E89: Big Fat Lies and More | Gary Taubes
What this video covers
A wide-ranging interview on The Dr. Gil Show, hosted by fertility specialist Dr. Gil (a practicing reproductive endocrinologist), recorded in June 2025. Taubes walks through the history behind his books — from Good Calories, Bad Calories to Rethinking Diabetes — the founding and collapse of his Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), and what he hopes the new MAHA-era health leadership will do about nutrition research.
Key points
- Taubes argues the idea that obesity is caused simply by eating too much was already rejected by leading German and Austrian researchers in the 1920s and 1930s, who viewed obesity as a hormonal, neuroendocrine disorder — a line of science he says was lost after World War II and replaced by “gluttony and sloth” thinking.
- Host Dr. Gil notes that the ICD-10 diagnostic code itself reads “obesity due to excess calories,” which Taubes cites as an example of the assumption being baked into medicine rather than proven.
- Taubes recounts a historical case in which abdominal skin grafted onto a patient’s hand accumulated fat as she became obese while her other hand stayed normal — evidence, he argues, that fat accumulation is driven by the tissue’s hormonal environment, not calorie intake.
- Taubes describes co-founding NuSI with Peter Attia in 2011, backed by billionaire philanthropist John Arnold, to run experiments that could directly test the energy-balance model against the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity.
- Taubes says both NuSI-funded pilot studies measured higher energy expenditure on ketogenic diets at fixed calories, but the investigators interpreted the same result in opposite directions — one group calling it support for the carbohydrate-insulin model, the other dismissing the effect as too small.
- Taubes says NuSI ultimately wound down after he and Attia split, and the Arnold Foundation’s follow-up study at Harvard died during the COVID shutdowns.
- On the current administration, Taubes says he has “many issues” with RFK Jr. personally but notes that Bhattacharya, Makary, and Casey Means broadly share his camp’s outlook; he wishes Kennedy had said sugar “may be” poison, and hopes the new leadership funds the definitive trials needed to settle the diet debate.