Episode 42: Gary Taubes and the Case Against Sugar

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

What's going on guys? Chris here, and I wanted to take a moment before we get into today's episode to tell you about the Warrior Soul Agoge. That's our website. It's at www.warriorsoulagoge.com. The Agoge was a concept developed in ancient Sparta.

It's where they sent their young boys in order to learn how to become hardened Spartan warriors. At our Agoge, you're gonna learn about things like increasing your mental and physical performance through nutrition and exercise, as well as learning some other great tools and tactics that can help you to live your best life. We've got all of our podcasts up there. We've got new videos up every single day, and we've got some great articles up there as well. We've also got a lot of our training programs up there, ebooks on fitness that can help you to burn fat, build muscle, and increase your performance.

We've also got some amazing supplements up there like Dinotropin. Dinotropin is a human growth hormone secretagogue that's been demonstrated in over 900 clinical cases to help you to increase your growth hormone levels by 50 to 200%. Really great things going over at going on over at the Warrior Soul Agoge, and if you want to check us out, again, that's www.warriorsoulagoge.com. I also wanted to ask you guys if you can to write us a review on iTunes. We put a lot of work into this podcast and we want to know whether or not it's helping you out.

So, if you can, whether you like us or not, please be honest with us, but head over to iTunes and write us a review. It really helps this show out a lot. Today's podcast might, cause you to question a lot of things. It's going to cause you to question what you've been eating, what you thought was healthy and what causes various diseases. Over the past half century or more, we've looked at fat as an enemy in our nutrition.

And we've neglected the role that carbohydrates and sugar may play in the onset of death dealing disease. Our guest today is Mr. Gary Taubes. He is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, and The Case Against Sugar. We're getting a lot of different things, like the fact that one out of every four veterans admitted to the VA hospital system actually suffers from diabetes.

That's a higher rate than the veteran suicide rate right now, and nobody's talking about it. So we get into this and even more as far as nutrition and the plague of diabetes and heart disease on our society here in The United States and in the Western world. And I think it's one of the most interesting conversations we've had. So without further delay, let's get into episode number 42 of the Warrior Soul podcast with mister Gary Taubes.

Chris Albert 00:03:17 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's a solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

You need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul podcast.

Chris Albert 00:03:56 (link to this point)

Good afternoon, everybody, or whatever time of day it is when you're listening to this podcast. This is Chris Albert here with my brother, Andrew Marr. And we're here today to talk about a very, very important issue in our opinion with not only with the veterans community, but with the country in general. Just some stats for you guys. Twenty nine point one million people have diabetes.

That's nine point three percent of the population. Eight point one million people right now are undiagnosed, and one in four veterans admitted in the VA system have diabetes. I just got that. The first two statistics come from the CDC from 2014, and the last statistic comes from a book called The Case Against Sugar by a gentleman named Gary Taubes, who's been a huge influence on me in the way I conduct my diet through his books. The other major book that I read was Good Calories, Bad Calories.

But we've got Gary here with us today. First, Gary, I just wanna thank you so much coming on to this podcast and and I wanna thank you for your work because I understand that, you know, going against the grain like this nutritionally like you have and and just putting it out there, it can't be an easy thing.

Gary Taubes 00:05:29 (link to this point)

It's interesting. I want I wanna thank you guys for having me also, and I'm I'm honored to do the podcast. Yeah. That, being a journalist, challenging half century to a century of conventional thinking and nutrition is is, certainly an interesting position to be in in life. I think maybe Don Quixote tilting at windmills is my role model.

Andrew Marr 00:05:56 (link to this point)

Anytime you challenge that status quo, you you meet resistance, you know, even when you can back it up with sound evidence. So I know you've seen that time and time again. What's propelled you to keep going forward, Gary, as you meet that resistance?

Gary Taubes 00:06:09 (link to this point)

Well, it's folks like you. Mean, it's it's clearly so we should establish what, you know, what that challenge is and more or less how I got into it because the world is full of quacks who challenge conventional wisdom and are wrong. And so, you know, I entered this field as a as a journalist in the mid eighties. I had a hard science background and I was a science journalist doing investigative science reporting. So one thing I learned once I went into science journalism is just like there's the, know, bad doctors and bad plumbers and in the in the military, you've got, you know, bad officers and bad listen.

And people just can't do their job right no matter all their best intentions. In science, you've got the same issue. And in the early nineties, I got into reporting on public health because the science there happened to be particularly bad. And that brought me into nutrition by the late nineties, and then I had the opportunity to spend five years of my life intensively researching the history of nutrition and the science of obesity and diabetes going back to the nineteenth century, which the Internet made possible to do for the first time really comprehensively in a way that can never be done before. So the conclusions from this research was fascinating because as as you guys mentioned, we have these epidemics of diabetes that are unprecedented and an epidemic of obesity that goes with it that's also unprecedented and throughout this whole period not only do our research community that studies these things think they completely understand the cause of these disorders, but the nutritional guidelines that we've been given, to address it have been dominated by this idea that if you want to lose weight you just got to eat less and we should all be eating low fat diets to prevent heart disease.

And by eating low fat diets that will also help us eat less because fat is the densest calorie in the diet.

Andrew Marr 00:08:18 (link to this point)

Excuse me.

Gary Taubes 00:08:19 (link to this point)

So that's sort of the conventional wisdom. If you want to lose weight, got to eat less, exercise more, and if you want to prevent heart disease, you got to eat low fat diets, low saturated fat diets particularly so you avoid dairy and animal products. And when you go through the research, as I did and you have the opportunity to do what I did, both these ideas turn out to just be more or less dead wrong. So the idea that you should just eat less to lose weight sounds about as obvious as any idea could be, but it's based on this idea that the way we get fat to begin with is just by taking in too many calories and that ignores all these sort of hormonal regulatory issues that control how much fat we accumulate in our bodies and basically have very little to do with the caloric content of our diet and a lot to do with what we eat. It's not how much we eat, it's what we eat and then if you're concerned about what you eat the problem becomes not the fat in your diet but the kinds of carbohydrates we eat, the refined grains and sugars.

So for the past fifteen years or so beginning with the legend infamous New York Times Magazine cover story and then a series of books I've been arguing along with some very good researchers and an ever growing number of physicians and nutritionists that we should basically be doing the exact opposite of what the government has been telling us to do for the past forty years.

Chris Albert 00:09:55 (link to this point)

That that article was called what if it was all a big fat lie?

Gary Taubes 00:09:59 (link to this point)

What if it's all been a big fat lie? Yeah. And I got pilloried for writing that.

Chris Albert 00:10:06 (link to this point)

What what kind of resistance you face? Because, you know, I've I've googled your name quite a bit. I've I've listened to a lot of your interviews. I've I've mentioned you on a lot of my own YouTube videos, because I run my own YouTube fitness channel as well. And and there's some people out there, you know, particularly, you know, people in the vegan community and things like that.

They I mean, they just started spouting different types of vitriol and and all kinds of things. What types of resistance have you faced from various communities including the scientific community?

Gary Taubes 00:10:39 (link to this point)

Well, so it comes in different forms. The scientific community in general tends to ignore you. When you challenge them, their response and it's a it's a valid response, is to so the the the the the experts, the authorities, their their response is look any journalist who comes along and says he knows better than we do is almost assuredly wrong. Not only are we experts all our friends and our allies and our colleagues and the people who have given us promotions and given us grants and give us awards all think we're experts. They all think we know what we're doing.

You know, clearly this journalist is wrong, so we don't even have to pay attention to him. That's one response. Then there are all these the journalists who have been reporting this field for years. And if I'm right, then they've been wrong also. And everyone likes to think they do their job well. It's like human nature. I think I do it well.

Somebody comes along and disagrees with me. My knee jerk response is they're just not as bright as I am because clearly I know what I'm doing. So when a journalist comes along and particularly in a very high profile setting like cover the New York Times Magazine and says not only did the research community get it wrong but the journalists get it wrong. The journalists actually have an opportunity to very quickly respond because they write for newspapers and magazines. So I even had friends go after me.

