Gary Taubes's Reading List

"This book used to be described as the most famous book ever written about food. Aside from being a great read – and with [American food writer] MFK Fisher’s annotations it is even more enjoyable – Brillat-Savarin actually has several chapters on the cause and prevention of obesity. He says: I spent 25 years of my life talking to 500 stout or very stout people. Invariably their favourite food is bread, potatoes or pasta. To him, it’s very obvious that what makes people fat is what we would call carbohydrate-rich foods. Sugar on top of that makes everything worse. He says that if you want to be lean, you’ve got to give up these carbohydrate foods. They’re fattening, don’t eat them and get a good night’s sleep. Maybe be a little bit more active. That was his general advice. So it’s a dissertation from a very thoughtful, erudite Frenchman about how carbohydrates are inherently fattening. That’s an observation actually made by several observers of obesity in the 19th century. They also point out that carnivores never get fat. You don’t find fat lions, you don’t find fat tigers. It’s not because these animals are particularly active, because we know that male lions, for instance, do virtually nothing. They don’t even bother to hunt – they just come along afterwards and eat as much as they want. But they still don’t get fat. Animals that live on grain and vegetable matter do get fat. They don’t get obese, which is interesting, but they have massive fat deposits. So why isn’t that true for humans also? No, it doesn’t. The problem is that there are certain strains of rats that they can make fat by giving them fat to eat. I talk about this endlessly in Good Calories, Bad Calories . The experts decide that Americans get fat by eating fat. Then they find strains of rat that get fat eating fat, then they breed those strains. And now that they have found an animal model that confirms their preconceptions they argue that the preconceptions must be true too – obviously humans get fat on fat because the rats do. Then some journalist like me comes along, and says, “What about all the other animals that get fat on grains and vegetable matter?” And they look at you and say, “Oh, you’re one of those Atkins people aren’t you?”"

"Weston Price was a great dental scientist and did some really important work. What I didn’t know when I read this for the first time is that Weston Price’s book was the culmination of a long line of dental research in the first half of the 20th century, demonstrating that high fat diets are required in childhood when teeth are developing, to protect against cavities. Weston Price travelled around the world with his wife – whom he refers to as Mrs Price – and did his 1930s equivalent of controlled dietary experiments. He visited populations that were so isolated that they didn’t have access to modern Western foods (ie refined flour and sugar or refined white rice) and he compared their teeth, gums and jaws to people of similar genetic stock that did eat Western food. He began high in the Swiss Alps, in a village that is a mile above the nearest road, and he compared their teeth and jaws to the Swiss living in one of the major Swiss cities. He visited pygmies in Central Africa, and a variety of African tribes, Native American populations, Inuits and South Pacific islanders. Everywhere he went he took photos of their teeth and jaws. So you’ve got these populations that eat no sugar and refined flour with beautiful white teeth and perfect jaws, and other populations with the same genetic background, but living near Westerns outposts or cities or trading with the West. Not only were the kids’ mouths riddled with cavities, but their jaws were a mess. After reading Weston Price, half the reason I try to keep my kids off sugar is hoping I’ll save money on orthodontics. That’s the thing. You just look at the pictures. People who were eating refined flour and sugar were a mess, and people who weren’t seem to have been very healthy. It’s hard to tell with this kind of research, but as far as what was done in the era, Price did a pretty good job of convincing readers – he certainly convinced me – that there is something going on when you add Western food to any baseline diet. This is not modern science, it’s not something you can base public health recommendations on, but it is a book that can change your paradigm about what’s healthy and what’s not. And it’s a good read. No, it’s also a great travelogue. He’s a great storyteller. There are parts that I didn’t even believe could be true – how pygmies in Africa kill elephants by sneaking up behind them and sawing through their hamstrings over the course of a couple of days. Then they can kill the elephant because it can no longer move. I guess the elephant doesn’t feel this happening. You think this is crazy, and then you turn the page and there’s a photo of Mrs Price, a dowdy-looking middle-aged woman in a pith helmet and a long skirt, standing next to two pygmies with two enormous elephant tusks towering above them. One of the fundamental observations that I discuss in Good Calories, Bad Calories is the absence of cancer in