The world of Gary Taubes

Science writer Gary Taubes has a recent New York Times commentary criticizing Kevin Hall’s recent paper on the differential metabolic effects of low fat vs low carbohydrate diets. See here for my recent post on the experiment. Taubes is probably best known for his views on nutrition and as an advocate for low carb diets although he has two earlier books on the sociology of physics. The main premise running through his four books is that science is susceptible to capture by the vanity, ambition, arrogance, and plain stupidity of scientists. He is pro-science but anti-scientist.

His first book on nutrition – Good Calories, Bad Calories, was about how the medical establishment and in particular nutritionists have provided wrong and potentially dangerous advice on diets for decades. He takes direct aim at Ancel Keys as one of the main culprits for pushing the reduction of dietary fat to prevent heart disease. The book is a great read and clearly demonstrates Taubes’s sharp mind and gifts as a story teller. In the course of researching the book, Taubes also discovered the biological mechanisms of insulin and this is what has mostly shaped his thinking about carbohydrates and obesity. He spells it out in more detail in his subsequent book – Why We Get Fat. I think that these two books are a perfect demonstration of why having a little knowledge and a high IQ can be a dangerous thing.

Most people know of insulin as the hormone that goes awry in diabetes. When we fast, our insulin levels are low and our body, except for our brain, burns fat. If we then ingest carbohydrates, our insulin levels rise, which induces our body to utilize glucose (the main source of fuel in carbs) in favour of insulin. Exercise will also cause a switch in fuel choice from fat to glucose. What is less well known is that insulin also suppresses the release of fat from fat cells (adipocytes), which is something I have modeled (see here). This seems to have been a revelation to Taubes – Clearly, if you eat lots of carbs, you will have lots of insulin, which will sequester fat in fat cells. Ergo, eating carbs makes you fat! Nutritionists were so focused on their poorly designed studies that they missed the blatantly obvious. This is just another example of how arrogant scientists get things wrong.

Taubes then proposed a simple experiment – take two groups of people and put one group on a high carb diet and the other on a low carb diet with the same caloric content, and see who loses weight. Well, Kevin Hall anticipated this request with basically the same experiment although for a different purpose. What Kevin noticed in his model was that if you cut carbs and keep everything else the same, insulin goes down and the body responds by burning much more fat. However, if you cut fat, there is nothing in the model that told the body that the fat was missing. Insulin didn’t change and thus the body just burned the same amount of carbs as before. He found this puzzling. Surely there must be a fat detector that we don’t know about so he went about to test it. I remember he and his fellows labouring diligently for what seemed like years writing the protocol and getting the necessary approval and resources to do the experiment. The result was exactly as the model predicted. We really don’t have a fat sensor. However, the subjects lost more fat on the low fat diet then they did on the low carb diet.  This is not exactly the experiment Taubes wanted to do, which was to change the macronutrient composition but keep the calories the same. He then hypothesized that those on the low carb diet would lose weight and those on the low fat, high carb diet would gain weight. Kevin and a consortium of top obesity researchers has since done that experiment and the results will come out shortly.

Now is this surprising? Well not really, for while Taubes is absolutely correct in that insulin suppresses fat utilization the net outcome of insulin reduction is a quantitative and not a qualitative question. You cannot deduce the outcome with formal logic. The reason is that insulin cannot be elevated all the time. Even a continuous grazer must sleep at some point where upon insulin falls. You then must consider the net effect of high and low insulin over a day or longer to assess the outcome. This can only be determined empirically and this is what Taubes fails to see or accept. He also commits a logical fallacy –  Just because a scientist is stupid doesn’t mean he is wrong.

Taubes’s recent commentary criticizes Kevin’s experiment by saying that it 1) is a diet that is impossible to follow and 2) it ignores appetite. The response to the first point is that the experiment was meant to test a metabolic hypothesis and was not meant to test the effect of a diet. My response to his second point is to stare agape. When Taubes visited NIH a few years ago after his Good Calories, Bad Calories book came out I offered the hypothesis that low carb diets could suppress appetite and this could be why they may be effective in reducing weight. However, he had no interest in this idea and Kevin has told me that he has repeatedly shown no interest in it. (I don’t need to give details on how people have been interested in appetite for decades since it is well done in this post.) I came to the conclusion that appetite control was the primary driver of the obesity epidemic shortly after arriving at NIH. In fact my first BSC presentation was on this topic. The recommendation by the committee was that I should do something else and that NIH was a bad fit for me. However, I am still here and I still believe appetite control is the key.