I had one, woman in Boston who used to think I was one of the five best science health reporters in the country, maybe one of the three best until I wrote a very high profile article basically suggesting she had missed, you know, implying she had missed the story. And then she wrote a piece implying that I had had a brain transplant or had sold out to the, you know, the food industry or something or had worse had just made up the story so I could get a big book deal which I did get a big book deal so it was an easy target. So you get those kind of responses. There are organizations out there, consumer advocacy groups who have been pushing for healthier diets for years and what they've been pushing for are low fat diets. So I'm challenging what they've been doing and they also have the opportunity to respond in their newsletters.

So my piece was called what if it's all been a big fat lie, the Center for Science and the Public Interest in Washington published an article claiming that I had basically made all numerous mistakes and misquoted people and they called their article big fat lies attacking me. So that's the kind of response. I was stunned by all this, by the way. I knew the piece would be very controversial because I was claiming that half century of nutrition research was almost assuredly wrong in doing it in this high profile venue, but I was still kind of stunned as you put it by the vitriol of the response, how people simply didn't wanna hear it. And rather than deal with the message, they the easiest thing to do is go after the messenger, which was me.

After that, my job has been to sort of convince people that there's something valid here and they have to take it seriously. And, again, every book I write is another attempt to do that. And, you know, the feedback that keeps me going is pretty simple, which is the world is full of people like you guys who have read the books, find them compelling, change their diet, and get healthier. And nowadays, there are probably, I don't know, thousands of doctors who have changed the way they practice medicine based on these ideas. So I've had doctors say, you know, you made medicine fun for me again because I can actually make my patients healthier instead of just prescribing them drugs to treat their symptoms.

I can get them to shift their diet and actually watch them become healthy and they can watch themselves become healthy and the conventional wisdom is that nobody stays on a diet. And I would argue that's because it's it's the wrong diet and it's impossible to do and it doesn't make you healthier. You're not gonna stick with it. But when you get the right diet and you change your diet correctly and you actually see these changes and feel these changes, people find it very compelling to stick with.

Andrew Marr 00:15:14 (link to this point)

Gary, walk us through your mindset when you first started compiling your research in this data, some of the numbers that Chris read off earlier in the show, it must have been shocking or you're like, my gosh, I found what I believe the reason to be all of our problems and it's not being looked at. Like, What was that like for you when you first started coming to that conclusion?

Gary Taubes 00:15:40 (link to this point)

Well, it's funny. I mean, even I didn't your thinking evolves as you go. And even writing books, I've often said that the process of writing a book is learning what book I should have written by the time I'm done and it's not the book that you end up getting published. I my first piece in the magazine was the beginning of, in effect, this intensive research period. And then I spent five years researching and writing my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is a very sort of serious almost academic work despite the kind of diet bookish title. And that book is 500 pages long with a 150 odd pages of endnotes and and the learning experience there was if you want people to understand how they could possibly have gotten a subject wrong.

So I'm writing on one level to the experts because the experts have to understand it. You know, the authorities have to understand that the doctors have to get it, the scientists have to get it, the public health people have to get it. Otherwise, it's not gonna be disseminated the way it has to be disseminated. So on some level, I'm writing to them, and they don't just don't have the time to read a 500 page book, the subtext of which is you've been an idiot your whole life. I once gave a lecture at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, which is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And the title of the lecture is why we get fat. And the implication is it's not about how many calories you eat. It's about the the foods you eat and their effect on the hormones and enzymes that regulate fat accumulation. And at the end of the lecture, one of the faculty raised his hand and very politely said, mister Taubes, there's one subtext of your lecture that you think we're all idiots. And the answer is, you know, I don't wanna say yes. Kind of that's the subtext. You have to figure out a polite way to explain why they could have missed a very simple story for forty years and made a very kind of tragic simple mistake for forty years. So the first book was yeah.

And people they changed people's minds. It got some terrific reviews and some condescendingly dismissive reviews. But the lesson was if I really want people to pay attention, I can't expect them to read 500 pages implying that they just are, you know, got everything wrong. So then I write the second book, why we get fat, which is the kind of airplane reading version. And now I condense the history and the philosophy of science and all this kind of academic tome into this 250 page polemical argument.

That book started to take off and now, you know a lot it increased the readership and the understanding of the ideas significantly but you're still not getting past the barrier of the research community which is like this is crap and we really don't have time. You know, it's just life is too short to bother reading this so that we could figure out why this journalist thinks were wrong when clearly he's the one who's wrong. And then each book has gotten the last book, The Case Against Sugar, is a way to package the same ideas in an argument that in a in a form to pardon the expression of sugar coated. So there's a lot of nutritionists who are gonna read a book about the case against called the case against sugar, particularly because they know they accept now that sugar is a huge problem, which they didn't twenty years ago when I first started this crusade. And so in the process of reading that book, I'm still, you know, hoping that they will absorb some of these other messages about how they might have misunderstood things.

But it's still I'm still constantly surprised by responses, and I still get very condescendingly dismissive reviews that I'm just a pop science writer. And, clearly, I should leave the expertise to the experts. And I wanna respond, you know, when you've got these unprecedented epidemics, you're the prevalence of diabetes in The US has increased seven hundred percent in almost little less than sixty years. I mean, that's a that's a almost unimaginable number. Why would we if it's why would you even consider trusting the experts with a number like that?

Like, clearly, they're doing something wrong.

Chris Albert 00:20:20 (link to this point)

Yeah. It's it's ridiculous what's going on right now. And numbers are crazy. And, you know, as somebody who's who's read Thomas Kuhn and and studied scientific revolutions in the philosophy of science, I went through your book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and and that story about how fat got demonized and and about how how we came to understand that or came to believe that high carbohydrate diets were healthy. That that was a fascinating story.

Can can you take us through a little bit of why this lipid hypothesis research program stays alive? Why does it stay alive? Why is it stayed alive for so long when it hasn't done any good?

Gary Taubes 00:21:05 (link to this point)

Well, so this is, yeah, this is a part of the story that fascinates me. This is what obsessed the investigative journalist in me. So one of my favorite sent lines, which I quote in multiple books, is by the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, said the first principle of science is you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. And so the best scientists in the world are hypercritical of their own ideas. They're skeptical, and they believe this idea that what you're trying to do in science is prove that you got it wrong.

So you get a hypothesis, and then you try to disprove the hypothesis and you try as hard as you can to disprove the hypothesis. And when you fail to successfully disprove it, you get your friends and colleagues involved in trying to disprove and eventually, you begrudgingly say, look. This hypothesis might be right because we have completely failed to shoot it down, and we're gonna believe it until somebody else can show us how we screwed up. That's kind of how science works and how it should work. So nutrition, what happens is post World War two, you get this awareness that there's a appears to be a heart disease epidemic going on in the world.

Middle age executives are dropping dead from heart attacks, and whether or not there was an epidemic is a longer story, but there's the appearance of epidemic. So nutritionists in The US decide they're gonna try and figure this out. And because heart attacks are linked to atherosclerosis, you know, plaques in your arteries, and the plaques in your arteries have cholesterol in them. The idea is whatever raises cholesterol might cause atherosclerosis and lo and behold, fats from animal products. I don't think of them as saturated fats yet, but these animal fats raise cholesterol.

So one particular nutritionist named Ancel Keys, is a very smart guy in some ways, not so smart in others, and very influential already in the fifties, decides that dietary fat's the cause of heart disease based on some simple observations and some very simplistic thinking. And then he goes about trying to convince the world that he's right and trying to convince himself that he's right. And because there's no competing hypothesis in the nineteen sixties, so they don't have any real belief system about what the dietary cause of heart disease is. Keys gets this idea that it's dietary fat and that just fills this vacuum. So suddenly the idea is dietary fat probably causes heart disease.

We're gonna do all these studies and all these tests to prove that that hypothesis is right, not test the hypothesis, which is what they're supposed to be doing, but to prove it's right. And until then, we're gonna believe it's right, and eventually, we'll prove it. So complete kind of ass backwards way of doing science and these people frankly were never trained to be scientists. They were trained to be doctors and they weren't first rate intellects. They were second and third rate intellects, the kind of people who went into nutrition in the sixties were rather than physics or molecular biology or Wall Street or even medicine and what's interesting is the more studies they did, they did study after study and they kept failing to confirm this idea that dietary fat causes heart disease, but they just kept looking for reasons to rationalize why the study failed.

So you could always find in a study a little piece of data that supports your belief and ignore all the negative data, and that's basically what they did. Technically called cherry picking. Everyone does it to some extent. They kind of perfected it. And as these studies went on and then the National Health Institutes of Health gets involved and they're deciding gonna fund 250,000,000 worth of studies.