populations that do not eat Western diets. We think of cancer as inevitable. But the chief statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company, who later became one of the founders of the American Cancer Society, compiled the observations that populations that don’t eat Western diets don’t get cancer nearly as much. One of the explanations put forward in the early 20th century was that the meat in Western diets was the cause of cancer. But people at the time pointed out that the same absence of cancer is true of the Inuit, the Native Americans of the Great Plains and pastoral populations like the Masai. These are people who live exclusively on animal products – so whatever is causing the cancer, it’s unlikely to be that. There is now a growing body of research showing that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are cancer promoters. I actually have a five page article about this research in the journal Science today. The idea is that you avoid cancer by keeping insulin levels as low as possible, which means avoiding these same fattening carbohydrates we’ve been talking about, and arguably eating an animal product, fat-rich diet. It’s the same type of diet we’ve been eating for two million years, prior to agriculture, and the same diet that many of these indigenous populations were still eating through the early 20th century. Actually, while I was doing research for this story I interviewed the head of the cancer research centre at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School, as well as Craig Thompson, the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in Manhattan. Both of them told me they were effectively on the Atkins diet – very low carb, high fat, mostly animal products – not because they wanted to lose weight, but because they didn’t want to get cancer."

"Stefansson was a Harvard anthropologist who spent a decade or so living with the Inuit and had a lot of adventures, some of which didn’t reflect too well on him. There’s an entire book written about an expedition where he seems to have abandoned the rest of his team when his ship got stuck in the ice. But he came back from the Arctic territories in 1920 or so and said: These people eat a diet completely devoid of fruits, vegetables, and grains and they are the most vigorous people we’ve ever seen! He describes the Inuit men, for instance, with their thick clothing, running alongside the explorers on their dogsled treks for 25 miles. So the authorities of the day responded: Well, they probably developed a genetic ability to adapt to this environment where there is no fruit, vegetable or grain, so they can survive. Stefansson said: Explorers go up and it doesn’t matter where we’re from or what our genetic background is, we have to live on that diet and we become more vigorous. In fact, he convinced the medical research community and the leading nutritionists of the era, as well as the leading anthropologists, to oversee an experiment in New York in the late 1920s where he and one of his colleagues lived on an all-meat diet. They ate nothing except meat for an entire year, and the researchers measured everything imaginable. At the end of the year, they published nearly a dozen papers on the experiment, reporting that everything was better – even things like bad breath and the fungus on their toenails. There was also a series of three articles in Harpers written by Stefansson. They describe the 1928 experiment in detail and became the book, which was published in the 1940s and describes the Inuit diet in great detail. It contradicts virtually everything we’ve come to believe about what a healthy diet is. The healthiest possible diet is one devoid of all these fruits and vegetables. You don’t need what we now consider a balanced diet, because you can get everything you need from animal products, particularly if you’re eating the right fat and you’re not eating these carbohydrates that can deplete your body of certain vitamins. In the introduction to the book, one of the leading nutrition and metabolism authorities of the era wrote that this one all-meat diet experiment alone showed that the nutrition textbooks had to be rewritten. Again, it’s an amazing read. Stefansson was a great storyteller. This is what got me into all this 10 years ago. I was researching a New York Times Magazine article which was eventually called “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” , which turned into a book advance that allowed me to spend five years writing Good Calories, Bad Calories . Only in the early 2000s did people start doing experiments and clinical trials where they compared Atkins-style diets – very low carbohydrate, high fat, moderate protein diets – to the low-fat, low-calorie diet that the American Heart Association wants us to go on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On the one side, you had all these people eating foods that are supposed to kill us: Fatty meat, eggs, bacon, sausage, steaks, hamburgers without the bun. On the other side, you had people eating wholegrains and green vegetables, skinless chicken breasts, and very carefully counting their calories so they never