167 - Gary Taubes: Bad science and challenging the conventional wisdom of obesity

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Taubes learned skepticism by covering physics that went wrong.

  His first book, Nobel Dreams, followed Carlo Rubbia's team at CERN, about 150 physicists, in the period after the discovery of the W and Z bosons that won Rubbia the 1984 Nobel Prize. Watching the team chase a claimed new discovery in 1984–85, he saw how a leader who has gone out on a limb publicly stops hearing junior physicists who warn that the detectors aren't understood well enough to support the claims.

• 02

  'Pathological science' starts with premature public commitment.

  Physicists use the term for the science of things that aren't so. Its defining trait, Taubes says, is committing publicly to a result based on premature evidence without appreciating the chance of being wrong. Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement talk captures the antidote: good science requires investigators to report everything that might undermine their result, unlike advertising.

• 03

  Cold fusion showed why controls matter.

  After Pons and Fleischmann's March 1989 announcement made front-page news, Taubes wrote Bad Science (published 1991). Partly they rushed because they feared a physicist at Brigham Young, about 30–40 miles away, was working on a related idea. The story of a Georgia Tech group's neutron detectors (see examples) is his model of a missing control.

• 04

  Nutritional epidemiology can't reliably establish cause.

  Cohorts like the Nurses' Health Study (about 110,000 nurses filling out food-frequency questionnaires) generate associations confounded by who chooses what. Taubes points to its 1987 observation that hormone replacement therapy appeared to prevent heart disease, an example critics flagged as confounding. He notes rigorous scientific method is less than 400 years old, dating to Bacon's Novum Organum, while pattern-seeking instincts are far older.

• 05

  Low-salt and low-fat advice outran the evidence.

  Reporting for Science around 1998, Taubes found Americans had been eating low-salt diets for 15–20 years though randomized evidence never really supported it. An NIH administrator told him that when the low-fat recommendation came in 1984, they assumed rather than had the evidence. His two hypotheses for the obesity epidemic, which starts between roughly 1978 and 1991, both coincide with that era.

• 06

  Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup coincide with the epidemic.

  Foods once considered fattening, starches and sugars, were rebranded as heart-healthy in the low-fat era. HFCS-55 arrived around 1977–78, could replace sugar in Coke and Pepsi, and by 1984 saturated the beverage industry, the same window when obesity rates began climbing.

• 07

  Obesity research ignored the science of fat storage.

  Until about 1930 almost no one studied fat tissue. Starting in 1933, Rudolf Schoenheimer at Columbia showed fat is constantly deposited and mobilized, and by the mid-1960s intermediary metabolism was well established, yet Taubes says obesity textbooks from 1965 onward omitted it as psychiatrists and psychologists came to dominate the field.

• 08

  The 'eat too much' paradigm rests on thin foundations.

  In 1930 physician Louis Newburgh published work based on a small number of patients arguing obese people simply overeat; German-speaking researchers like Julius Bauer called the argument naive, favoring hormonal dysregulation of fat tissue. In 1938 Albert Hetherington, at the lab of neuroanatomist Stephen Ranson, produced obesity in rats by lesioning the ventromedial hypothalamus, and with John Brobeck framed it as overeating. After Yalow and Berson's insulin assay (post-1960), those animals turned out to be hyperinsulinemic.

• 09

  The carbohydrate-insulin model is an alternative hypothesis, not settled fact.

  Taubes argues that for people who gain weight easily, carbohydrates drive fat storage through insulin, so carbs must be restricted and replaced by fat and protein. He and Attia discuss a just-published paper by John Speakman and Kevin Hall presented as a possible refutation; Attia sees it as a mechanistic inquiry rather than a public-health solution, and they examine energy-expenditure methods such as indirect calorimetry.

• 10

  Ketogenic diets moved from 'deadly' to widely studied.

  Conventional wisdom before about 2010 held that Atkins-style diets caused heart disease. Taubes notes roughly 200 trials now study ketogenic diets for conditions ranging from cancer and Alzheimer's to traumatic brain injury.