This is now the mid nineteen seventies, and congress agrees to let them spend $250,000,000. And from the standpoint of a congressman, if you're gonna fund a study testing the hypothesis of dietary fat causes heart disease, the only successful conclusion to that test is to confirm that it does. So that to a congressman, if that study refutes the hypothesis, it's a waste of money. To a scientist, that's successful science. To a congressman, it's a waste of money.

So you end up with this sort of huge kind of societal movement. The journalists get involved, and they ask people like Ancel Keys, you know, what do you the what causes heart disease? And he says, well, dietary fat does. So the journalists are writing that dietary fat causes heart disease. The congressmen believe it causes heart disease.

A congressional committee decides for the first time ever to put together dietary guidelines for America, and they have, in effect, one writer with a background in labor reporting from a Rhode Island newspaper interview for scientists who say, oh, yeah. Dietary fat causes heart disease, and you just get this kind of what's technically called a cascade effect. And the studies continue to refute the hypothesis until finally 1984, coincidentally, one huge study, one of the two studies done, which was testing the hypothesis that a cholesterol lowering drug could reduce heart disease and make people live longer seems to be a success and that it seems to show that men live longer on this cholesterol lowering drug and the National Institutes of Health and all these health organizations just sort of dive in and decide they are gonna tell all Americans that we have to go on low fat diets based on a drug study, not even a diet study. And, again, as you go through, even as I'm telling this story, I'm thinking this sounds impossible. Surely, ly this didn't happen.

And yet this is, you know, it's a it's a abbreviated version of what what happened over twenty year period. By the mid nineteen eighties, we were being bombarded from numerous government agencies and publications with this message that we should all eat low fat diets, and it was simply wrong. And it was an interesting hypothesis that could never be confirmed. And then once the government was invested in the American Heart Association actually had been invested in this idea since the early nineteen sixties, they're just not going back. It's very hard for government organization to acknowledge that they made a mistake.

You know, you can't imagine the American Heart Association putting together a press release for instance explaining why the low fat diet advice they've been given since 1961 was wrong and apologizing for killing any people they might have killed. And it's just never gonna happen. So, you know, the the organizations get more and more dug in and you end up with an idea that you this extremely difficult to remove from the sort of population thinking zeitgeist.

Chris Albert 00:28:27 (link to this point)

Well, let's talk about the impact there. What what was the impact of this this faulty research program? And how did it affect the average person here in The United States?

Gary Taubes 00:28:39 (link to this point)

Well, so here's the idea. When you tell people to eat less fat, you have to replace those calories with something. So the question is what do you replace it with? And the answer was carbohydrates. I don't know if you guys remember the food guide pyramid, but the base of the food guide pyramid, this came in the mid nineties was, you know, pasta, bread, potatoes, rice.

So one shift is and I document this in my books. From the early eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen sixties, the conventional thinking was a carbohydrates were fattening. You know, bread, pasta, potatoes, beer, sweets, egg literally make you fat. Nobody really quite understood why, what it meant. You know, does it make you eat more?

Does it make you just accumulate more fat? But the conventional wisdom was that if you don't wanna get fat, those are the foods you didn't eat. Now beginning in the nineteen sixties, we start telling people to eat low fat diets and then we institutionalize this in the nineteen eighties. So you eat less fat and you replace it with carbs, fattening carbs and the the carbohydrate itself goes from being thought of as uniquely fattening in the nineteen sixties to a heart healthy diet food by the nineteen eighties. So I remember being a young journalist in New York when suddenly everybody started eating baked potatoes for dinner every night.

And the idea was a baked potato was a healthy diet food. You just didn't put butter or sour cream on it, were the fattening things. So we literally shifted our diets from, you know, a higher fat diets to lower fat, higher carbs, and we started eating these foods at previous generations just based on their copious anecdotal experience thought were fattening. And then the other thing that happened is sugar, which includes, you know, the the cane and beet sugar, the white stuff you put in your coffee or sprinkle on your cereal, which is technically sucrose. And then high fructose corn syrup, which is syrupy version of sugar that came in in the late nineteen seventies and is made from corn.

These these were kind of given a free pass. So there was also this conventional thinking that sugar was something you should avoid in a healthy diet. But once we targeted fat as the problem and then the food industry was instructed, for instance, by the Centers for Disease Control to come out with low fat food products. They would remove the fat from the product, and then you've got this sort of tasteless, insipid food. And so you have to replace those calories again, and you replace it with sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

And then you can market it as hard healthy diet foods. So yogurt is the classic example of this and you end up with this whole world, tens of thousands of low fat food substances being produced and marketed that are lower in fat, equal calories, and higher in sugar and are now being portrayed as health foods. And even sugary beverages, sodas, things like that were just assumed to be benign because fat was the problem, not sugar. So the country goes on this prolonged sugar binge and this carb binge and all of us thinking we're eating healthy the way we're being told to eat. And you could see this reflected in the statistics from the US Department of Agriculture.

And simultaneously, obesity and diabetes rates skyrocket. And, you know, again, you can't say that's the cause, but it's very suspicious. So, you know, my guess is a lot of these even the vets, one in four vets with diabetes in the VA medical system are diabetic in large part because thinking they've been eating a healthy diet and yet simply eating the wrong foods.

Chris Albert 00:32:39 (link to this point)

Yeah. I I mean, I think back to when we, when I was in and I was just actually looking over the, the nutrition factors in in MREs, the meals ready to eat. And, you know, we I'll just pull some up for you over here. The Chili Mac, which was actually my favorite MRE during that whole time, it had something like a 160 grams of total carbohydrate with a 100 gram of grams of sugar in a single meal. And and, you know, just going down the list. The average is like, I mean, the the lowest I've seen is 47 grams of sugar in a single meal. I mean, it it's ridiculous.

Gary Taubes 00:33:22 (link to this point)

Well, it's funny because one of the the big countries controversy in the nineteen sixties. So there was a a school of British nutritionists who were saying, hey. The problem is white flour and sugar and refined carbohydrates that includes like the maltose and beer, but mostly white flour and sugar. And this guy, Ancel Keys, who thought it was fat. And Keys was the kind of guy that you would describe as not suffering fools gladly, which is to me another word for I don't know if I could what kind of language you're allowed to use on your show, but someone goes

Chris Albert 00:33:58 (link to this point)

whatever language you want, man.

Andrew Marr 00:34:00 (link to this point)

Anything you want.

Gary Taubes 00:34:00 (link to this point)

Another word for an asshole, basically. Anyway, Keys the guy pushing the sugar school in The UK said sugar is a problem. It's a guy named John Yudkin who happened to be the premier nutritionist in Europe. He was, you know, one of the smartest nutritionists out there. He had the best science training and he was criticizing Keys' work and Keys hated him and he didn't like Keys and what's interesting so Keys back in World War two was famous for a series of things including creating the k ration.

And the k was said to stand for Keys. And the k ration is loaded with sugar including their sugar tablets in it. So the idea is, you know, you load people up with sugar and that gives them energy. And then Keys laboratory was also funded by the sugar industry, which may or may not have played a role. But I often wondered if the reason that Keys was so adamant against this idea that sugar was a problem was in part because he had been played a major role in basically, you know, infusing generations of US military men with high sugar diets.

But the idea is ultimately that, you know, it's the sugar and the carbs that cause the diabetes. This is the argument I'm making in the case against sugar and the so you need a we clearly genetic factors are involved with this disease, but it's ultimately and fundamentally the sugar in the diet that cause it. Maybe not even in in your diet, but in your mother's diet because she can sort of pass on a susceptibility to this disease in the womb. So it's a very the science is fascinating, and it's just it's basic. I mean, it's all pretty much conventional biology that's just been ignored for fifty years because once we started getting this story wrong, the researchers can't believe that, you know, they they became invested in it and their egos and their careers and their belief in their own, you know, capabilities became invested in it.

Chris Albert 00:36:18 (link to this point)

I just wanna get Andrew's perspective on this because I I did a post a couple of weeks ago just talking about the amount of sugar in MREs. And, you know, there's guys out there and and they even say it on the box. They say war war fighters have unique nutrition requirements and that's kinda how they justify the sugar content. But you know, I had some people come on to the post and they were like, well, we need the sugar when we're when we're out there doing infantry stuff and everything. And Andrew, you know, you're you're you're a Green Beret.

