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Gary Taubes work is now classified as Quackery Taubes Articles found to contain flaws & pseudoscience GARY TAUBES BIG FAT LIES OF OMISSION:
Gary Taubes science, logic, sorely lacking in pro-Atkins Lowcarb diet article

Nutrition / Health Lifestyle / Consumer Food / Recipes Dining Out Environment Exercise / Fitness

By Vance Lehmkuhl - writer for the Philadephia City Paper and featured speaker Back in 2002, back in a time when The New York Times was still the most respectable American newspaper imaginable, its magazine section mistakenly ran a piece by Gary Taubes with the headline "What if it's All a Big Fat Lie?" and people around the nation, journalists, scientists, and the everyday public alike, amusingly rushed to reconsider their notions of fat and nutrition. In the ensuing year, the Times has seen its credibility torpedoed by twin scandals of more bogus reporting, but so far Gary Taubes' 7,700-word incorrect pro-Atkins essay - illustrated by a cut of butter-slathered steak - has largely escaped proper scientific scrutiny. Indeed, his fat apologia has been erroneously picked up by the mainstream unscientific press as the operating story, and even despite the fact that more and more new studies have turned up negataive against Atkins. Yet Taube's books and articles are being spun as further proof of the fat diet. Many people actually vow he is correct, even stand up as a voice for him, not knowing that his articles were found gravely false. In his article "Big Fat Lie," Taubes gleefully incorrectly trashed decades of actual nutrition evidence from multiple experts to prove that "Atkins was right all along." Robert Atkins, who died in March of a slip on the ice, then found to have had evidence of heart disease and a stroke, was of course the most famous proponent of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, author of the best-selling "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution." The fact that Gary Taubes, an Atkins devotee, (biased) was dubiously assigned by the Times to write a purportedly unbiased objective analysis of the good doctor's theories is just one of many questions raised by "Big Fat Lie." The irony here is that even after following an Atkins-like low carbohydrate diet, Taubes himself remains fat. Apparently his own advice doesn't work on himself, but photos of him showing him only from the top, and cut off before you reach his waist so you won't see he's still fat, serve to hide this fact and dupe further people into being followers and buying into his incorrect unscientific ideas that give belief but don't actually work. A close look finds Taubes misquoting, misrepresenting, equivocating and running logical loop-the-loops to persuade us that Atkins had the answer, before finally revealing that he's on the diet himself and doesn't really care whether it shortens his life. (In other words, Taubes makes people jubilant that they can lose weight! But is failing to mention that you come off the Atkins Lowcarb diet with potential damage to your heart, kidneys, and have perhaps some budding elevated cancer risk.) Doubtless most readers are unaware of the CNN report in which scientists quoted by Taubes backed away from him, and refuted his interpretation of concepts he twisted and then attributed to them. And few of his followers probably saw the Washington Post article citing all the peer-reviewed scientific studies that directly contradict Taubes' "low-fat diets don't work" mantra. Lowfat diets are the ones that actually work. Lowcarb diets cause you to 1st lose weight, then you gain it all back, plus more, and then realize you may have done damage to your heart, and health. So now you're fat again but now you also have cancer. Of course, writing a book that just says the same thing as the evidence shows doesn't sell as many books as when you claim the old 'I've got something new, everyone else is wrong, and THEY just don't want you to know!" line. Even on its face, "Big Fat Lie" isn't what it appears. Taubes, the selfproclaimed daring iconoclast, supposedly "exposes" the fact that fat can be good for you and that lowcarb diets can cause weight loss, then tries to put these together to form an endorsement of the healthfulness of Atkins' program.

