Why We Get Fat
What this video covers
Delivered at New Brighton School in Capitola, California, under the sponsorship of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, this 2012 public lecture is Taubes presenting the core argument of his book Why We Get Fat to a general audience. He opens with the scale of the problem as he saw it then: an obesity epidemic running alongside a diabetes epidemic, with type 2 diabetes diagnoses having tripled in the United States since 1980.
Taubes then lays out what he calls the conventional wisdom — that obesity is caused by taking in more calories than you expend, and that getting fatter somehow causes the cluster of associated diseases: type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, cancer, asthma, sleep apnea, and neurodegeneration including Alzheimer’s. His counter-proposal, which he flags as radical, is that the causality runs differently: whatever makes us fat also causes all of these diseases. In his telling, adiposity and chronic disease share a common dietary driver rather than one causing the other.
The lecture is structured as an argument, not a literature review — Taubes says so explicitly, telling the audience he will argue that what he says is true. He walks through the history of nutrition science as he sees it, the failures of the energy-balance model, and the hormonal alternative centered on insulin’s regulation of fat tissue. It is one of the clearest single-sitting statements of the Taubes thesis, aimed at non-specialists.
His historical centerpiece is the Pima Indians of Arizona: prosperous and, in the words of an 1840s Army battalion, “sprightly and in fine health” when they fed tens of thousands of Gold Rush travelers passing through their territory — then, after settlers diverted the Gila River and a 20-to-30-year famine followed, described by a 1902 Harvard anthropologist as living in conditions “poor beyond our imagination,” with obesity soon following. For Taubes, it is a natural experiment in what the nutritional transition does to a population.
Key points
- Taubes opens with the twin epidemics as he frames them: obesity rising alongside type 2 diabetes, which he notes had tripled in the U.S. since 1980.
- He lists the disease cluster associated with obesity — diabetes, fatty liver, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, cancer, asthma, sleep apnea, Alzheimer’s — and disputes the conventional causal story.
- His central claim: it is not fatness itself that causes these diseases, but rather that whatever makes us fat also causes them — a shared dietary driver.
- Taubes argues the “calories in, calories out” model fails as an explanation of why people get fat, calling it a description mistaken for a cause.
- He presents insulin’s regulation of fat tissue as the alternative mechanism, with dietary carbohydrates — especially refined ones — as the lever.
- Two of the talk’s most quoted lines: his mid-1980s Paris memory, where “no self-respecting French woman over the age of 25” would eat baguettes — those were for 12-year-olds on bicycles — because adults knew the foods were fattening; and his question “what’s the difference between low-fat yogurt and dessert? Maybe the chocolate content… that’s it.”
- His closing: “we solved the obesity problem in the 1960s before the obesity epidemic, and we’ve been going backwards ever since” — and his stated hope is to bring the field “back 50 years in time to when we actually understood this.”
- The talk is explicitly framed as advocacy for a position, and its claims about diet and disease remain contested in nutrition science.