Gary Taubes on bad health journalism: warns against

Gary Taubes warns that uncritical reporting on nutrition epidemiology misleads the public by treating conventional guidance as settled science. In his 2026 Substack post “Bad Health Journalism, an addendum,” he takes The Atlantic’s article “America Stopped Cooking with Tallow for a Reason” as his example — a piece he says treated the conventional account as authoritative without examining its foundations.

His stated reasoning: as a former science journalist himself, he argues that health reporters too often act as stenographers for official guidance and press-release epidemiology rather than doing the harder work of interrogating the evidence. He presents this as a structural problem in science journalism, not just a handful of bad articles — and he holds his own field to the same standard he applies to the institutions he covers.

This page chronicles a stated position of the person above. It is not medical advice and not the site's own conclusion.