But wait: Nutritionists never said NO fat was healthy; and it's not whether they cause temporary weight loss that concerns people about Atkins-style diets - it's whether they're harmful to your overall, longterm health. In other words, Taubes' great achievement in 7,700 words is to knock down two obvious "straw man" imaginary arguments that no one ever made in the first place. Diets don't say you should stay away from ALL fats, they say to stay away from dangerous fats. Taubes makes you believe he scored victory by somehow 'proving' that it's ridiculous to need no fats, which nobody was saying in the first place. And much like smoking cigarettes also have the side-effect that you'll lose weight, Gary Taubes proudly shows the results that you'll lose weight on his Atkins meat lard and fat diet, but neglects the part where you end up with health damage and potential cancer. Nevermind that part, plus the part where you have to come off the lowcarb diet eventually because it'll start causing damage to your kidneys and after 6 months to a year or two, most lowcarbers have gained all the weight back. He fails to mention those parts. Only reveling in the initial jubilation of the waterweight and muscle tissue loss that apparently sheds massive pounds in the first weeks or months. What he fails to prove, though, is their converse - that SATURATED fat is good for you, or that Atkins' diet ISN'T dangerous over the long term - exactly where the argument has been all along. So he slams the establishment for vilifying "fats," Taubes means "saturated fats," but when he cites positive health effects of "fats" he cites studies on monounsaturated fats. (Gary Taubes Bait & switch) Similarly, when he warns of the dangers of "high carb" intake, he means sugar, corn syrup, and some starches, not the fruits, beans, and whole grains that make up such a large part of a healthful, plantbased diet. (See, it's not a matter of carbs fighting agains protein versus fat, it's the case that there are carbs that are good and bad, there's kinds of protein that are good and bad, and there's fats that are good, and those that are bad. Good and bad ones for Each. Like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. It's not that carbs are bad-it's that cake is bad. But the carbs in brown rice and bananas are great. It's not that large amounts of protein are good, it's the case that plant proteins are healthy and animal meat proteins are linked to cancer and health damage. And it's not that every single nit of fat is bad, it's the case that plant-based omega3's are ok, as are Mufa's, and that Saturated Fats and Trans fats are bad. It's not about %. It's not about lowcarb at all. It's about keeping the percentages the same but choosing all the good types of plant protein, whole grain energetic carbs, and healthy omega3 fatty acids, and dumping the cancerous meat and steak protein, heart-clogging saturated fat, and processed purified white bleached cakes topped with the kind of factory carbs like sugary empty calories. It turns out that whole wheat is good, not bad, whole grain pasta is good, not bad, brown rice is good, not bad, and flax oil and olive oil is good, not bad. Red Meats are bad, not healthy, Butter is bad, not good, and lack of carbs causes health damage such as ketosis, kidney damage, nitrogen waste, bad breath, body odor, fatigue, and lowcarb diets essentially train your body to eat itself, digesting your own muscle and causing muscle loss. Plant based diets include just as much protein, energy from carbs for the brain and endurance, and heart pumping clear plant origin omega3's.) Now, it's true that the USDA Food Pyramid does probably err in presenting grains as an undifferentiated, eat-all-you-want base for our diet, (it should say brown grains not white, that's all) but Taubes wildly erroneously overstates the effect this has had on American eating patterns. In his flawed conceptions, we've become more obese because we're eating exactly as the Food Pyramid tells us to, so the pyramid must be completely wrong. (It's how much people are eating, too much). He conveniently avoids any mention of how few Americans actually eat according to the guidelines (fewer than a third, according to the Department of Health and Human Services), and ridicules the notion that our food choices may be more influenced by our ad-saturated instant-gratification culture than by the opinions of scientists. (How many people do you know that eat after consulting the USDA food plate chart? As opposed to saying hey, that was a fast food commercial, let's get some! - Taubes theory is that everyone is using the USDA food plate, and then since some people are fat, that 'proves' the whole food plate diagram is somehow wrong. Oh, and add a tinge of appeal to conspiracy theories bashing 'the government' or 'big pharma' or something. That sells diet books to the uneducated.) Shortly after this piece appeared, an American Dietetic Association survey showed that most of us get our nutrition advice from commercial television. But in Taubes' world, that's irrelevant: We eat junk food because of USDA "low fat" guidelines. We guzzle soft drinks, he says, because "they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy." That's right: Soft drinks "appear intrinsically healthy!" Have you ever heard ANYONE make a health claim for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Mountain Dew because they're "fat free?"

