Gary Taubes on federal dietary guidelines' low-fat, high-carbohydrate advice: warns against

Gary Taubes warns that decades of official dietary advice to eat less fat and more grains was based on flimsy evidence and “may actually be making us fat.” In a 2026 LowCarbUSA interview, he said: “I think a terrible mistake has been made in the medicine, medical nutrition, public health world. We’ve been getting the wrong advice.”

His stated reasoning: he argues that the low-fat guidance adopted in the late 20th century was never supported by rigorous trials, and that telling populations to replace fat with carbohydrate pushed the food environment in a direction that, on his reading of the evidence, promoted rather than prevented obesity and metabolic disease.

Criticism worth noting: this is a contested historical claim. Defenders of the guidelines era argue that the evidence base was reasonable for its time and that subsequent trials have not established that the guidelines caused the obesity epidemic. This site reports Taubes’s position and the dispute without taking a position.

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