Taubes: It's a simplistic way to think about it, probably wrong, the things many of us live for and many of us wait for. Anyway, so this is the issue. Something in our diet and lifestyle cause obesity and diabetes.
We see these chronic diseases appearing in populations when they make this nutritional shift, so the question is what is it? The argument I make in this book is that sugar is the prime suspect, always been the prime suspect, cause you can track these epidemics back in time.
Gillespie: Now, you say it's always been a prime suspect but really at least in the past 40 or 50 years, we've been told and this is a lot of your work, what we've been told is don't worry about sugar, worry about fat, worry about meat and that beautiful arc of fat around the edge that you might gristle up a little bit?


Taubes: That's key to the story, and that's how I entered into it as an investigative journalist is we had this belief system that began as a hypothesis in the 1950s and started to be tested in the 1960s and was never confirmed, which is that dietary fat causes heart disease. So by the 1980s, a healthy diet was being defined as a low-fat, low-salt diet.
Gillespie: And this explains Snackwell cookies and things like that.
Taubes: One of the things that happened in the 80s when we embraced this low fat healthy diet synchronicity is the government, the CDC, started telling industry to produce low fat foods. So, we could take foods like the iconic example is yogurt, a high fat food by definition. You remove some of the fat and now you have this kind of insipid watered-down, tasteless thing and to make it taste good, you put back fruit and sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and now you've got a heart healthy diet food that they sell in these little packets and we see them everywhere.
Gillespie: Did the shift from a higher fat, or a more balanced diet actually, to a low fat, low salt, sugar, did it achieve the goals that were predicted for it?
Taubes: You could look at heart disease mortality and it's come down. The nutrition community said, "Well, look, people aren't dying from heart disease as much, therefore, our advice is right." And then people like me say, "Yeah, but, we're not interested in mortality, cause we're also selling billions of dollars in statins every year and billions of dollars in blood pressure drugs. We're doing hundreds of thousands of heart surgeries a year, putting in stents, doing bypasses. If mortality wasn't coming down, we'd have a real problem. Question is what's happening to incidents. Are we seeing less heart disease because we're preventing it with changes in diet? And there's no evidence."
Gillespie: You know, you describe an early battle over many of these questions between academic nutritionists who overwhelming took the energy balance approach to nutrition: you lose weight of you burn more calories than you take in versus what they characterize as quack doctors who writing diet fad books that you can eat all the fat you wan. And yet you say the quacks were actually closer to being right.
Taubes: So you have an academic research community that dominated post-World War II in the U.S. by nutritionists, who are studying animals for the most part. 1959, '60, Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson invent the technology that allows hormones to be measured accurately and the school of endocrinology explodes. The science of endocrinology finally has the tools they need to understand things like hormonal regulation of fat accumulation. Yalow and Berson say, look, insulin drives fat accumulation, so maybe this link between type two diabetes and obesity, maybe the type two diabetics are obese because of the insulin. And nobody cares, except the doctors.
The doctors are like all of us. They're getting fat, right? What do you do if you're getting fat? Well, you try what everyone tells you to do, which is eat less and exercise more and if that doesn't work, which it doesn't, then, if you're smart, you look for other methods. Some of them read the diet book literature and try various diets. Some of them actually read the same medical literature I did, so Atkins famously read the same studies I read 40 years later. Maybe if I get rid of the carbohydrates and replace it with fat, because fats are the one macro-nutrient that doesn't stimulate insulin secretion, maybe I'll lose weight.
If you try it and it works-
Gillespie: So it is a place where kind of people outside of the official research community were desperate to get skinny or have their patients get skinny so they tried a bunch of different things?
Taubes: They try a bunch of different things. When you find one that works, after a lifetime of failing ... Obesity is one of these subjects where it helps to have a weight problem. If you don't understand what it's like to get fatter and fatter, year in and year out, regardless of what you do, or to be 50 pounds fatter than your schoolmates in high school regardless of what you do, you just don't understand obesity.
Gillespie: You're a trim guy. Were you a fat load at some point?
Taubes: Nah, I was chubby when I was a kid. It was one of the interesting things, cause my brother who is a mathematician was ... you could see every vein on his body, and I was a chubby. He was taller and thin. He couldn't gain weight if he wanted to, and I was just a chubby kid. Puberty helped and then I became an athlete and that helped. But my brother at his peak was 6'5" and weighed about 195 was a rower. Remember Freud said anatomy is destiny. So he rowed crew. I was 6'2" and could get up to 240, and I played football. We both ate as much as we could. That's what we did. We were kids. He was tall and thin. I was short and thick. Not ... shorter and thick. That's just how we were built. I often wonder it's like why would you possibly think that I was thicker than him because I ate more or exercised less. I was just thicker than him. That was my body.


Gillespie: In the book, you document a long history of public nutrition advice being intertwined with politics in this country. So let's talk about the sugar lobby. How did king sugar get its crown in the American economy and kind of in the American diet?
Taubes: Well, sugar used to be very expensive and hard to get. It's hard to grow. It only grows in specific and tropical regions. You can't just transport the sugar cane around the world and then refine the sugar out of it afterwards. You've got to get the sugar out quickly on refining. It's a horrible job.