It's no secret that these things are heavily branded sugar water, or that sugar makes you fat. (Brown rice is made of carbs too, so is a banana, and a basket full of cherries and fruit, but those don't make you fat--think of over 2 billion asians eating rice. Those kinds of carbs are not the same as drinking a soda, essentially a cup full of refined sugarwater.) But it's more important to be cool, to be refreshed, to obey your thirst, to get that jolt of caffeine and sugar right now. Taubes finds it inconceivable "that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity - both socially and physically - is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal." In other words, being obese is so punishing that people who continue to live on fast food must be doing so because they consider it healthy. This disingenuousness underlies much of Taubes' analysis, which seeks to tie a decades-long rise in obesity to recent recommendations to lower our fat intake. The impact of the food pyramid, which replaced the "Four Food Groups" in 1992, was apparently so great that it caused us to gain weight a full ten years before the pyramid appeared!: "The percentage of obese Americans," Taubes reports, "stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's." Taubes feigns mystification at the fact that during this rise, we've been eating less fat as a percentage of calories. Yet a few sentences later he mentions that we're also eating 400 more calories every day. As it happens, we're NOT eating less fat now, we're eating slightly more - something he never finds room to mention but we're definitely eating way more food, way more calories - you know, the thing that makes you fat? So what's the best way to avoid excess calories and still get good nutrition? Easy: Nutritious foods that are low in calories - a description that befits most unprocessed plant foods. Remember that gram for gram, fat has twice the calories that carbs do, without providing twice the vitamins. But that's OK, because Atkins' plan is for you to get vitamins elsewhere - namely, from the Atkins Center, which sells "Atkins" brand vitamins at phenomenal prices. The "Diet-Pak," for instance, containing "a month's supply of all the nutritional support your body needs to survive and thrive during controlled carb weight loss," is on sale for $53.96 (marked down from $63.96). That word "survive" is a little jarring - the implication is, if you want to be sure this diet doesn't kill you, fork over $640 a year (assuming that sale price holds) to get the nutrients missing in your "nutrient-dense" food supply. Taubes doesn't bring any of this up, of course, but he tacitly admits that the diet is dependent on vitamin supplements to deliver adequate nutrition. In his prime example of a clinically successful Atkinsstyle diet, he reports that "the diet was 'lean meat, fish and fowl' supplemented by vitamins and minerals." Note that even the meat is lower-fat. This is a big fat endorsement? There are other interesting omissions in this very long article, not least the many non-vitamin-related health liabilities associated with a high-animal-protein diet (see sidebar). Nor does Taubes seem to want to discuss the charge that Atkins-style diets cause constipation. After all, what's a little discomfort here and there when you're improving your health through the power of saturated fat? As if weak logic, straw-man arguments, and careful selection of factoids was not enough to drive his point home, Taubes apparently stooped to misrepresenting his sources and to denying the existence of data that didn't fit. Some would be surprised that in his thorough examination of the relationship of high- or low-carb diets to heart disease, Taubes conveniently forgot to consider the peer-reviewed successes of, say, Dean Ornish, but it's much more than that: his summary of what science has found out about these issues is so skewed as to border on outright fraud. Scripps Howard columnist Michael Fumento quotes Stanford University cardiologist Dr. John Farquhar as saying "I was greatly offended by how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins Diet. I'm sorry I ever talked to him." And, CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen (7/8/02) spoke to three of the Harvard researchers spotlighted in Taubes' piece - the ones representing a major shift in thinking about Atkins - and heard from them that Taubes had misrepresented their positions on the matter of fats vs. carbs. They all explained that there are good fats and bad fats, and good carbs and bad carbs, making the categorical distinctions that Taubes had worked so hard to elide. And "...cheeseburgers, pork chops, butter and bacon," Cohen says, "the folks who I talked to said: 'You know what? We don't like that kind of fat. We don't think that's good for people."

One Harvard researcher Taubes cited is Walter Willett, who has long been a critic of the prevalence of starchy grains in USDA recommendations, among other things. Taubes seems to elicit phrases from Willett supporting his cheeseburger-based regimen. Yet Willett told Time Magazine (12/24/90): "The less red meat, the better. At most, it should be eaten only occasionally. And it may be maximally effective not to eat red meat at all." Has Willett changed his viewpoint, or has he been misrepresented? If we're to believe the Washington Post, it's the latter. In "Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts" (8/27/02), Sally Squires spoke to Willett regarding Taubes' remarkable advice to "eat lard straight out of the can" to "reduce your risk of heart disease." Willett recalled speaking to Taubes about lard, but stressed that "I don't think that lard is part of a healthy diet." Instead, he told Squires, the idea is to "'replace unhealthy fats with healthy fats,' such as those found in fish, nuts, olives and avocados." After explaining at some length why those fats, unlike lard, have a positive impact on your cholesterol, Willett added: "And I have gone over this a number of times with Gary, but he barely mentioned it in the article." That's not the only discrepancy Squires found in Taubes' reporting. As the author contends throughout "Big Fat Lie" that low-fat diets have proven to be "dismal failures," Squires found dozens of peerreviewed studies that proved exactly the opposite and asked Taubes why he ignored these reams of data - especially when they came from his own sources. A researcher named Arne Astrup, for instance, whom Taubes interviewed for a half-hour, said he provided Taubes with "all the evidence suggesting that low-fat diets are the best documented diets and was extremely surprised to see that he didn't use any of that information in his article." Taubes' excuses for these omissions - ranging from an opinion that one prominent scientist "didn't strike me as a scientist," to an assessment that another didn't cause quite enough weight loss, to his own "gut feeling" that the head of one peer-reviewed study "made the data up," to a breezy dismissal of the entire science of epidemiology - come off as comically bogus. Squires may have been giving Taubes a taste of his own selective-quote medicine, especially by concluding her article with his quote "I know, I sound like if somebody finds something I believe in, then I don't question it." Well, yeah, that's just it. Taubes launches his "Big Fat Lie" broadside by explicitly linking the conventional, low-fat wisdom to religious zealotry. In his introductory paragraphs, he stresses this is something "we've been told with almost religious certainty ... and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty." But after a careful examination of the article's construction and its history (at least according to the other people involved in it), it becomes clear that Taubes, an Atkins disciple, is projecting his own zealotry onto those he disagrees with. While some manipulations in his writing seem very carefully calculated - e.g., waiting until the next-tolast paragraph to include three major bombshells (that he is on the diet himself, that overconsumption of saturated fat can indeed shorten lifespan, and that "Atkins had suffered with heart troubles of his own") - it would seem that Taubes was not exactly trying to deceive his readers. Instead, he just wants us to believe as fervently as he does; his judgement of what's relevant and what's not, what's logical and what's not, is somewhat skewed by his faith in the animal-fat credo. All in all, the article is not without some merit: It encouraged more discussion of the role of different fats, and the possibility that different levels of fat and carbs may work differently for different people. Since "Big Fat Lie" appeared, some studies have confirmed, once again, that Atkins-style diets can indeed cause weight loss, and without any short-term health effects. On the other hand, a massive Stanford University survey of low-carb trials confirmed that the key to the diet's success is simple calorie restriction rather than any "magical" metabolic process. And, in one of the "success story" studies (New England Journal of Medicine, May 2003), people on the low-carb program gained twice as much weight back after a year than did the low-fat participants, leading the Washington Post to call the "long-term benefits negligible." And in June, another New York Times writer, Jason Epstein, penned a public apology to readers for his earlier Atkins evangelizing.

