Good Calories, Bad Calories

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet. Posted December 12, 2007.

If you spend much time at all trying to follow the never-ending headlines on diet and nutrition, you are probably familiar with feeling like a wide-eyed kid in a snake oil shop. One week fat is the root of all evil; the next it might just save your life. One week carbs are the center of a healthy diet; the next they are the cause of all your rolls. To actually determine which of these studies is accurate and which is overblown would take a background in the scientific method and hours upon hours of original research in esoteric medical journals.

You most likely don't have that kind of expertise or time, but lucky for all of us health journalist Gary Taubes does. In his new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease, he exhaustively researches the last 100 or so years of medical and nutritional research in order to separate myth from reality. In the process, he uncovers a scientific system -- from training to research to funding to public education -- riddled with institutional bias and substandard rigor. AlterNet caught up with him during his book tour and asked him some questions:

Courtney Martin: How did you become interested in the nexus of diet, obesity and disease research?

Gary Taubes: It just happens to be where my particular journalistic obsession took me. I began my career in the early 1980s writing about physics. I then became fascinated with the extraordinary challenge of doing good science and how hard it is to get the right answer after I lived at a physics laboratory for the better part of a year and watched some extremely smart physicists discover nonexistent elementary particles. I then spent three years working on a book on cold fusion, a scientific fiasco, because I was fascinated with how something so obviously wrong could become such a big deal. Afterward, friends in the physics community suggested that I should look into the bad science underlying the belief that electromagnetic fields cause cancer. That conclusion was based on the science of epidemiology, and suddenly my obsession had taken me from physics to public health research. From there I just followed the bad science -- first writing about observational epidemiology itself, then the controversy over salt and blood pressure, then dietary fat and heart disease, and then obesity and the question of why we gain weight.

Martin: You do such compelling, exhaustive research. Please explain your process.

Taubes: I'm just inherently skeptical. I ask what seem like obvious questions -- can diabetes be caused by sugar, for instance, or if obesity is caused by eating too much, why doesn't eating less reverse the process -- and then I go looking for the answers. I don't like taking anybody's word for something so important, so I look for the actual data, which often means following the references in the relevant papers and books backward in time until I eventually get to the underlying data themselves or find that they don't exist. I also like to talk to the researchers who were directly involved with the relevant studies. This was something I learned in my physics writing. One Nobel laureate who ran a physics laboratory told me that he liked to go around the lab at night and talk to the graduate students directly because "they hadn't learned how to lie yet." I like to talk to the people who actually did the experiments in question -- the graduate students if necessary -- because they'll know all the ways they could have been fooled by their equipment, even while their superiors might be trying to gloss over those inadequacies to make their points.

Martin: You write that the "practice of science requires an exquisite balance between a fierce ambition to discover the truth and a ruthless skepticism toward your own work." Why does it appear that medical scientists have had such a hard time striking this balance?

Taubes: The problem with medical and public health research is that those who do it suffer from the all too admirable desire to save lives and ameliorate human suffering. Doing good science takes extreme patience. You come up with a hypothesis, and then you have to rigorously test it. That's the ruthless skepticism I was talking about. It's the testing that's the excruciatingly difficult and time-consuming part of doing science. It can take decades of experimental tests before it becomes a reasonable bet that your hypothesis, and not some other [idea] that you never even thought of, might be right. But people go into medical and public health research because they want to help people; they want to save lives. They know that hundreds of thousands of Americans, for instance, maybe millions, are dying every year of heart disease and cancer and diabetes, etc., and so they don't believe they have the time to rigorously test their hypotheses.

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Courtney E. Martin is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

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