You you operated for quite a while, did three tours in Afghanistan. What's your perspective on all this as far as nutrition in the field?

Andrew Marr 00:37:02 (link to this point)

Well, I think what Gary is helping to kind of illuminate, through his books and the new understanding what the science is establishing with inflammation, I didn't realize, we didn't realize as far as people operating on a whole, what role inflammation actually could play as being detrimental to our health and what role nutrition could play in either being pro inflammatory or anti inflammatory. So when you think of it in that aspect, something that's high in sugar or high in refined or processed sugar or carbohydrates are gonna lead to what we call a non neuro permissive environment, something that's where the body could be riddled with chronic inflammation, especially if you're eating like this over and over and over again. So then being around or in environments that you're with low level explosions and things that were the heads competitively getting jarred, you're susceptible to a brain injury and other things. So I think if there's a direct correlation there that we're helping to show. But I think anybody who has a problem, you know, they talk negatively about eating sugar in the field, They they don't have understanding what they're really trying to do.

A professional would never talk that way. So when new science comes out, you know, are what are the Olympians doing? How are they preparing? And we will try to do the same thing in special forces. That's why I love Gary's book and the information so much because it's I know it's getting implemented there because they're taking that information and saying, oh, shit, man.

How can we change what we're doing to benefit, you know, and achieve the mission? So if you know that sugar is gonna deplete the system, it's gonna gonna be a quick energy and then you're gonna need it again, you're gonna fall off. This doesn't provide benefits. And if you're really focused on accomplishing a mission, then you shouldn't be worrying about comfort food. You should want it to fuel your body with the most optimal sources possible in order to achieve that mission.

So, you know, I guess that's that's what, our thinking is on it there.

Gary Taubes 00:39:08 (link to this point)

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because you've got sort of different time scales going on here as well and different there's sort of short and long term goals with when you're talking about ideal nutrition. And one of the things I learned doing the research for the sugar book as you go back to the 1910s 1920s athletic coaches thought of sugar as performance enhancing drug so there are these studies where they're actually feeding sugar to marathoners and to rowers crew. The Germans were actually perfecting the use of sugar in the military and they thought this is terrific for because it is quick energy and we all know I mean mix it with caffeine and it's a pretty unique stable high for three or four hours and you could get you know if you just think of it as performance enhancing drug it's not surprising that people would feel that it's absolutely necessary for enhanced military performance and particularly when you're out in the field you think of the K rations or MREs You need food that's easily preserved that you could take with you that's you know small packages that isn't going to spoil. It's not a question of you know cooking a lot of vegetables when you're out there so sugar can be an extraordinarily valuable part of the diet but just like any other performance enhancing drug it could you be doing long term harm and then when you're in a in susceptible to injury and from from explosions and you could imagine that the conditions that you talked about Andrew the inflammation in the body could actually make the effects of those wounds worse.

But you don't know for sure. You don't really know that and the only way you could find out would be through some pretty significant research. What you do know is I can feed soldiers up with sugar just like I could feed you know a marathoner with sugar and for two hours he might perform he or she might perform better than if they don't have sugar and again it's certainly easy to transport and to take with us and to make sure the soldiers always gonna have enough food but that's a separate issue from then the long term effects and the third issue here is in this whole world, you know, what I've been arguing and others is that the carbohydrate content of the diet is the problem and if you're again predisposed to be obese or diabetic or you're already there, you should be eating very low carb, high fat diets. You have to trust that that fat isn't giving you heart disease. And then the extreme version of that is what's called a ketogenic diet where you've got very low carbs, very high fat.

Your liver is is producing ketones which is feeding your brain and your organs and there's a lot of evidence that people work exceedingly efficiently when they're in ketosis and that it can also enhance performance significantly without the downsides of sugar but now you've got to be able to take foods with you to the war zone that are know keto friendly and they're hard to package the way they I mean nowadays people are creating these foods and they're creating artificial ketones so you can do it and I know that the DOD is doing research in this and funding some of this research but up until the last five or ten years the idea of being in ketosis and a war zone would be virtually impossible. You just couldn't do it. You wouldn't have the foods available to do it unless you were hunting yourself.

Chris Albert 00:43:11 (link to this point)

We we actually just came back from Paleo FX and, you know, we were looking there's some amazing advancements being done to the point where I think that eventually we'll be able to have an MRE that that could be could be able to to help guys get into ketosis. But one thing I I I think significant is that, you know, back when I was eating these MREs, when I was on that that sort of diet, you know, I'd be eating things like pound cake to try to keep my energy up just as you say. And and in about an hour or two afterwards, I was I was literally brain dead, you know, trying to rub, chewing tobacco into my eyes to try to keep myself awake, because of the it brain fog. Did. I mean, that's partially the reason why I think I developed a a tobacco habit when I was in the military was because I was just constantly trying to keep myself alert.

And, you know, you know, and just hearing from from I know Andrew Andrew, were you were you guys using like intermittent fasting or anything like that prior to missions? Or or were you consuming anything else prior to missions to try to stay alert there?

Andrew Marr 00:44:23 (link to this point)

No. I mean, we we were using intermittent fasting, but that adjust. I mean, it's 2010, 2011, we just started implementing that or understanding that. But it wasn't like, as a whole and no idea, like Gary was talking about ketosis are producing ketones, had no idea that that was even a thing there.

Gary Taubes 00:44:47 (link to this point)

Well, and this is what it's an interesting debate that goes back into the nineteen thirties, nineteen forties. So even back then, I forget if it was the US government or the Canadian government financed the study to see how soldiers performed in ketosis because one of the arguments for it is that the Native Americans basically lived on zero carb, high fat diets for at least six months out of the year through the winter and the explorers that explored The US two, three hundred years ago were living on a food called pemmican, which is made primarily from buffalo fat. And all these people would have been in effect in ketosis much of the year. So the Canadian government did a study of soldiers but it takes time to become what's called keto adapted where your body transitions from burning carbohydrates which it's burning if you're eating a typical American diet to burning fat and ketones which is what it burns if once you transition takes about three weeks to make that keto adaption adaptation successfully and the study done in Canada was done on soldiers over the course of three days without allowing them to keto adapt.

And they said, look. These guys are just exhausted. They can barely carry their packs for an hour, let alone, you know, do a day's worth of hiking. So that was the end of those studies, but other, investigators, particularly those for instance that had lived, in the Arctic with the Inuit said, you know, once people become keto adapted, they could do amazing feats of endurance. There was a a famous Harvard anthropologist who lived with the Inuit for a decade in the nineteen tens who would describe they they he said they would go on, you know, dog sled tracks through the through the snow, and the Inuit would run alongside for 25 miles running alongside the dog sleds without needing to rest because they were living on, you know, fat and protein and no carbohydrates.

And he said once the explorers got keto adapted, once they got used to that diet, they could do these kind of remarkable feats of endurance. But it requires that adaptation period. And it's hard to stay in ketosis when you live in a world where all the foods basically the only foods available are carb rich or not sufficiently fat rich.

Andrew Marr 00:47:28 (link to this point)

Gary, can you talk about how we transitioned over the last few hundred years from you know there being no sugar in the diet or not nearly as much as there is today per capita, and diabetes was virtually unknown in certain parts of the world and only seen in the wealthy in other parts as opposed to where we are today. So what's changed, and and why has it changed?

Gary Taubes 00:47:53 (link to this point)

Well, so that's the the case that I make in the case against sugar is, I'm trying to explain this worldwide phenomenon, which is the appearance of obesity and diabetes epidemics whenever a population transitions from whatever its traditional diet is to a Western diet. And in The US, this happened with the industrial revolution that started in the late seventeenth century. So this transition builds slowly through the nineteenth century and then in the twentieth century, it sort of comes to blossom. And as this happened you see diabetes prevalence and I documented this from hospital records from the nineteenth century. You see diabetes going from a vanishingly rare disease like a major urban hospitals will have zero patients.

