Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes was born April 30, 1956. He is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate/high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His early career was in general science journalism, and he has won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. He also held an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship in 1996–97.

His first two books, Nobel Dreams (1987) and Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), were classic long-form science-journalism projects on particle physics and cold fusion respectively. Those books established his reputation as a reporter willing to question institutional consensus when the evidence seemed to warrant it.

In the early 2000s, he began applying that same skeptical methodology to nutrition-science orthodoxy. His New York Times Magazine cover story “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” in 2002 was one of the first mainstream-media reopenings of the question of whether the low-fat dietary consensus of the late twentieth century was well-supported by evidence. That reporting expanded into his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories, a detailed historical-and-scientific case that refined carbohydrates, not fat, were the primary driver of the modern obesity and metabolic-disease epidemic.

Later books continued that argument at different levels of accessibility: Why We Get Fat (2010) distilled the case for a popular audience, The Case Against Sugar (2016) zeroed in on sugar specifically, and The Case for Keto (2020) presented a defense of ketogenic and low-carbohydrate approaches in clinical practice.

The reception of Taubes’s work has been genuinely mixed. He has supporters inside clinical medicine, particularly in the obesity-medicine and endocrinology subspecialties. He also has critics in mainstream nutrition science who argue that his carbohydrate-insulin model overstates what the clinical-trial literature actually supports. That methodological debate is an active scientific one and part of the public record.

In 2012, Taubes co-founded the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) with physician Peter Attia, an organization that funded large randomized-controlled trials designed to test carbohydrate-insulin and energy-balance models head-to-head. The results of those trials have themselves been part of the same contested scientific conversation.

Inside the MAHA coalition, Taubes is the senior journalist-author figure. He has not taken any advisory role and has stayed firmly in the independent-reporting seat, but the coalition’s rhetoric on sugar and refined carbohydrates is heavily indebted to the popular framework his books put on the map.

Open questions: whether any forthcoming HHS dietary-guidance rewrite materially updates sugar and carbohydrate framing in the direction Taubes has argued for, and how the ongoing RCT literature continues to shape the carbohydrate-insulin debate.