eat more than 1,500 a day. You do these experiments and you find that not only do the people on the Atkins diet – the ones who are restricting carbohydrates but otherwise eating as much as they want of fat and protein – lose more weight but their heart disease risk factors improve dramatically. So when you actually do an experiment to test which is a healthier diet, the Atkins diet that we’ve all been taught will kill us turns out to be the healthier way of eating. This one , from the New England Journal of Medicine is a particularly good. One caveat is observational studies, where you identify a large cohort of people – say 80,000 people like in the Nurse’s Health Study – and you ask them what they eat. You give them diet and food frequency questionnaires that are almost impossible to fill out and you follow them for 20 years. If you look and see who is healthier, you’ll find out that people who were mostly vegetarians tend to live longer and have less cancer and diabetes than people who get most of their fat and protein from animal products. The assumption by the researchers is that this is causal – that the only difference between mostly vegetarians and mostly meat-eaters is how many vegetables and how much meat they eat. I’ve argued that this assumption is naïve almost beyond belief. In this case, vegetarians or mostly vegetarian people are more health conscious. That’s why they’ve chosen to eat like this. They’re better educated than the mostly meat-eaters, they’re in a higher socioeconomic bracket, they have better doctors, they have better medical advice, they engage in other health conscious activities like walking, they smoke less. There’s a whole slew of things that goes with vegetarianism and leaning towards a vegetarian diet. You can’t use these observational studies to imply cause and effect. To me, it’s one of the most extreme examples of bad science in the nutrition field."

"Thomas Cleave was a British naval surgeon who travelled around the world and ran the British naval research laboratory in the UK for a while. He wrote letters to hospitals all over the world, and asked: “What kind of diseases are you seeing in your patients? Tell me what kind of foods they’re eating.” He came to the conclusion that everywhere in the world, where people were eating sugar and white flour they were getting very specific Western diseases, and these are diseases that also tend to cluster together in patients – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, ulcers. The argument he was making is that there is an evolutionary element to all of this. We evolved to eat certain foods, over two million years during the Paleolithic era. We were mostly living on animal products and some tubers and very hard-to-digest carbohydrates. Then agriculture came along, and we start eating grains and refining grains. Then with the industrial revolution in the late 19th century we are machine-refining everything. White flour and sugar explodes over the world, and wherever people eat these you see the same kinds of chronic diseases. Cleave and his colleague Campbell get the credit for nailing it. They had a primitive understanding of the mechanisms, but the gist of what they’re arguing is: You take these foods that in their native state are very hard to digest and take the human body a long time to break down. As a result, the carbohydrates enter the bloodstream very slowly and the body responds to them very slowly. But now you refine them and you make them very easy to digest. For instance, in the case of apple juice you can consume the sugar equivalent of eight or 10 apples in a minute. All the sugar is dumped in your bloodstream, and it creates hormonal havoc. All these diseases and their variations are the result of this havoc. It’s a very compelling read. Cleave of course was perceived by most people as quackish but Sir Richard Doll, the most famous British epidemiologist – he was knighted for linking cigarettes to lung cancer – wrote the introduction to the earlier edition of his book. He said at the time that he thought Cleave was brilliant and that there was a lot to it. I actually interviewed Sir Richard Doll a few years before he passed away, and he told me that maybe Cleave had been right all along, and we just got away from this line of research, which is what I’ve been arguing. Basically, you want to avoid highly refined grains and sugars. Then it just depends on how severe the problem is. If you’re 20-30 pounds overweight and you want to lose weight, you get rid of the refined grains and sugars, and the same foods that my mother’s generation believed were fattening – pasta, bread, beer, sweets, et cetera. When I lived in Europe in the mid-1980s, no self-respecting woman I knew would eat the bread that they brought to the table at a restaurant, because they knew it was fattening. If you’re a little bit overweight, those are the foods you don’t want. But I’m also writing to people who are 200-300 pounds overweight. They might have to live on the equivalent of a virtually all-meat diet if they want to be anything even close to lean. I’m arguing that a virtually all-meat diet is actually a healthy diet."

