Gary Taubes Quotes

When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant. If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing (University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube)

...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...

But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn't the "exercise explosion" and the "new fitness revolution" have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity?

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 on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.

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 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, and effort, and money but have done incalculable damage along the way. Their beliefs have remained imperious 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.

Cohen testified that there was no 'direct relationship' linking heart disease to dietary fats, and that he had been able to induce the same blood-vessel complications seen in heart disease merely by feeding sugar to his laboratory rats. Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. 'I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment,' Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. 'For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... but, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up... that is a very different proposition.

It may be easier to believe that we remain lean because we're virtuous and we get fat because we're not, but the evidence simply says otherwise. Virtue has little more to with our weight than our height. When we grow taller, it's hormones and enzymes that are promoting growth, and we consume more calories than we expend as a result. Growth is the cause - increased appetite and decreased energy expenditure (gluttony and sloth) are the effects. When we grow fatter, the same is true as well.We don't get fat because we overeat; we overeat because were fat.

What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.