Remember we said one in four vets in the in the VA medical system is diabetic major urban hospitals like Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston or Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia in the mid nineteenth century had zero they had many years where they had zero cases of diabetes which before the discovery of insulin was horrible debilitating fatal disease with you know manifestations that were pretty easy to diagnose because they were so awful including you know blindness and infections leading to gangrene and you know the need for amputation so you'd expect these people to show up in hospitals and it just wasn't happening. And as post civil war in The US, you see the number of diabetics in the hospital year to year increase and basically the epidemic that we've been experiencing you could see its origins right in post civil war era where suddenly diabetes is beginning to appear in the population. You look at sugar consumption over this period specifically, and it increases by a factor. I forget if it was four or eight in the nineteenth century. Basically, you think of all the ways we eat sugar today, and they except for sugar, you know, in our coffee and your cereal, granulated sugar, they just didn't exist at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

So the candy industry, the ice cream industry, the chocolate industry, they all are founded in like the eighteen forty's eighteen fifty's with the mass production of these products and they start to be shipped for the first time in history children and women are kind of being targeted as a consumers of sugar As the price is coming down, all these items appear. And then in the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, soft drinks appear. And, you know, Coke and Pepsi and Doctor Pepper, and they just saturate the world. So by the early twentieth century, you know, there's this massive soft drink industry, and it's becoming part of the diet. It's just a natural thing that everyone consumes, which they didn't consume fifty years earlier.

Post World War one, by the nineteen thirties, the fruit juice industry kicks up. And if you think about it, you can't really drink sodas and fruit juices in the home until you have refrigerators and freezers in the home. And it's not till the nineteen thirties that refrigerators and freezers become cheap enough that they become sort of common appliances in everyone's home. And with them, Coke and Pepsi and these other companies start producing. Now you start getting six packs of sodas and large cartons of sodas so people could take it home and keep it cold in their refrigerator.

And then there's a break for the war period where basically the US government does a job of making sure every soldier has plenty of sugar and actually Coca Cola and PepsiCo both have these programs work to make sure that the soldiers could get as much Coke and as much Pepsi as they want, as cheaply as they want. And it's seen as, you know, doing their patriotic duty for the country, which they I'm sure that's how they thought, but it's simultaneously sort of infecting, you know, creating this massive sugar addiction in an entire generation of young American men or young men all over the world.

Andrew Marr 00:52:16 (link to this point)

Great business model to expand, you know, globally. Right?

Gary Taubes 00:52:20 (link to this point)

Well, this is and while they're doing this, they're also particularly Coca Cola is using the war as an opportunity to build bottling plants everywhere in the world. In part in post war in Europe, they use and and in the South Pacific, they use, you know, German and Japanese prisoners of war to help build the the bottling plant. So, yeah, they see it as a concerted effort to spread the reach of Coca Cola around the world to make it the the ubiquitous product that is today. I think Coca Cola is the second most recognized word in the world after okay. Anyway, so this happens post World War two.

You then nineteen fifties, you get this explosion in sugary cereals. So back at the turn of the twentieth century when cereal manufacturers thought about putting cereal and sugar putting sugar and cereal, they didn't do it because the cereal industry had come out of the health food industry and these are all you know, the idea was eat a lot of fiber and it helps with constipation and if you could take care of constipation, people live to be 100. So the cereal industries are very resistant about putting sugar in their products. But by the nineteen fifties, one company sort of took the step post with Sugar Crisp, and everyone else thought, boy, if we don't dump sugar in our products, you know, we're gonna be run out of the business. So by the nineteen sixties, you've got this sort of perfect storm where particularly children from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, they're being loaded with sugar.

So this the amount of sugar they would have gotten in 1,800 in a week, they're now getting basically every three hours through the course of the day. And this is the norm.

Chris Albert 00:54:14 (link to this point)

I found it funny because, you know, reading your book, they they took the cocaine out of Coca Cola. And you would think that, you know, cocaine being an addictive substance, the the sales would go down. But but they they went up exponentially. You know? How how addictive is sugar?

Gary Taubes 00:54:34 (link to this point)

Well, this is yeah. It's another subject that that is very poorly studied. From the nineteen seventies onward, once this guy Ancel Keys successfully Ancel Keys in the sugar industry successfully convinced the research community and Americans in general that this sugar is bad hypothesis was quackery. You couldn't study it. So the NIH didn't spend nobody was out there.

There was one research group that was out there looking studying whether or not sugar might be addictive in some way. So we know it affects the same part of the brain that other addictive substances do. That's called the nucleus accumbens. We know that at least for laboratory rats and mice, it's more addictive than cocaine or heroin. So by that, you could addict a rat to cocaine and give it a daily bolus of coke and then give it an opportunity have either sugar water or the Coke and it'll switch to the sugar water.

And the same is true of heroin although it'll take a little bit longer to decide to go for the sugar water over the heroin, but we're not rats. So you can't you don't know for sure that it. As far as I'm concerned, you have children, you don't need a lot of hard science to know that there's something powerful about sugar that isn't true of any other food. You know, we don't have duration other I don't have to tell my kids to stop eating even the most expensive steak on the market. I don't have to ration that.

You always have to ration sugar. There's something about it that triggers a craving that other foods don't trigger. We just like I said, by the nineteen sixties, it had become okay for basically every meal to be some kind of minor variation on dessert. Even to the point that I remember spending a few weeks in Utah writing my second book back in the mid eighties and the the wonderful family I was staying with was was feeding. It was strawberry flavored sugar sweetened linguine for dinner.

You know, that kind of crazy acceptance of this substance is the norm. And to say anything about it was to be a food fatter. So until very recently, the last five to ten years, if you said anything negative about sugar, you were like the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. Now finally, like I said, the nutrition community's got on board. They're all saying, we always said sugar was bad.

So they don't have to say we missed the boat, but but it did in this forty to fifty year period, we hit levels of sugar consumption that were unprecedented by any society. 150 pounds of sugar per year was being delivered by the sugar industry and the corn refiners to you know, for every American in the country. Like, the crazy amounts.

Andrew Marr 00:57:46 (link to this point)

Gary, I I'm interested in your research methods and techniques. I know you say over five years very intensely and the internet gave you opportunities that we never had before, but how did your research techniques develop? Did you start out with a whiteboard and you have like a thousand questions and and then how do you compile it? I find that fascinating. Can you speak a little bit towards that?

Gary Taubes 00:58:11 (link to this point)

Yeah. And that kind of evolves naturally. So once I started doing the well, I had two two ways to address this. As a journalist, you know, my first book, I lived at the physics laboratory CERN. So this is, CERN is this huge, European lab outside of Geneva where they have at the moment the world's largest particle accelerator and I had gone there in nineteen eighty four eighty five to follow what I felt was going to be a great discovery in physics.

So in today's lingo I was embedded with the physicists thinking I was going to write a book about this great discovery and what I learned when I got there there was a researcher who actually won the Nobel Prize while I was there was the head of the experiment while he was going around the world telling people about this great discovery they were on to, once I arrived at the laboratory I realized that there were people in his own experiment who thought the discovery was wrong, who basically thought they were fooling themselves. They thought they were fooling themselves because they had built the equipment with their bare hands and they knew how that equipment could fool them. Whereas this soon to be Nobel laureate hadn't built a piece of equipment in forty years. He just assumed that if it was telling him there was a great discovery he was gonna go run with it. So I had come out of that experience realizing that if you wanted to learn the truth about a piece of science you couldn't just talk to the head of the experiment and called the principal investigators you had to try and talk to everyone even the technicians you know the guys whose names don't even show up in the paper because it's a technicians who are gonna build the experiments who really understand what how this devices can fool you.

And I I can assume there's if I wanted to report about the major issue in the military, I would want to do the same thing. I'm not just gonna listen to the generals. I wanna talk to everyone. So I had developed this sort of saturation reporting style where I wanted to talk to everyone involved and that was prior to even getting into public health and nutrition. My second book which was about this scientific fiasco called cold fusion that happened in the late eighties.

I interviewed over 300 researchers and administrators and graduate students and bureaucrats and technicians for what may have been the stupidest scientific subject in the nine in the twentieth century. Then when I got into the nutrition world, beginning with an article for the journal science in the late nineties on whether or not salt causes high blood pressure, What you found is in these controversial subjects, there's a period in time in which the sort of paradigm is set. The conventional wisdom is set. And just before that happens, the people who are pushing one side of the argument the people are pushing the other side of the arguments are giving their best arguments so they're writing their papers with a referencing all the key discoveries everything they think is vital to making their argument and you could get those papers and then go back in time through the references basically to see if what they're arguing is supported by the evidence they're supplying. You could It's very similar to what competing teams of lawyers do in a criminal case.

