10,000 Calories a day? - Gary Taubes on eating unlimited calories
What this video covers
A short interview segment in which Jonathan Bailor — author of The Calorie Myth — puts a deliberately extreme question to Gary Taubes: if food quality truly makes quantity irrelevant, what would happen if someone ate or drank 10,000 calories a day of a single food, like butter? Taubes’s answer is the interesting part: he doesn’t claim you’d stay lean. He says, in effect, go ahead and try — he genuinely doesn’t know what your body would do, and your body wouldn’t like it.
The exchange is revealing because it shows Taubes refusing the simplistic version of his own argument. He uses the example of cashews to make the point concrete: eat 10,000 calories a day as 7,000 from cashews and 3,000 from heavy cream, and cashews turn out to be about 20 percent carbohydrate by calories — so the carbohydrate content, in his framework, is what your body will respond to. The honest answer, he says, is that he can’t predict the outcome of any single person’s overfeeding experiment.
Key points
- Bailor’s question tests the claim that food quality makes calorie quantity irrelevant, using a hypothetical 10,000-calorie-a-day butter diet.
- Taubes declines to predict the outcome, saying he doesn’t know whether a person would gain fat — but is confident “your body is not going to like it.”
- He argues the relevant variable isn’t the calorie count but the carbohydrate content: cashews are roughly 20 percent carbs by calories, so a cashew-heavy overfeed is a different hormonal event than a butter-only one.
- The clip illustrates Taubes’s position that obesity is driven by hormonal responses to food (particularly insulin in response to carbohydrates), not by calorie arithmetic alone.
- Rather than asserting unlimited eating is consequence-free, Taubes treats the question as an empirical unknown — a notable moment of restraint from a figure often portrayed as absolutist.
- Bailor’s framing — “the quality of the food you eat makes the quantity irrelevant” — is presented as his own message, which he says he learned in part from Taubes’s work.
- Taubes supports the point with the Ethan Sims experiments of the late 1960s: trying to fatten people up in a Vermont prison, Sims’s team found subjects could triple their calorie intake by adding carbohydrates (and still went to bed hungry), while overfeeding fat required what the researchers called a “heroic effort” — and convicts on an all-fat, pork-chop diet simply refused to eat enough to gain.
- He also quotes endocrinologist Edwin Astwood’s early-1960s retort to forced-overfeeding arguments: sure, you can make geese fat by force-feeding them, “but that’s not how the circus fat lady got there” — i.e., voluntary overeating explains how real people become obese.