E37 Gary Taubes discusses low carb diets and sheds light on the hazards of sugar
What this video covers
Episode 37 of STEM-Talk, the podcast of the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition — a two-hour conversation with Taubes that doubles as an intellectual biography. The ostensible subject is The Case Against Sugar and Taubes’s argument that rising sugar consumption over the past 30 to 40 years drove a diabetes epidemic in the U.S. that has since gone global. But the hosts range widely across his whole career.
The conversation revisits the 2002 New York Times Magazine article, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”, in which Taubes argued that Robert Atkins’s high-fat, low-carb approach had a better scientific record on weight loss than the low-fat diet at the center of national health policy. The hosts cite Michael Pollan’s observation that after the article, bread “abruptly disappeared overnight from the American dinner table.” They also cover Taubes’s unlikely path: a Harvard applied-physics degree, a Stanford aeronautical-engineering master’s, then a pivot to Columbia journalism; his 1980s investigations of flawed science (Nobel Dreams, Bad Science on cold fusion); and the two big nutrition books that followed the 2002 article — Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) and Why We Get Fat (2010) — which argued that refined carbohydrates drive America’s obesity rate and contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Key points
- Taubes’s sugar argument in full: increased sugar consumption over recent decades caused a U.S. diabetes epidemic now spreading worldwide.
- The 2002 NYT Magazine article is treated as the inflection point of his career — and, per Pollan, of American eating habits.
- His pre-nutrition work on bad science (cold fusion, Nobel-chasing physics) is presented as the training ground for his skeptical approach to nutrition research.
- Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat are summarized as arguing that refined carbohydrates — not fat, not calories per se — are responsible for rising obesity and Western chronic disease.
- The hosts quote a New York Times review by Dan Barber: “Comparing the dangers of inhaling cigarettes with chowing down on candy bars may sound like a false equivalence, but Gary Taubes’s The Case Against Sugar will persuade you otherwise.”
- Taubes discusses his Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), the nonprofit he co-founded to fund rigorous tests of competing hypotheses: it facilitated four experiments, two aimed directly at the energy-balance hypothesis — including a $4.5 million metabolic-ward study led by Kevin Hall.
- He also recounts his own conversion story: trying low-carb in the early 2000s, he lost 25 pounds in six weeks — “it’s as though you flick a switch” — then fell off, regained the weight, and returned to carbohydrate restriction after the research for his 2002 article convinced him.
- His own daily eating, he says, is repetitive by choice: a salmon salad on pumpernickel for breakfast, a chicken or tuna salad lunch, grilled meat or fish with green vegetables for dinner, and 100%-chocolate snacks.
- The IHMC/STEM-Talk venue — a serious science-and-technology institute — gives this interview a different register than his conference talks: more biography and method, less rally.