Gary Taubes — 'Why We Get Fat'
What this video covers
A full-length lecture Taubes delivered at George Brown College in Toronto in 2017, laying out the argument of his book Why We Get Fat for a culinary and health audience. Taubes traces how he came to question the energy-balance account of obesity, tests that account against everyday observations — fat distribution, puberty, animal breeds — and presents his alternative: obesity as a disorder of fat accumulation regulated by hormones, above all insulin.
Key points
- Taubes describes spending five years researching the primary literature back to the 19th century, and says he approached obesity as a journalist asking why public health had made zero progress against the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
- Taubes says US diabetes prevalence rose roughly 700% since 1960, which he argues is incompatible with the claim that medicine understands what causes the disease.
- Taubes argues the energy-balance hypothesis cannot explain where fat is stored: why men gain fat above the waist, women below it, or why puberty makes boys leaner and more muscular while girls gain fat in specific places — patterns he says are plainly governed by hormones.
- Taubes uses dairy and beef cattle as an analogy: genes determine whether incoming energy is partitioned into milk, muscle, or fat, and he argues the same fuel-partitioning question — not intake — is the real question in human obesity.
- Taubes quotes Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer’s 1954 warning that explaining obesity by overeating merely restates the problem, comparing it to explaining alcoholism by chronic overdrinking.
- Taubes presents his alternative hypothesis: obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, so the scientific question is what regulates fat accumulation — and on that view, overeating is a compensating effect of getting fat, not its cause.
- Taubes also argues, citing his book The Case Against Sugar, that sugar can explain the great majority of diabetes — positioning his claim against Rob Lustig’s more modest estimate, which he references from the same event.