Who knows? Maybe a new scientific study will indeed find the perfect combination of body type and fat/protein mix to validate Atkins' theories. On the other hand, maybe the answer will be: It worked for some people because, like Taubes, they really, truly believed it would. So they just reduced calories like any other diet and it was really that which worked, but you could do the same thing by going low fat, high carb and eating the healthy fats and not meat fat, and plant protein instead of animal protein, and good whole grain carbs instead of liquid sugar and lose just the same amount of weight but come out of it healthy and with protection against cancer, unlike a lowcarb atkins diet which gives you bad breath, body odor, and might send you to the emergency room with coronary problems or end up spawning a budding tumor in your tissues which you will now have to live with in pain for the next decade of your life.

NUTRITION AND HEALTH Unlike what he is purported to be, Gary Taubes actually has NO medical degree, he is not a registered dietitian, he has NO certification in nutrition, he is not a medical doctor, he has not ever performed surgery or seen a human heart in the chest of a patient showing the effects of saturated fat and cholesterol, or atherosclerosis, he actually criticizes science and then he does the very same thing he criticizes such as criticizing an epidemiological study and then turning around and citing another epidemiological study as proof of his own theories on his own blog or in his own article, and when cited often he is citing it the wrong way and interpreting it incorrectly. Gary Taubes is only a journalist. He writes articles. He's a blogger with no authorization to practice medicine, he is Not an M.D. and has no Board Certification in anything. Gary Taubes is merely a columnist, who is selling flawed and incorrect ideas in diet books. Of course these are fudged up in a certain way so as to 'appear' like they are scientific, but they are not. This is what's often called "Pseudoscience". It's like the difference between physics (an actual science) and a psychic (fortune-teller), or the difference between astronomy (the actual science) and Astrology. Astrology is bunk, attempting to tell people about romance and duping people that it can predict their future, but it can be doctored up with all kinds of star-charts and orbits and biorhythmic graph looking things with scientific-looking symbols in order to appear like it has anything to do with science when in actuality it is merely Miss Cleo's psychic phone line. Gary Taubes' work has now been found flawed. And to those who still doubt, the final nail in his reputation coffin is that Gary Taubes is Fat. An individual who purports to be a scientific expert in weight loss and know all the answers perfectly on how to achieve it, should live it, should be a shining example of their own words. Gary Taubes has been on his own LowCarb Atkins Paleo style diet for year after year after year, and yet he sports a bulging muffintop like paunch stomach gut and thus Gary Taubes is a living failure of his own ideas. Who takes nutritional advice and believes the diet theories of a person who can't even do anything themselves? No one. Lowcarb diets were debunked in the mid 2000's and found false, however some people still don't realize this and are still following them. And thus Gary Taubes is now listed as yet another diet-kook who took himself too seriously and spewed books and articles full of thousands of lines of fallacious information that was found to be false and unscientific. He has bilked thousands of people in the public, and even duped a foundation into giving him funds. Meanwhile the health damage from his crank ideas have possibly hurt thousands of people. Gary Taubes is now regarded as a lowcarb diet kook.

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