Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It | Gary Taubes | Talks at Google
What this video covers
Speaking to Google employees in Mountain View in May 2011, Taubes delivers the book talk for Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, the popular-audience follow-up to Good Calories, Bad Calories. The premise, as he presents it: the nutritional science of the twentieth century got the cause of obesity wrong, and the most damaging error was the calories-in, calories-out model of why we get fat.
Taubes structures the talk around the questions he says the conventional model cannot answer: why are some people thin and others fat on similar diets? What roles do exercise and genetics actually play? Which foods should be eaten and which avoided? His answers all run through insulin’s regulation of fat tissue — the “good science that has been ignored,” in his phrase. He argues that the field fixated on energy balance while neglecting the endocrinology of fat accumulation, and that this misdirection shaped decades of dietary guidelines.
The talk concludes, as the book does, with practical dietary guidance — an easy-to-follow regimen built on carbohydrate restriction. For viewers tracking Taubes’s trajectory, this is the bridge talk: the moment his dense, 640-page Good Calories, Bad Calories argument was repackaged for a mass audience, setting up everything from The Case Against Sugar to The Case for Keto that followed.
Key points
- Taubes argues that twentieth-century nutritional science was fundamentally misguided, with the calories-in, calories-out model of obesity as its most damaging error.
- He presents insulin’s regulation of fat tissue as the neglected “good science” that explains why people get fat.
- Taubes poses the questions he says energy-balance thinking can’t answer: why thin and fat people can eat similarly, and what exercise and genetics really contribute.
- In the Q&A, challenged with the 1970s-to-today rise in calorie intake (2,200 to 2,700 calories a day), Taubes counters that the increase was almost entirely carbohydrate — only about 3 percent of it from fat — and that correlation is not causation: “the price of tea in China probably also went up since 1970, but we’re not going to blame obesity on that.” He adds that people didn’t know high-fructose corn syrup was sugar, and believed it wasn’t a problem “because the problem was all about fat.”
- He contends that the field’s fixation on calories shaped decades of dietary guidelines to the public’s detriment.
- The talk ends with concrete dietary advice centered on restricting carbohydrates — a prescription, not just a theory.
- As a 2011 corporate book talk, it is advocacy for Taubes’s position; the underlying claims about obesity’s causes remain disputed in the field.