Why We Get Fat: Diet Trends and Food Policy
What this video covers
A Stanford Health Policy Forum held November 27, 2012, at the Li Ka Shing Center, moderated by Paul Costello of the School of Medicine’s communications office. The format is significant: science journalist Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat (2010), shares the stage with Dr. Christopher Gardner — Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and the lead investigator of the well-known A to Z Weight Loss Study.
Gardner’s A to Z trial, published in JAMA in 2007, compared the Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN diets; Taubes cites it in his own book because the very-low-carbohydrate Atkins arm lost more weight and showed more favorable changes in triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin resistance than the other diets — despite subjects being told they could eat as much as they wanted. Gardner, a vegetarian of 25 years at the time, has described the result as “a bitter pill to swallow,” having entered the study concerned that a meat-and-saturated-fat-heavy diet would prove dangerous.
The forum’s framing — obesity, diet trends, and food policy — lets Taubes argue that federal nutrition policy was built on misinterpreted science: that the “calories in, calories out” model is a failed paradigm, and that carbohydrates, via insulin, drive fat accumulation. Gardner’s presence gives the event an unusual credibility for Taubes’s thesis: a mainstream Stanford nutrition researcher whose own data pointed in the same direction.
Key points
- Taubes argues the conventional “calories in, calories out” model of obesity is bad science that has failed as public policy.
- He contends that refined carbohydrates drive fat storage hormonally (via insulin), and that restricting them — not counting calories — is the lever that matters.
- Gardner’s A to Z study is presented as mainstream evidence that very-low-carbohydrate diets can outperform low-fat approaches on both weight and metabolic markers.
- Gardner’s own surprise at his results — he expected the high-fat Atkins arm to look worse — is part of the story Taubes uses to argue the evidence, not ideology, is moving.
- The event is a Health Policy Forum, not a diet conference: the discussion connects diet science to federal food policy and the dietary guidelines.
- Taubes’s closing argument against one-size-fits-all guidance: the MyPlate template might be a perfectly healthy diet for 60 percent of the population, but for the other 40 percent “it will keep them fat or make them fatter” — and government guidelines don’t differentiate.
- He closes on an unusually conciliatory note: “I think Chris and I agree on everything” — the one real disagreement with Gardner, he says, is ethical, about meat.
- Taubes’s core prescription, as stated in his book: if you’re predisposed to gain fat, restrict carbohydrates to keep blood sugar and insulin low. (Attribution: this is his stated position, not medical advice.)