The Man Who Hated Carbs

Before It Was Cool

Gary Taubes on how big sugar and big government
wrecked the American diet
Nick Gillespie from the May 2018 issue - view article in the Digital
Edition
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Science writer Gary Taubes has a knack for subverting conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he
published a groundbreaking feature article in The New York Times Magazine arguing that decades'
worth of government-approved nutritional advice was flat-out wrong, ideologically motivated, and
contributing to rising rates of obesity and diabetes. Traditional dieting guidance attacking fatty foods
and praising carbohydrates, he wrote, was based on "a big fat lie."

Back then, Taubes was excoriated. (Reason published pieces both attacking and defending him.) But
today his thesis is gaining ground among health and nutrition researchers. His work has been
highlighted everywhere from The New York Times to Time magazine. Protein-rich regimens have taken
off after millions of Americans found that stocking their pantries with supposedly "heart-healthy" snacks
such as granola bars and fruit juice failed to improve wellness.

Taubes' latest book on the subject is The Case Against

Sugar (Knopf), which describes the sweet stuff as a
toxic substance akin to cigarettes that can and does kill.
"Something's triggering the epidemic everywhere, and
it's probably the same thing everywhere," he says. The
ingredient "at the scene of the crime"—one that's
stealthily packed into even our diet foods, and one
we've been consuming in ever-increasing doses over
time, he argues—is sugar.

In January, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with

Taubes in his kitchen in Oakland, California, to talk
about food, science, and the politics of both.

Reason: Your book is framed as a kind of

prosecutorial case, meant to convict sugar as the Gary Taubes. Photo by Cody Pickens.
chief cause of many of our society's health
problems: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, other chronic illnesses. Can you lay out the opening
argument?

Gary Taubes: It's meant to indict, but I'm not sure I could get a conviction.

We have obesity and diabetes epidemics everywhere. Worldwide, they manifest whenever a
population shifts from whatever their traditional diet is to a Westernized urban diet, and so you could
think of the Western diet and lifestyle as the vector that carries obesity and diabetes into these
populations.

Describe the "Western diet." Is it processed foods?

Pizza Rolls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, Coca-Cola—

So the things we live for are the things that are killing us?

Something in our diet and lifestyle causes obesity and diabetes. Conventional wisdom is it's basically
caloric overload. We eat too much and we're sedentary. Too many foods are available. They're
packaged in a way that makes them irresistible. They have too much salt, fat, sugar. There's a whole
host of theories around that idea, but ultimately it comes down to [the fact that] we take in more
calories than we expend, and that causes obesity. Obesity increases your risk of Type 2 diabetes. Both
those increase your risk of heart disease, cerebral vascular disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, you
name it—every major chronic disease.

We see these chronic diseases appearing in populations when they make this nutritional shift, so the
question is what is causing it? The argument I make in this book is that sugar has always been the
prime suspect.

You say it's always been a prime suspect, but at least in the past 40 or 50 years, we've been
told, "Don't worry about sugar. Worry about fat, worry about meat."

That's key to the story, and that's how I entered into it as an investigative journalist. We had this belief
system that began as a hypothesis in the 1950s and started to be tested in the 1960s, which is that
dietary fat causes heart disease. So by the 1980s, a "healthy" diet was being defined as a low-fat, low-
salt diet.

And this explains SnackWell's fat-free cookies and things like that.

A whole genre of food. One of the things that happened in the '80s, when we embraced this low-fat
healthy diet synchronicity, is the government, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], started
telling industry to produce low-fat foods. So the iconic example is yogurt, a high-fat food by definition.
You remove some of the fat and now you have this insipid, watered-down, tasteless thing. To make it
taste good, you put back fruit and sugar, and now you've got a "heart-healthy diet food."

Did the shift from a more balanced diet to a low-fat, high-sugar diet achieve the goals that were
predicted for it?

You could look at heart disease mortality, and it's come down. The nutrition community says, "Look,
people aren't dying from heart disease as much. Therefore, our advice is right." And then people like
me say, "Yeah, but we're not interested in mortality, 'cause we're also selling billions of dollars in statins
every year and billions of dollars in blood pressure drugs. We're doing hundreds of thousands of heart
surgeries a year, putting in stents, doing bypasses. If mortality wasn't coming down, we'd have a real
problem." Question is what's happening to the incidence. Are we seeing less heart disease because
we're preventing it with changes in diet? And there's no evidence of that.

