Gary Taubes on 'Manhattan Project'-style rigorous nutrition research: recommends

Gary Taubes says nutrition and obesity science needs far more rigorous, well-funded experiments — the kind of large-scale program he has described as a “Manhattan Project” for nutrition research — that could “resolve or refute” competing hypotheses. To that end, he co-founded the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) in 2012 with Dr. Peter Attia.

His stated reasoning: he argues that nutrition science has been built largely on weak observational evidence and underpowered trials, so genuinely resolving debates like the cause of obesity requires expensive, tightly controlled experiments that typical grant-funded research cannot deliver.

Criticism worth noting: NuSI itself became part of the controversy. Per Wikipedia’s Gary Taubes entry, a NuSI-funded 2014 pilot study led by NIH researcher Kevin Hall “produced evidence which did not support the hypothesis,” and in 2017 Hall wrote that the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis had been “falsified by experiment.” Attia left NuSI, funding dried up, and by 2018 the organization was described as having “two part-time employees and an unpaid volunteer.” Hall himself has said of his metabolic-ward study that “this study clearly demonstrates” fat loss is possible without reducing insulin — directly challenging Taubes’s strong version of the claim. (Science 2.0 account of Hall’s study)

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