Dr. Weil Endorses Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories
What this video covers
A clip from CNN’s Larry King Live, aired October 19, 2007, with guest host Joy Behar filling in for King. The occasion is the publication of Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories — his 640-page challenge to the conventional wisdom on fat, carbohydrates, and obesity. Taubes and Dr. Mehmet Oz have been arguing the book; then Dr. Andrew Weil, the integrative-medicine physician, joins the panel — and does something close to what the clip’s title claims.
Weil says he read the book “in its entirety and very carefully,” calls it “a very important book,” and says he has been recommending it to his medical colleagues and students. His summary of its big ideas: there is, he says, “absolutely no scientific evidence for the belief that fat is the driver of obesity”; it is carbohydrate that is central to the process; obesity is mostly a hormonal disorder, genetically influenced, in which insulin is a central player; and overeating and underactivity are not causes of obesity but symptoms of that underlying disorder. Taubes, Weil adds, has done “a meticulous job of showing that many of the assumptions that are held by the conventional medical community simply rest on nothing.”
But the endorsement comes with one clear reservation. “I don’t agree,” Weil says, “that the way to process this is to eat a diet that’s mostly meat and no carbohydrate.” What matters, he argues, is how different carbohydrate foods affect blood sugar — and people differ: some are simply not sensitive to carbohydrates and won’t get fat however much they eat. He also warns that very restrictive diets set people up to fail and binge, and points to his own anti-inflammatory diet — a modified Mediterranean diet from his book Healthy Aging — as a livable way to apply the principles Taubes describes.
Taubes, plainly delighted, replies: “His assessment of my book was exactly what I would want the medical research community to take out of it.” He notes that the book itself says little about meat beyond the point that everyone reacts to carbohydrates differently, and invokes Atkins’s old advice: give up carbs, get down to the weight you want, then find out what your body can tolerate. Asked about his own eating, Taubes says he follows “a relatively low carb diet” — and jokes that Oz stays thin because “he is a thin person,” a matter of the same genetics and hormonal disorder. The clip closes on childhood obesity: genes predispose, Taubes argues, but today’s diet — flooded with sweetened drinks, high-fructose corn syrup, flour, and starch — triggers the disorder, compounded, in his telling, by exposure in the womb, where a heavier or diabetic mother’s higher blood sugar means the child “sees” more glucose before birth.
Key points
- Weil says he read Good Calories, Bad Calories “in its entirety and very carefully,” calls it “a very important book,” and says he has been recommending it to his medical colleagues and students.
- His summary of the book’s core claims: no scientific evidence that dietary fat drives obesity; carbohydrate is central; obesity is mostly a hormonal disorder with insulin as a central player; overeating and inactivity are symptoms of that disorder, not causes.
- Weil’s reservation is specific: he rejects a mostly-meat, no-carbohydrate diet as the takeaway, arguing that how carbohydrates affect blood sugar is what matters and that some people are not carbohydrate-sensitive at all.
- He also argues that very restrictive diets set people up to fail and binge, and offers his anti-inflammatory diet — a modified Mediterranean diet — as a sustainable application of the same principles.
- Taubes responds that Weil’s assessment is “exactly what I would want the medical research community to take out of it,” noting the book’s own position is that carbohydrate tolerance varies by person.
- On childhood obesity, Taubes argues genes predispose but modern foods — sweetened drinks, high-fructose corn syrup, flour, starch — trigger the disorder, with exposure beginning in the womb.
- The clip was uploaded by low-carb advocate Jimmy Moore and titled an “endorsement”; on the evidence of the broadcast itself, that framing is largely fair — with Weil’s dietary reservation the honest caveat.
- In retrospect, the panel is a time capsule: Oz would later become CMS Administrator under RFK Jr.’s HHS, and Taubes a central intellectual figure of the MAHA-adjacent nutrition world.