Gary Taubes

In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (published as The Diet Delusion in the UK). This book proposed that a hypothesis — that dietary fat is the cause of obesity and heart disease — became dogma, and claims to show how the scientific method was circumvented so a contestable hypothesis could remain unchallenged. The book uses data and studies compiled from more than a century of dietary research to support what Taubes calls "the alternative hypothesis."[13][14]

Taubes' argument is that the medical community and the U.S. federal government have relied upon misinterpreted scientific data on nutrition to build the prevailing paradigm about what constitutes healthful eating. Taubes argues that — contrary to conventional nutritional science — it is a carbohydrate-laced diet, augmented with sugar, that leads to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, and other "maladies of civilization." In the Epilogue to Good Calories, Bad Calories on page 454, Taubes sets out ten "inescapable" conclusions, the first of which is, "Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization."[15]

Reviewing Good Calories, Bad Calories, obesity researcher George A. Bray, wrote that the book "...has much useful information and is well worth reading" but that "obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones" and that "some of the conclusions that the author reaches are not consistent with current concepts about obesity."[3]

In 2007, New York Times science writer John Tierney cited Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories and discussed information cascades and the role of physiologist Ancel Keys in widely held beliefs related to diet and fat. Tierney follows Taubes in noting that a 2001 Cochrane meta-analysis of low-fat diets found that they had "no significant effect on mortality".[16] Harriet A. Hall, however, criticizes Taubes for selectively quoting the meta-analysis.[17]

Taubes authored The Case Against Sugar in 2016. The book argues that sugar is an addictive drug and is the cause of obesity and many health-related problems. It was positively reviewed by chef and food-writer Dan Barber who described Taubes's writing as "inflammatory and copiously researched".[18] Food journalist Joanna Blythman also praised the book, noting "his clear and persuasive argument that obesity is a hormonal disorder, switched on by sugar, is one that urgently needs wider airing."[19]

Harriet Hall who is known as a skeptic in the medical community wrote that Taubes made a compelling case against sugar but the evidence was inconclusive.[20]

C. Albert Yeung in the Journal of Public Health described the book as very informative but insufficient to draw any conclusion and a "polemic, not a balanced scientific review."[21]

In September, 2012, Taubes and Peter Attia launched the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), a nonprofit organization they described as "a Manhattan Project-like effort to solve" the problem of obesity.[22] The project set out to validate the "carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis", a model by which carbohydrate is proposed to be uniquely fattening because of its influence on insulin levels.[23]

A pilot study funded by NuSI was conducted in 2014 by a team led by NIH researcher Kevin Hall, and produced evidence which did not support Taubes' hypothesis.[24] In 2017 Kevin Hall wrote that the hypothesis had been falsified by experiment.[23][25]

Not long after the completion of that study NuSI was confronted with a number of issues. They lost a significant source of funding; co-founder Peter Attia left the organization.[26]

In 2018, NuSi was described as having "two part-time employees and an unpaid volunteer hanging around".[26]