Gary Taubes on How Big Government Made Us Fat
What this video covers
A 22-minute interview by Nick Gillespie for ReasonTV — the libertarian magazine’s video channel — in which Taubes makes the case that federal nutrition policy caused the obesity crisis. The thesis, as the video’s own description states it: “The attack on fatty foods, in favor of carbohydrates, contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.”
Taubes’s argument runs through the familiar history: the 1977 McGovern report and the 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans told the public to eat less fat and more carbohydrates; the food industry and public-health messaging followed; and obesity and diabetes rates climbed in the decades after. He cites diabetes prevalence rising 700 percent in the U.S. since the early 1960s. In Taubes’s telling, this wasn’t just mistaken advice — it was a policy intervention that reshaped what hundreds of millions of people ate, with catastrophic results. The Reason framing adds a distinctly libertarian moral: government shouldn’t be in the business of telling people what to eat, especially when the science was thin.
He also gives the interview its most personal moment: a childhood contrast with his brother — 6-foot-5 and 195 pounds at his peak as a rower, versus Taubes at 6-foot-2 and up to 240 playing football — with both of them, he says, “eating as much as we could.” The implication, in his model: his body stored fat differently than his brother’s, regardless of intake.
Key points
- Taubes argues the federal government’s low-fat dietary guidance — beginning with the 1977 McGovern report — drove Americans toward carbohydrate-heavy diets.
- He contends the resulting rise in obesity and diabetes is best explained as a consequence of that policy shift, not of personal failure.
- The interview presents the “attack on fatty foods” as a case study in how official dietary advice can outrun its evidence base.
- Gillespie’s libertarian framing treats the episode as a government-failure story: centralized nutrition advice imposed on a population without adequate science.
- Taubes’s policy implication is deregulatory in spirit: get official guidance out of the way rather than replacing it with new mandates. He explicitly rules out a “war on sugar” — the story, as he sees it, is about government interference, and the fix is for the government to stop interfering, not to start a new prohibition.
- He recounts a striking sugar-industry anecdote: an industry executive, quoted in The New York Times, describing how the industry spent half a million dollars on research hoping to find anything damaging about artificial sweeteners — dosing female rats with the equivalent of 60 cans of soda a day to try to produce birth defects.
- Worth noting the venue: this is Taubes speaking to an audience primed for anti-government-regulation arguments, which shapes the emphasis.