In the book you write, "One of the common themes in the history of medical research is that a
small number of influential authorities—often only a single individual—can sway an entire field
of thought." Why do you think that is?

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Paradigms are founded when fields are small. They're fertile. The signal-to-noise ratio is high. If those
scientists are good, you get paradigm shifts. We got the double helix and our understanding of the
general principles of molecular biology when a half-dozen people led by Francis Crick, a former
physicist, could determine what was going on. You take them away, you have no revolution.

In diabetes, you had Elliott Joslin in the U.S. He was a very caring, concerned,
wonderful doctor, but not that good of a scientist, not that good of a critical
thinker. And then you had Harold Himsworth in the U.K., who went on to
become the head of the [government's] Medical Research Council. They were
writing the textbooks. They were the ones being cited, and they were citing each
other. If they got it wrong, everybody got it wrong. Our whole conception of
obesity was determined in large part in the 1970s by half a dozen men untrained
in science, who were, in effect, self-elected to run the field.

You describe an early battle between academic nutritionists, who

Joanna Andreasson overwhelmingly took the energy-balance approach to nutrition—you lose

weight if you burn more calories than you take in—and what they
characterized as quack doctors writing diet fad books, saying you can eat all the fat you want
and you'll be fine as long as you stay away from sugar and refined carbs. Pork rinds good,
cookies bad. And yet you say the quacks were actually closer to being right. Is this a place
where the marketplace was more effective at hashing out the truth?

Yes. You have an academic research community that is dominated, post–World War II in the U.S., by
nutritionists, who are studying animals for the most part. In 1959–60, Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon
Berson invent the technology that allows hormones to be measured accurately, and the school of
endocrinology explodes. The science finally has the tools to understand things like hormonal regulation
of fat accumulation. Yalow and Berson say, look, insulin drives fat accumulation, so maybe the Type 2
diabetics are obese because of the insulin. And nobody cares, except the doctors.

The doctors are like all of us. They're getting fat. What do you do if you're getting fat? Well, you try
what everyone tells you to do, which is eat less and exercise more. And if that doesn't work, which it
doesn't, then if you're smart you look for other methods. Some of them read the diet books and tried
various diets. Some of them read the same medical literature I did—Atkins famously read the same
studies I read 40 years later. There's a conventional thinking that carbohydrates are fattening—bread,
pasta, potatoes. Women describe them as going right to their hips. Maybe if I get rid of the
carbohydrates and replace them with fat, because fat's the one macronutrient that doesn't stimulate
insulin secretion, maybe I'll lose weight.

"Are we seeing less heart disease

because we're preventing it with
changes in diet? There's no evidence
of that."

So people outside of the official research community were desperate to get skinny, or have
their patients get skinny, so they tried a bunch of different things?

They try a bunch of different things. When you find one that works after a lifetime of failing…

Obesity is one of these subjects where it helps to have a weight problem. The way I describe it in my
lecture is a male obstetrician can deliver 10,000 babies and won't understand childbirth as well as one
woman who has given birth. It's just a fact of life. If you don't understand what it's like to get fatter and
fatter, year in and year out, regardless of what you do, you just don't understand obesity.

You're a trim guy. Were you fat at some point?

I was chubby when I was a kid. My brother, you could see every vein on his body. He couldn't gain
weight if he wanted to, and I was just a chubby kid. Puberty helped, and then I became an athlete and
that helped. But my brother at his peak was 6'5" and weighed about 195 pounds. Remember how
Freud said anatomy is destiny? So he rowed crew. I was 6'2" and could get up to 240. I played football.
We both ate as much as we could. He was tall and thin. I was short and thick. That's just how we were
built.

In the book, you document a long history of public nutrition advice being intertwined with
politics in this country. So let's talk about the sugar lobby. How did King Sugar get its crown in
the American economy and the American diet?

Well, sugar used to be very expensive and hard to get. It only grows in specific tropical regions. You
can't just transport the sugar cane around the world and then refine the sugar out of it afterwards.
You've got to get the sugar out quickly. It's a horrible job.

It was done by slaves.

It was done by slaves. The sugar industry is at the heart of the slave trade. Then the industrial
revolution comes along beginning in the late 18th century, and suddenly sugar gets cheaper and
cheaper to refine. In the 1840s the candy industry, the chocolate industry, and the ice cream industry
all start up. In the 1870s–1880s you get the soft drink industry, with Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and Dr.
Pepper, and suddenly not only are you creating entirely new ways to consume sugar, but you're
targeting children and women as the consumers of sugar. The soft drink industry in particular just
explodes.