"So the argument that Cleave made was that we are products of a long history of evolution, and we should eat what we are adapted to eat. Our genes haven’t had a lot of time in the past 10,000 years to come to grips with agriculture, and they’ve had virtually no time to deal with the machine-refining of carbohydrates that has happened since the industrial revolution. In the 1980s this idea was captured in the notion of the Paleolithic diet by a couple of Emory University researchers, and it’s grown into the idea of the Paleo diet. There are a lot of Paleo diet books now. It’s fundamentally a carbohydrate-restricted diet that also restricts some other foods we never ate and that we didn’t evolve to eat, like dairy. I like to refer to them as not-your-father’s Atkins diets – that’s part of their popularity. Mark Sisson did probably the best job of all these books in capturing the essence of the science. He didn’t go too far overboard with ideas that are not well tested, because there are a lot of ideas out there that still haven’t been tested in rigorous clinical trials. He’s got 10 basic ideas, including everything from avoiding the poisons in your diet – which are mainly processed foods, sugars, grains and chemically modified fats – to getting enough sunlight and play. It’s a very good basis to learn the fundamental ideas, to get enough of the science to convince you that this is a healthy diet, or at least a healthier diet than what you’ve been told to eat by the government. Yes, Mark focuses on the insulin connection, which I think is crucial because insulin regulates fat tissue. That’s been known since the 1960s, and all these other disorders – metabolic syndrome and maybe even Alzheimer’s – are all insulin disorders. If you eat the way Mark recommends and the way these other books imply, then you are going to be minimising insulin secretion and eating more like the indigenous populations that never saw Western diets, and the way we evolved to eat over the Paleolithic era. In Japan they’re not eating a Western diet but they’re eating a relatively carb-rich diet. The question is, what’s the difference? One possibility is that this whole hypothesis is wrong. The other hypothesis – which I argued in a New York Times Magazine article in April, “ Is Sugar Toxic? ” – is that sugar is required to create insulin resistance. Our livers didn’t evolve to deal with these large doses of fructose that are dumped on them in the course of drinking a glass of orange juice or a Coca-Cola. So the sugar causes the initial insulin resistance, and then when your body becomes resistant to insulin you have to secrete more insulin to deal with the carbohydrates you’re consuming, and now other carbohydrates become bad too. The Japanese, and East Asians in general, historically ate exceedingly little sugar. In the early 1960s they were eating the amount of sugar that we were eating in the 1860s, back when diabetes appears to have been virtually non-existent here too. In fact, many of the populations that are held up as having the healthiest diets are populations that eat, or at least ate, exceedingly little sugar. There’s the French paradox – the French eat about half as much sugar as we do. The Greeks and the Mediterranean diet analyses of them – particularly the island of Crete where the original Mediterranean diet studies were done – showed that they were eating virtually no sugar. If they sweetened things it was with honey. Not by our standards. Also, we’ve taken these fruits and bred them to be as sweet and juicy as we can, which makes them both easier to digest and increases the fructose content. One of the reasons why I get in trouble with the conventional wisdom people is I argue that if you’re obese or overweight you’re probably not doing yourself any favours by eating a lot of fruit. Before the government and people like Weight Watchers recommend we eat a lot of fruit, they should really do some randomised clinical trials. They can’t just assume that if Adam and Eve ate it in the Garden of Eden then it’s good for us. Look where it got them, anyway. Let me know how it goes. When you switch from eating a carb-rich diet to a carb-poor diet that is rich in fat, you’re switching the fuel on which your body is runs. You’re switching from using carbohydrates for fuel to running on fat for fuel, and usually your own fat too. Which is what you want it to do – you want it to burn your own fat and not have it locked away in your fat tissue. But there can be side-effects to the switch. They’re not deleterious aspects to the diet itself, once you successfully make the switch. But you’ve got to keep an eye out, because often these things happen and then people say that the diet is dangerous. It’s not that it’s dangerous, it’s that you’re literally changing the fuel your body is running on and that can take some fiddling to get right. Yes, many people