages before issuing that judgement, Taubes is unfailingly journalistic in tone: cautious and measured, polite and diligent. But at the very end of the book, when the weight of the assembled evidence is at its greatest, he pulls the Gods of nutrition off their high horse with a few scathing phrases. He doesn’t say it outright, but you can tell that he is absolutely disgusted by what he learned about the state of nutrition science in America.
I can tell you, I would not want to disappoint Gary Taubes. He is more of a scientist than a lot of scientists. To earn his contempt seems to me to be a great failing.
Most of the nutrition and obesity experts in world today do not deserve to be called scientists.Good Calories, Bad Calories is a kind of über-textbook, what textbooks should be: detailed and credible surveys of a subject, yet readable and interesting. And I have rarely learned so much, so quickly, as I did from Gary Taubes reading this book. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that I have never had such a dense educational experience. My brain tingled from cover to cover.
It’s not an easy book. Taubes promises and warns early on that he is not going to oversimplify the subject — doing so would completely defeat the purpose, which is to truly wrap our heads around this thorny subject. And, boy, does he deliver. As much as I enjoyed the book, even as a strong and highly cerebral reader, there were times when I had to take a break, nearly panting from the effort to understand.
But it’s worth it.
I think most professionals who have grappled with nutrition science have probably felt a frustration akin to trying to remember a fading dream. The “facts” about nutrition as we have known them have a maddening insubstantiality, as though entirely too many of them might actually be “guesses,” a mess of poorly connected expert proclamations. Too many things are said to be true with no clear sense of how we supposedly know them to be true. To read Taubes is to finally remember the dream, to finally be able to reach out and firmly grasp the subject, or at least parts of it — either to actually understand much that was hopelessly vague before, or at least to understand why it cannot yet be understood. And this is quite satisfying.
For the layperson, it’s just a heavy-duty life preserver. Finally, an expert who gives clear reasons to believe something, anything about what is healthy and unhealthy and why.
To read Taubes is to finally remember the dream, to finally be able to reach out and firmly grasp the subject of nutrition.Time and again as I read this book and talked to people about it, they asked me, “Well, why should we believe this guy?” The point was clear: we are getting sick of contrarian expert opinion. As I see it, there are two main reasons to “believe this guy”:
There is a truth waiting to be known. The world is that it is the way it is, and no amount of pig-headed human foolishness can change that. Fifty years of crappy nutrition science don’t change the facts, whatever they may be.
And what might they be? At the end of the book, Gary Taubes proposes several rather surprising possible truths about nutrition. I will list them now, but only after emphasizing Taubes incredibly impressive research again. It’s not a diet book — it’s a book about the history of nutrition science. And Taubes is extremely careful not to pronounce “the truth.” As with his criticism of the experts, he saves his opinions to the last, and makes it completely clear that they are opinions, and that there are many scientific questions that must still be studied properly before anything he believes can be trusted by billions of people. But this extremely cautious and humble approach only makes him all the more believable.
It’s not a diet book — it’s a book about the history of nutrition science.Here are some of the surprising things that Gary Taubes believes that there are good reasons to believe:
Early in 2008, the Canadian CBC Radio One programme “Quirks & Quarks” interviewed Gary Taubes. Skeptical listeners responded angrily, outraged that their beliefs had been challenged by a non-scientist.
“I am shocked that a science program would stoop to interviewing a mere journalist,” ranted one listener. “Please stick to interviewing scientists in the future.”
(I’m paraphrasing. I didn’t look it up, but it was very much like that.)
I have good skeptic credentials. I have no patience for credulous belief in alien abductions, miracle cures, or psychic powers. But these outraged skeptics are not good specimens of the breed, I denounce them as posers, and I wish they’d stay off my side. Unfortunately, the skeptic movement often acts like a militia defending mainstream scientific opinion — sort of a KKK for conventional wisdom — but that is not good skepticism. A good skeptic is well aware that science is a work perpetually in progress, which by nature thrives on both self-criticism … and external criticism.
It’s shockingly obnoxious and ironic to accuse Quirks & Quarks of stooping to interview a science journalist — the Q&Q team are science journalists, routinely editorializing on science, choosing what to report and how to report it, interpreting and explaining and passing judgement. I imagine they interviewed Taubes out of respect for his professionalism.
The world needs good science journalism. Scientists are not generally well-equipped to explain science to the public — they rarely have the time, the ability, or the inclination.
Carl Sagan was often ridiculed by his colleagues as a scientific lightweight because he spent too much time writing books and doing television shows, and not enough time doing research. Of course, his critics were just jealous: Carl was a polymath who did more good research in a year than some scientists do in their whole careers, while also writing books and doing television shows! And that’s a Good Thing.It’s not a matter of whether or not scientists “should” educate, but that the few that have the ability should certainly educate.
More importantly, they often lack the perspective. Specialization keeps scientists isolated from each other, reading only their own journals, going only to their own conferences. No scientist (except perhaps Carl Sagan) can advance in a specialized field and keep tabs on the big picture — it’s just not humanly possible. To be good in your field is, by definition, to be generally oblivious to the big picture. A good science journalist is an ideal solution to this problem.
Taubes had the time, the ability and the inclination to do what no obesity or nutrition or hormone system researcher has ever done. (He also had the internet, which arguably made it possible to write a book that could not have been written by anyone as little as ten years ago.) More importantly, he had the perspective.
It’s not shocking that Quirks & Quarks interviewed Gary Taubes — what’s shocking is that people calling themselves skeptics were upset about it. If you think science can’t be criticized by a journalist, stop calling yourself a skeptic!
Gary Taubes is doing great work, period.
In 2007, Taubes wrote The Scientist and the Stairmaster: Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner — and why we're wrong for New Yorker Magazine, summarizing many of the key concepts in his book, particularly as they pertain to exercise. Writing for MIT, Martha Henry interviewed Taubes to challenge and test the rigorousness of his hypothesis, and provided many links to other criticisms of Taubes’ book: see Gary Taubes: What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?