Just like a lawyer would tell the private investigator that they hire you want to make sure you go through, run down every piece of evidence see if it really says what they say it says see if there are alternative explanations so beginning with salt and then moving on to the issue of dietary fat I just sort of developed this method where I went back in time through the literature in a very comprehensive manner and as I went back in time I also wanted to talk to everyone who if they were still alive who had published the studies and the people who's you know in some cases every single name on the paper to see if the interpretation that was in the paper was the you know if everyone agreed with the interpretation and it just it was an analyst process and then when I got into, you know, obesity specifically, you know, the papers went back to the nineteenth century. Like I said, the internet and the books went back so you could recreate the history of obesity research by, you know, one of the things I could do that no one before me could do, I could literally go online and find every relevant book on the subject and then find a place where I could buy it from the booksellers now had their catalogs online.

Nowadays, it's all on Google Books. You don't even have to buy them, but when I was doing this research, I ended up collecting probably one of the best private libraries on obesity books going back to the nineteenth century. So I could see what people thought, when they thought thought it, what the evidence was, what the counter arguments were, you know, and basically build it forward and then see how the conventional wisdom when it won. So this belief that obesity is caused just by eating too much, that there is no kind of hormonal regulatory factors driving our predisposition to get obese came was an idea that was being discredited by the late nineteen thirties, but then World War two comes along. And the people who were refuting that idea were all Germans and Austrians and they just vanish with the war.

And so you could you can actually see this happen in the literature. How the bedrock belief about obesity that it's caused by taking in more than calories than we expend was an idea that these brilliant European clinicians thought was intellectually bankrupt. And they were arguing that it was intellectually bankrupt, but then the war disrupts that school. Afterwards, nobody wants anything to do with German and Austrian clinicians. And this very simplistic naive idea about the cause of obesity ends up carrying the day because the critics vanished.

So this is the kind of thing you could do when you take a historical perspective.

Andrew Marr 01:04:44 (link to this point)

That's that's absolutely fascinating to think, you know, what implications the war had on biasing our opinion or not even being open to listening to other viewpoints. Can you talk about the role of insulin and insulin resistance and and how that plays a a big factor in this, Gary?

Gary Taubes 01:05:02 (link to this point)

Okay. So that's the you know, getting back to this sort of pre World War two European idea. So there was this one very prompt you have to think understand that when we talk about obesity research like pre World War two, you're talking about five people in the world who studied it and wrote about in any significant way, maybe 10 maximum. And so you've got these German and Austrian clinicians in this school of research that they had found that all the fields of medicine relevant to obesity, metabolism, diet, nutrition, endocrinology, the study of hormones, genetics, these things are barely understood in America. I mean, it's it's just a fact of life.

American doctors and researchers, were backward when it came to subjects like genetics and endocrinology because it had been founded in Europe. And in fact, if you wanted to do meaningful research back then, you had to at least be able to read German. So you could read the German language literature, the German, which was this German was the lingua franca of medis medical science pre World War two. So these guys come to the conclusion that obesity has to be a hormonal regulatory disorder. You know, the fact that simple observations who like men and women fatten differently.

So men get fat above the waist, women get fat below the waist, that tells you that sex hormones are involved in where we get fat. And if they get if involved in where we get fat, they're probably involved in why we get fat. You know? Boys and girls, when they go through puberty, boys lose fat and gain muscle. Girls gain fat and they gain it in very specific places.

And that tells you again that this is, you know, that the the the accumulation of fat is being determined by hormones, not whether or not they're taking in more calories than they expand. So then this school vanishes, and it's not until the nineteen sixties, nineteen sixties specifically, that research technologies invented that allows researchers to measure hormone levels in the bloodstream accurately. And this is the field of endocrinology of the study of hormones explodes in the nineteen sixties. Finally, you can measure hormones accurately. And, you know, what you're doing and by mid nineteen sixties, it's absolutely clear that the hormone insulin regulates, for all intents and purposes, determines how much fat you're gonna store in your fat cells.

So you raise insulin, you store fat, you lower insulin, you mobilize the fat that you've stored, and you burn it for fuel. And insulin is the primary hormone determining this. And then there's this condition that's come to be understood also in the early nineteen sixties called insulin resistance, which is where your cells are resistant to the hormone insulin. So when you secrete you eat carbohydrates particularly, your pancreas secretes insulin. And as the the carbohydrates get into your bloodstream as glucose and raise blood sugar, the insulin helps your cells take up the blood sugar, the glucose, and then use it for fuel.

So the insulin tells your fat cells to store fat, and it tells your lean tissue basically to burn carbs because you wanna keep that blood sugar under control. Too much blood sugar is toxic, and the insulin is basically orchestrating that use of fuels. Researchers realized actually, the same researchers who invented this technology for measuring hormone levels very quickly realized that type two diabetes, the common form that associates with obesity, isn't a disorder of insulin deficiency, which type one is the kind that's so awful that that comes in childhood, but it's a disorder of insulin resistance that these obese diabetics have too much insulin in their bloodstream rather than not enough. And the same thing is true of obese people. They they tend to be insulin resistant, meaning they need to secrete more insulin to do their job.

So by 1965, and this is kind of amusing in my in a horrible way, it's clear that insulin regulates fat accumulation and that if you want a lower fat accumulation, you got a lower insulin. And it's clear that obese and type two diabetics have too much insulin in their bloodstream, which would work to make them fatter. And, again, the people invented this technology, this woman Rosalyn Yalow, would later win the Nobel Prize for it, are arguing that it seems quite likely that insulin and insulin resistance actually cause obesity. So you just become a little insulin resistant. You have to secrete a little too much insulin, and that makes you store fat instead of burning it.

You only have to store 20 extra calories a day as fat to gain 20 pounds of fat every ten years. So it's a very little slight effect that would very easily make people obese. And, you know, our obesity research community is convinced that fat is the problem with modern diets and that fat people just eat too much, and a lot of the obesity research in The US is being driven by psychologists who are trying to get fat people to just eat less. So this whole science of how insulin and insulin resistance relate to fat accumulation, obesity, and type two diabetes is just considered irrelevant because the implication of that research is that carbohydrates are fattening because we secrete insulin in response to carbohydrates and that sugar in particular is bad because that's likely to be the cause of insulin resistance. So this research community convinced as they are that, you know, they're so focused on fat and they're so convinced that obese people are just they're gluttons and sloths and it's just all about overeating that they just take this very beautiful human physiology that all of which implicates the carbohydrate content of the diet and they kind of sweep it out of sight because it's inconvenient.

And we end up with the conventional thinking And worse than that, we end up with this belief that if you actually if you were to design a diet to lower insulin and maximize basically the to get as much fat out of your fat tissue as you could, That would be a diet that is very low in carbs and very high in fat. In fact, it's the Atkins diet for all intents and purposes. And these guys insisted that that was quackery. So not only did they take this physiology, which is now textbook physiology and say it's irrelevant to obesity, but then they took the diets that were based on human physiology and were the, you know, ideal diets to reverse this very terrible disorder. And they insisted that that was quackery that would kill people without the data to back it up.

Chris Albert 01:12:17 (link to this point)

Yeah. You know, it it seems like somewhere in the story, you know, they they it seems like the powers that be were trying to come up with with sound bites that they could translate diet advice to. And one of the examples I see in your story is that of energy balance and the concept of calories, calorie counting. And when I first got in the fitness industry, I was working for a corporate gym that shall remain nameless. And I, you know, when I was talking about diet advice, the fitness manager will pull me aside and say the only thing that we can talk about because it's the only science that we have to go off of is that if they wanna get leaner, they have to consume less calories.

But looking at things and knowing what I know now, it seems like this concept of calories creates kind of a black box for for them to kinda sweep stuff under the rug. Could you speak a little bit about why calories became relevant and and and how has it masked a lot of these issues that you talk about in your books?

Gary Taubes 01:13:25 (link to this point)

You know, I can't although, clearly speaking a little bit about any subject is something I have trouble with. Okay. Okay. I gotta give you the history again. It's This is what fascinates me about this work, and this is why I became so obsessive.