get something known as the Atkins flu. Not everyone – I don’t know what the numbers are because it’s never been studied, but anecdotally maybe 10% of people. You can get around that by drinking chicken or beef broth. You actually need more salt on these diets, which is one of the many counterintuitive aspects. You just have to have faith that it’s not killing you. You can even get a heart disease risk factor test and test yourself. You can do it now, and then again in a month or ideally three months from now, and see whether you’ve improved or not. I got into it because I was writing these big articles for Science magazine, first on the salt and blood pressure issue. I spent a year on the story, and it won the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society award. While I was reporting, one of the worst scientists I’ve ever interviewed in my life – and given my expertise in controversial science I’ve interviewed some terrible scientists – took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, but less fat and fewer eggs. One of the lessons I had learned from my 15 years of reporting on controversial science was that bad scientists never get the right answer. I put down the phone after I interviewed him, called up my editor and said: When I’m done with the salt story, I’d like to write about fat and cholesterol. If this guy was involved in any substantive way, there’s got to be a good story there. So I started reporting a story that became an article called “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat”. Over a year I interviewed about 120 to 150 people for that one story. While I was doing it, I was up at MIT doing another magazine article, on the mathematics of the stock market. I was interviewing an MIT economist and we got talking about the fat story. He said, “If you’re writing about dietary fat, you’ve got to write about the Atkins diet.” He said he had a colleague at Wharton whose father had lost 200 pounds on this diet. He’s Asian American, and he said that he lost 40 pounds on the diet, basically giving up white rice. So I went back to California and tried the diet as an experiment. I didn’t have kids, I wasn’t worried about killing myself, and I lost 20-25 pounds of my excess weight in six weeks. The weight just dropped off. I didn’t stay on the diet by the way, though I have since gone back to it now that I understand the science. It’s an experience that every nutritionist, every nutrition writer and every obesity researcher should undergo. [Health columnist] Tara Parker Pope had an article the other day in the New York Times Magazine about how it’s impossible to lose weight, how we struggle with it if we’re predisposed [to putting on weight]. You mentioned that you’re a bit chubbier since having children. It’s not that you want to be chubby, it’s just something that unless you starve yourself you can’t get over. As we get older it gets harder and harder. Then you try this other way of eating and the weight just goes away. You’re not hungry, and actually you can eat as much as you want. One argument I make to these researchers is: Just try it, so you know what is happening here, because this should at least make you ask questions that you’re not asking right now. In the past four years, I’ve probably increased the awareness of these issues and ideas, both inside and outside the public health community, a thousand fold. But that means it’s gone from one millionth of the population and the relevant research community caring and understanding these arguments to maybe to one thousandth. I’m actually putting together a non-profit to raise money for research, because there are experiments that I think need to be done that the NIH [National Institutes of Health] is never going to pay for. So we’ll pay for it ourselves. We’re making progress, but the problem is that there’s just so far to go. For example, I’m writing a letter to the New York Times in response to the Tara Parker Pope piece, hoping that we can get several hundred physicians to co-sign it . 200 have so far, after 18 hours up. Yes! The reason you can’t lose weight is because you’re trying to cure a hormonal disorder by starving people. It’s not a disorder of eating too much, and starving people isn’t the cure. In all the studies we’re looking at, that remains the underlying assumption – that the way to lose weight is to starve people. People think its impossible to lose weight and keep it off because they don’t understand why they’re fat to begin with, and they’re using the wrong treatment, not because the hormonal disorder can’t be cured or prevented. It’s like doctors trying to cure bacterial infections with antiviral drugs, and then throwing up their hands saying it’s hopeless because the treatment failed. Get the right treatment, the right intervention, and obesity can be cured and prevented in most people. That’s what I’m arguing."