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Gary Taubes
Primary focus: Health
In a Swedish study published last month in JAMA Open Network, meat consumption was associated with cognitive health in individuals with a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s. Does this mean eating meat protects against Alzheimer’s? Does it mean avoiding meat increases risk–i.e., should vegetarians worry that their diets are accelerating cognitive aging? (Hint: I would.) In...Read More »
RFK Jr and the MAHA Initiative may have inverted the food guide pyramid, turning red meat and full-fat dairy back into health foods, but the American Heart Association has just doubled down on the low-fat, plant-based advice it’s been disseminating for decades. Should we expect anything different from the organization that created the low-fat consensus...Read More »
I’ve wanted to write for years about the seemingly unseemly tendency in the nutrition world to speculate about the dietary lessons we can learn when a prominent promoter of a particular dietary philosophy passes away. It’s not inappropriate to ask these questions. But there are limits to what we can ever know. The recent passing...Read More »
My latest post on Unsettled Science: Johann Hari’s new book, Magic Pill, does a good job on the benefits and risks of taking a drug like Ozempic. It goes off the rails when he gets around to discussing the science of obesity. Consider this the Satiety Problem Problem. Another learning experience (we didn’t need) on...Read More »
In the years after I published Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), I would frequently get emails from readers saying, in effect, “now that you’ve taken on nutrition science, would you look into climate change?” I never did and, I would reply, I almost assuredly never would. That’s still true, but this week I took the...Read More »
This is a post I’ve wanted to write for years. We read about scientific misconduct regularly. Fraud is news. Institutions investigate it. The media covers it. But garden-variety bad science is the far more insidious problem. There is no institutional immune response. No one investigates, nothing is exposed. Bad science can persist indefinitely, infecting entire...Read More »
When nutritional epidemiologists conclude (as they always do) that some item of our diet or lifestyle associates with chronic disease, it’s inevitably news. Not so when methodologists point out potential, if not very disturbing problems with the epidemiology itself. This research has enormous influence on our conceptions of a healthy diet and yet the media...Read More »
by GT When Nina Teicholz and I were discussing working together on a Substack newsletter, I suggested a name for it that I’d always joked I’d someday use: “Let’s Pretend This Is Science.” Let’s just say, wiser heads prevailed. Still, that’s the phrase that comes to mind when I write about some of the research in...Read More »
That a plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat is the nutritional equivalent of common sense. We’ve been told it’s the one thing on which nutritionists can always agree. Journalists treat it as dogma. But where’s the evidence? When a group of researchers decided to apply the same methodology to nutrition that is accepted...Read More »
The very controversial history surrounding dietary therapy for obesity and diabetes comes down to one consistent and very obvious conflict. Physicians, like the UK’s David Unwin in his recent article, insist that they know better how to successfully treat their patients than the academic nutritionists and epidemiologists in their Ivy Towers. The physicians have argued...Read More »