So modern nutrition science begins in the late eighteen sixties in Germany with the invention of something devices called calorimeters that allow researchers to measure the energy expended by, like, dogs or human subjects. So you basically live in this box, and the box measures the oxygen you're taking in, the carbon dioxide you're taking out. And from that, you could figure out how much energy you're expending, how many calories you're expending. And we know that that a hundred years previous to that, French physiologists had figured out how to burn foods and and calorimeters to figure out how many calories are in the food. So beginning with the eighteen sixties, you can measure the calories people eat and the calories people expend, and that's all they could measure.

And then so for the next fifty years, all of nutrition science is basically studying calories in and calories out in a whole bunch of different settings and like, you know, in children and soldiers and hospital beds and and they could also study vitamin deficiencies. So and mineral deficiencies. So that's what nutrition science is. And by the nineteen twenties, nineteen tens, you have this theory that obesity is caused by taking in more calories than we spend because that's all they could measure. There's a story in science that's very relevant called the drunk in the streetlight story.

I first heard this when I was writing about physics because the physicists used to use it all the time. And I'm always surprised that other people don't know it. The idea is a guy's walking down the street, and he comes upon a drunk. It's a nighttime, and he comes upon a drunk on his knees under a streetlight crawling around on the ground. And he asked the drunk what he's doing, and the guy drunk says, I'm looking for my keys.

And the guy says, is this where you lost them? And the drunk says, I don't know where I lost them, but this is where the light is. And in nutrition research in 1900, 1910, the light was on calories. So they come up with this idea that obesity is caused by taking in more calories. They may know nothing about hormones.

The whole science of endocrinology starts to kick up in 1922 with the discovery of insulin. But the people studying obesity talking about it, they know nothing. All they're focused on is energy. So we have this theory that it's just about calories in calories out because that's what they can measure. And as it turns out, the different macronutrients in the diet, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats have very dramatically different effects on hormonal status.

And hormones determine things like how much fat we're gonna accumulate or how much fat we're gonna burn for food, fuel, whether we're gonna store things, how much protein we're gonna use to build muscles. That's all determined by hormones. But by the time, like I said, 1960, when hormones can be measured accurately in the bloodstream and they can become aware of insulin resistance and the role of insulin and fat accumulation, This idea that obesity is just simple. It's calories in, calories out. Fat people eat too much, and they exercise too little.

They're gluttons and they're sloths. It's got this nice biblical ring to it. It just seems obvious. And it's again, it just becomes set like a stone. I mean, I recently got a condescendingly dismissive review by a Harvard professor in the New Yorker.

And his professor writes, you know, the importance of calories you know you get fat when you eat more than you expend is the unchallengeable fact of nutrition and it's just it seems so obvious. And then the argument I'm making is not only is it's unchallengeable, it's it's just it's it makes no sense at all. It's and there's a famous European physicist who would describe an idea like this is not even wrong. You know, that it sounds reasonable. It sounds good, but it's like saying somebody got rich because they made more money than they spent.

You know, if you get rich, you have to make more money than you spend. If you get fat, you have to take in more calories than you expend, but it tells you nothing about why fat is accumulating, why wealth is accumulating. You know, I make more money than I spend that I'm not rich. So it doesn't answer anything important about the the problem. And somehow and this is like I said, this is why the community's response to my work is that I must be wrong because I'm saying they embraced an idea that's meaningless as the cause of obesity, and everyone believes it.

And at the end of you know, if I don't know if you guys have comments to your podcast, but if you do, people will write in and say that clearly Taubes is an idiot because clearly people get fatter because they take in more calories. Whereas what I'm saying is when they get fatter, they take in more calories, but that's not why they get fat. This energy balance idea and it just it seems intuitively obvious. It's meaningless, but it's so deeply set. It's a fundamental idea in all of nutrition research.

And it almost has to be right because it's too big to fail. Put it that way using Wall Street language. And yet, it's you know, my book, why we get fat, I call it the original sin. It's like once you make that assumption, everything after that is wrong. And you're also implying that obese people are obese because they have behavioral issues.

They're somehow lesser less than you or I who aren't obese. I mean, it's a whole chain of horrors that start with this simplistic idea that it's an energy balance disorder. And the other thing it's based on is then here's the other thinking, and I would talk to research. You know, you if you starve rats or humans, they'll get thinner. So people think that somehow tells them that obesity gets if you remove food, people get thinner.

Therefore, too much food is the reason they get fatter and sophistic thinking, but that's that's what we've done.

Andrew Marr 01:20:15 (link to this point)

Yeah. It's this seems to me with the endocrinology and the neuroendocrinology, like, that line of thinking is not substantiated whatsoever as you've proven. I think it was Planck who said science advances by, gravestones. What what do you think is going to be, enough to have a paradigm shift in thinking on sugar and carbohydrates and as far as energy balance quotient so to speak?

Gary Taubes 01:20:42 (link to this point)

Well, I think what will happen is what you're seeing now which is slowly so if we were to go into the future ten fifteen years from now I think this energy balance thinking will have vanished. I feel sorry for the people who have endowed chairs in energy balance, and they'll have to figure out a way to deal with it. But, you know, what the the establishment will do is they'll slowly shift their thinking, and they'll shift their discussions, and they'll claim fifteen years ago that new research has demonstrated that there are other factors other than calories that influence fat accumulation. And these factors happen to be the effective macronutrients on all these other factors including fat accumulation. So you'll see a shift in the thinking but with that shift will go this idea that we mostly knew this all along and then new research clarified some of the issues so nobody will ever have to say we screwed up.

I'm a big fan of saying people screwed up and saying I screwed up because if I acknowledge that I screwed up, I'm more likely to do it right the next time. So I think it's important, but it probably isn't gonna happen in this case. In the process, people like me will still be, yeah, you know, Taubes was just saying what everyone knew. And that way, you don't have to, you know, really again, you never have you can change a 180 degrees how you think but you never had to acknowledge that you were thinking incorrectly to begin with. So I think that's what will happen and you see this shift already to some extent even that New Yorker, that Harvard professor in the New Yorker said new research is showing that there are factors other than calories but calories are vitally important and what I'm arguing is that they never should have gotten on the calorie idea to begin with.

So we'll shift and you see it's you know quite often now Like the idea that you should eat a low fat diet to lose weight has pretty much vanished from what I see at least on the Internet. I'm sure there are doctors who still push it and there are variations on it, but that's kind of evaporated and pretty much everyone or a large percentage of the community says well clearly don't go eating sugar and white flour because that's particularly bad and those foods are particularly fattening. So I bet if you went back to your original corporate gym, their message will have changed. But they won't say our previous message was wrong.

Chris Albert 01:23:24 (link to this point)

Well, it's interesting because I suffer from ulcerative colitis and it's something I've suffered from since I I got out of the military. And I was put into the hospital about six months ago with a flare up. And I go in there and the the doctor who whom I've explained to that whenever I eat sugar tends to cause me to flare up. They put me on a clear liquid diet. And I was looking at all the labels on on the trays they were bringing me.

And there was a 120 grams of sugar minimal per meal. I mean, we're talking orange juice, you know, two jellos. Forgot what else was in there, but it was ridiculous.

Gary Taubes 01:24:09 (link to this point)

Yeah. That's sad. Hopefully, that'll change, but the problem is those foods are cheap. They're inexpensive. Whereas the healthy foods, not only they're more expensive, but the and the non sugar foods and on white flour should they don't have the shelf life.

So you can't just buy them packaged, put them in a closet, and forget about it for six months and take it out and feed it to a patient. So you've got a whole host of issues that work to, you know but I'm hoping that doctor even that doctor will they've pointed out will realize what they're doing. Again, it's hard to imagine hospital food getting better, but it's going to have to. I've had friends in the in the VA community try to argue, you know, that the that the cafeterias and the hospitals have to up their stop loading up the patients and the patients' families and the employees with sugar, and they've gotten nowhere. But here, I'm optimistic.

I think I think that situational improvement won't go as far as I necessarily think it should with the fat content of the diet. You know, I'm one of these people who thinks bacon and butter are health foods. I hope I'm right. Amen. It's yeah.

It's gonna take a while before that shift is accepted, but we are making progress.

Chris Albert 01:25:38 (link to this point)

Yeah. Absolutely. And it's because of of people like you who who who write the works you do and and, you know, we definitely applaud you for that. I really wanna be respectful of your time. We're gonna wrap up here in a second.

