Why Most Diet Books Are Not Helpful
Gary Taubes explains why diet books fail and what science actually says about keto, obesity, and the medical establishment's approach to nutrition. He argues that most diet advice ignores how the body actually works.
Chapters
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
Do you ever feel a little bit of pride when you look around and like, there's tens of thousands of doctors talking about the keto diet? You were one of the first and most science based voices writing about this. I mean, back in 2007, your big book came out. But I consider you to be one of the big guys who first planted the modern seeds of this. When you go to bed at night, you're like, all right, I help these 10,000 plus doctors get there.
When I'm feeling bad about myself and I need to prop up my ego. This is going to sound hubristic and I don't mean it to, but the book I've always wanted to write is about good science and bad science. So I spend a lot of time when I'm not watching Netflix or Amazon prime with my wife and wishing that kids would just go to bed already. I spend a lot of time reading memoirs of scientists and looking for where they talk about how they do their science and what they think is good science and bad science. And so I read Darwin in his memoirs. At the end of the memoirs, he talks about how many books. He talks about how many books he's published in how many different foreign language editions there are of their books. He does everything but talking about his Amazon numbers. And then he talks about the mantra that he repeats to himself over and over and over again when he gets criticized or feels like people aren't taking his work seriously. And the mantra was something like, I've done all that one man can do. No one could ask for anything more. And I thought, you know, I know Darwin is. My high school guidance counselor would have said. What he said was, you're no Einstein. But, you know, you just see, you know, at some time you have to remind yourself that. And I said this, even I did this misguided debate with some young neuroscientist named Guilline, whose first name I'm not going to say because I. I remember.
When you did that.
I pronounced it on the debate and I still can't remember how to pronounce it correctly.
It's either he spells it wrong. That's why he's also a jerk, just so he can be clear on that.
And I will not disagree. Now I lost my train of thought.
About what you think about the difference you've made.
Oh, yeah. So at one point I just said, jesus, you know, Gine, you clearly think that I have done an enormous amount of damage in the world by raising these issues. And Implying that the mainstream medical community, you know, God forbid, might have made a mistake, and a tragic one in this case. But you and I both know we're both bombarded by emails. We get emails daily saying, look, I went on keto diets and I went on low carb, high fat diet. And for the first time in my adult life, I was able to achieve and maintain a healthy weight without feeling like I was starving myself to death. And, you know, there's always, I don't know. He didn't find those observations meaningful. I do. I mean, there's clearly, as you put it, we've. Well, I talk about in the book the conversion experience. So you had a conversion experience. Right. This was a Malcolm Gladwell phrase from his first. In 1998, he wrote an article on obesity called the Pima Paradox. And he asked the same questions I asked when I wrote about obesity for the New York times magazine in 2001. But the difference was those three years I had David Ludwig to follow at Harvard and Eric Westman to follow at Duke. And I could see that there was really respected establishment physician researchers who were taking seriously the idea that carbohydrates were fattening and for a diet to work, you shouldn't have them in it. But Gladwell talked about the conversion experience in diet books. You know, every diet book doctor tells his story first about how he was getting fatter or diabetic or growing five arms or turning green or whatever it was, and nothing he did helped. And he followed the advice. And then he went to the depths of the local medical school library. And from there he emerged with the secret formula that he's now going to give you because it cured him. And the fact is, all these physicians went through that. And it was either one of two phenomena. Either if you're doing family medicine or internal medicine or pediatrics in America, you're dealing with the negative sequelae of obesity. Diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance. That's what you're confronted with. You're telling your patients how to eat. Because that's how the American Heart Association, American Medical association says we should do when they're not getting any better and you're just managing disease anyway. So that's. You're either confronted with your patients getting fatter and more diabetic. That was the case with, like Eric Westman. And one of his patients does Atkins against his will. He does Atkins, he gets healthy and his cholesterol profile gets better. And Eric Westman is open minded enough to say, wow, this is interesting. This goes against everything I believe. Maybe I should look into it. Exactly what you want your doctor to do. So some of them did that and some of them were getting heavy themselves. And so they couldn't blame their patients for not taking their advice because they knew they were taking their advice. Right? And some of them are vegans and vegetarians and some of them were world class athletes. My former partner, Peter Attia at Nusi is a prime example. I mean, Peter's an exceedingly smart physician.
Yeah, he's great.
He's doing everything he was supposed to be doing, right? Working out three, four hours a day, swimming from LA to Catalina and back, and he's just getting fatter.
It's so frustrating.
But the problem is you have to have a weight problem to understand that, right? If you're thin and you're doing everything right, then there's nothing to learn. There's no conflict between your expectations and reality. So there's no learn. And science starts with the observation of something that conflicts with what you believe it should be. So you have a hypothesis about how the universe works and you see something that doesn't fit that hypothesis. And now you have to generate a new hypothesis.
Okay, Gary, you've got it all wrong. If there's something that disagrees with what you believe, you suppress it via orchestrated censorship and commercial interests. I mean, come on, I don't know what century you're living in this old science.