But I had one question I really wanted to ask and that's that, you know, there there are so many opportunities out there I think for us to to make scientific research better. And and you know, in nutrition of course I, I still think that there's huge opportunity out there. But are there other opportunities out there that you see where we can start to question some of these things that might have been falsely reinforced whether it be through, you know, academic tenure or, or nepotism within the journal community or, you know, anything like that? And and where do you see yourself going? What's your what's your future mission? What other kinds of things do you have your sights set on?

Gary Taubes 01:26:38 (link to this point)

Well, that's a bigger another big question. Clearly, there are ideas that are still being re ideas that are almost well, very likely to be wrong that are still being reinforced daily and that the research the community doesn't really think through. So, you know, I'm thinking of there's a there's a huge anti red meat movement in the scientific community. And so from their perspective based on a particular kind of study that we don't have the time to discuss it looks like people who eat a lot of meat tend to be less healthy than people who don't. So one way to put it is, you know, the kind of person who I live out here in Oakland, California right next to Berkeley and, like, you know, the people in Berkeley who go to yoga practice and after yoga practice, they go to a restaurant called Chez Panisse and have a vegetarian meal tend to be healthier than truck drivers in West Virginia who are eating at Denny's.

And then the researchers who study these populations say, clearly, it's because the truck drivers at Denny's eat more meat. And then you get that's reinforced by the idea that that livestock and and meat production is very bad for the environment and for it produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases which is based on a whole host of assumptions that may or may not be true. And you get this whole world of people saying we should be eating mostly plant vegetarian diets. And those diets might be perfectly healthy or healthier than the kind of crap that we typically eat in the standard American diet and the sugar rich, you know, packaged foods we eat. But for the population that's obese and diabetic, it might just keep them obese and diabetic and never do any better than that.

Whereas you put them on a animal product rich diet, you know, one of these low carb, high fat diets where they're eating butter bacon animal products, they you can actually reverse their conditions. So there's a whole world of things that have to be fixed, assuming I'm right, from, you know, the the the type of research that's done to how rigorously their research is interpreted, to how it of ubiquitously over interpreted, and then the public health messages that come out of that. And there's this, like I said, a large vegetarian movement in The United States whose, you know, might be completely right from a moral and ethical perspective, but support their belief system by arguing that people are healthier eating these ways where they don't have no idea if that's true and certainly not children. Know I fight this battle every day from the moment I wake up on emails to helping design research projects that can actually study these issues and to, you know, writing op eds and future books. I seem to be in this for the long haul whether I like it or not.

You know, it's an interest. It's you've got these huge institutions with very well meaning individuals who are believing you know, basing their actions and their guidelines and their recommendations on on what are quite likely erroneous beliefs and a lot of work to be done one way or the other.

Chris Albert 01:30:26 (link to this point)

Absolutely. Absolutely. Andrew, did you have something else?

Andrew Marr 01:30:32 (link to this point)

To ask one more question to Gary. Gary, I know you have two boys. I have five children of my own. In this age of information, how can we teach our young people to be able to think critically and delineate fact from fiction, which is what your work is centered around? So, how do you go about teaching your children that?

Gary Taubes 01:30:56 (link to this point)

Boy. That's a hell of a question. And, again, I don't think there's any short answer. I'm yeah. How do we I mean, if you have to somehow teach them to think critically. Okay?

That's you know, to be skeptical of everything, and I think maybe I do it by always had you know, my children like all kids these days are probably on screens too much, and often they're telling me things that they think are true based on something they read or something their schoolmates have told them. And I happen to be a skeptical guy. Yes. A few days ago with some spider crab that they said is the world's largest insect and is eight feet, you know, wide or tall. And I just said, okay.

I find that hard to believe. And I want them to think. I want their first response to many things in life to be, I find that hard to believe. What's the evidence? And it has to be more than your friend John told you at school or I read it on the Internet.

So it's this process of teaching them to ask the question, what's the evidence? Then you get into issues where you want him to you know? I don't know. I'm trying to get them off sugar. That's hard enough.

Now you're asking me how to get them to think critically and not eat sugar when I'm telling them with the sugar that they have to trust me.

Andrew Marr 01:32:31 (link to this point)

I'm with you, brother. I just I want to hear your advice and your thoughts on it because it is uphill battle, but one very worth doing, I I believe.

Gary Taubes 01:32:41 (link to this point)

Well, it's funny because I'm one of the few I gave one commencement address to a university in my life, and the commencement address was basically how do you walk this balance? Remember I said that quoted this Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist saying the first principle of science is you must not fool yourself when you're the easiest person to fool. And I might say that should be the first principle of life, right, is you must not fool yourself. But simultaneously, for you to do anything important in life, you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in your ideas or the ideas of your church or the ideas of your officers or the ideas of your government.

So you're constantly walking this tightrope between skepticism and thinking critically about what you're being told and believing what you have to believe to get things done. And I did what I said to these kids when I gave them the commencement address is I don't know how to do that, But I know that that's what we have to do. So

Chris Albert 01:33:49 (link to this point)

Well, that's great advice in and of itself. Absolutely. Gary, so wanna wrap things up here for you. Where can people find you on the Internet? Do you hang out on Twitter or on Facebook?

Gary Taubes 01:34:05 (link to this point)

I do tweet but not very often. Gary Taubes is my Twitter handle and I have a website, garytaubes.com, which I don't update enough because of all this other activity trying to tilt at windmills. And I do have a Facebook page that I don't update very much. So and my books are available, you know, Amazon and Barnes and Noble and bookstores near you. If somebody wants to reach me, the best way to do it is through my website, garytaubes.com.

And I do try to respond to most emails. Although often after a podcast like yours, I'll be deluged and most will be some.

Chris Albert 01:34:56 (link to this point)

Well, I I hopefully that, you know, everybody who listens to this podcast which I, you know, I think that, our community is very receptive to these sorts of ideas that can help them to live better. You know, hopefully you you get some love out of this too. I I know you've been dealing with a lot of hate throughout your career and and, you know, I I can imagine that. But it just goes to show you, you know, if you're out there and you're listening to this and you've got a an idea that's out of the norm, you know, stand up for it and and and put it out there. You'll find people who who who it does help.

And, you know, for everybody out there who does wanna hate on this or or hate on Gary, you know, I think advice is the you know, read the books and keep an open mind, you know.

Gary Taubes 01:35:48 (link to this point)

Well, that's the that's the, you know, that's nothing pisses me off more, frustrates me more than the people who, you know, close convinced you're wrong, but won't go through the trouble reading the books. And again, I understand the logic, their logic, but I I it it irksome. The advantage, the thing that keeps this going is that it works for most people. So you've got this dietary intervention, call it that, that's extraordinarily effective for many to most people who try it at reversing what seems to be intractable conditions, obesity, type two diabetes, even things like epilepsy. So the idea is and what I would want people to do is you can try this.

What I've done, my role in all this is to say something that the medical community treated as quackery is not only like does make first of all, extraordinary sense physiologically and is not gonna kill you. And if it does kill you, I apologize, but it shouldn't kill you. So it's, you know, it makes sense biologically. It makes more sense than what we've been told to do, and it's you know, the clinical trials exist to say it's healthier than what we've been told to do. And so you could try it and see for yourself basically and then it becomes about self experimentation.

Don't take my word for it. Try it. Read the books and you know chances are you'll end up healthier and you'll decide it's worth it and if you don't stop doing it.

Chris Albert 01:37:29 (link to this point)

Absolutely. Andrew, any last words over here?

Andrew Marr 01:37:34 (link to this point)

I think Gary just summed it up and I think in a way that answers a lot of questions. Be open minded, but be skeptic and do the work and see what your results are. And I I know I think that's good advice across the board. Gary, it's been an absolute pleasure, brother. Thank you so much.

Gary Taubes 01:37:52 (link to this point)

Yeah. Thank you, guys. It's been great.

Chris Albert 01:37:55 (link to this point)

Yeah. Seriously, thank you so much for coming on here. And I know that a lot of people are going to get a lot of benefit, one, from reading your books, and two, from your time here on this podcast. So thank you again for coming on.

Alright, guys. So that was mister Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar and Good Calories, Bad Calories. And I thought that that was an amazing conversation and we try to bring you the best guests here on the Warrior Soul podcast. Again, if you like what we do here, you like our interviews, if you like our content, or even if you don't, please write us a review on iTunes. Let us know how we're doing.

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