By 1900, we're consuming about 90 pounds per capita, which is almost a 20-fold increase in a century.
It's like an arms race. The nutritionists say, "No, no, no, no, no," and the marketers say "If we don't do
it also, we're out of business." By the 1960s, you've got cereals that are 40, 50 percent sugar—

And that are advertising as such, right? It was originally Sugar Frosted Flakes.

Tastes like a milkshake. You've got all of the smartest minds on Madison Avenue in the P.R. industry
creating not just cartoon characters but entire Saturday morning cartoons—the ones we grew up on,
like Rocky and Bullwinkle. I loved Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was a vehicle to sell cereal.

Gosh, I didn't realize. So in the Hague trial of cartoon characters against humanity, Rocky and
Bullwinkle are as bad as Boris and Natasha?

You could look at it that way. Fruit juices come in in the 1930s. Sunkist, the coalition of California
orange growers, they have to do something with their oranges 'cause they all come into season at
once. You can't sell enough and you can't move enough so you turn them into juice. You sell them as
juice and you advertise them as healthy because of the vitamin C. We're coming off this age of the
new nutrition, which was all about vitamins and vitamin deficiency diseases.

You go back to what we evolved to eat, the sugar in those apples, and kids are now getting that within
20 minutes of waking up in the morning, and they aren't going more than an hour and a half or two
hours without it. Over the course of a day, they're consuming almost a year's worth of what they
evolved to eat.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other government agencies that gave dietary
recommendations wouldn't even think to say, "Well, glasses of apple juice and orange juice are
sugar."

To this day, when you are told to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, it's because they're vitamin-rich. The
conventional thinking is that orange juice is healthy because it's full of vitamins. In the alternative
thinking, the world I live in now, it's unhealthy because it's basically sugar water. You could take Coca-
Cola, add a vitamin C tablet, and you got the same thing.

Talk about why the government has

that blind spot.

The sugar industry was always a very

powerful lobby, because sugar was a vital
product import. The food industry was
dependent on it. [So] the industry creates
the Sugar Association basically to help
advertise sugar consumption. Post–World
War II the artificial sweetener industry
begins to come of age. Saccharine had
been around since the 1890s and
cyclamates since the 1930s, and they're
used in products that are sold for
Cody Pickens diabetics. People start thinking, "Hey, I'm
getting fatter. I could drink these sugar-
free, calorie-free drinks as well."

The newspapers now have something to measure, which is the amount of diet sodas being produced,
so they can write about the diet craze. And the sugar industry has a problem, because people are
saying sugar is fattening. So the Sugar Association starts saying a calorie is a calorie. That's the
bedrock belief of the obesity community. They start P.R. campaigns to combat the argument that sugar
is fattening. They do it by basically just taking what the nutritionists are giving them. But the
nutritionists are giving them bad science.

Is the sugar lobby actually paying for studies?

They began paying for research during World War II. That was a common practice. The sugar industry
kind of pioneered it. I don't think they did it for public relations reasons—they wanted to find other uses
for sugar, so they funded some of the best sugar biochemists in the world. Science magazine would
annually run articles about who they were funding. It helped cement some allies, because if
somebody's been paying your bills for 20 years, you tend to be fond of them. That's where the conflict
of interest comes in. In the 1960s, with this idea that dietary fat causes heart disease, some of the
people pushing that happened to be longtime recipients of sugar industry largess.

What about the attack on artificial sweeteners? Cyclamates were banned in the late '60s, right?

In '69, yeah. Saccharine was almost banned, or it was for a bit. Now it carries warnings.

Where did the idea that these sweeteners were problematic come from?

Oh, they came from the sugar industry. The saccharine and cyclamates were direct competitors.
Interestingly, here's where the beverage industry and the sugar industry split, because the beverage
industry was happy to sell artificially sweetened drinks. Artificial sweeteners are cheaper. So Coke and
Pepsi put out Tab and Diet Rite.

And Fresca. I'm thinking of all the horrible-tasting pre–Diet

Coke diet sodas.

But the sugar industry saw it as a direct threat to their viability, and
it was. There's a quote from The New York Times in my book, a
sugar industry executive copping to spending a half-million dollars
on research trying to find anything that an artificial sweetener does
Joanna Andreasson
that's damaging. They would give female rats the equivalent of 60
cans a day of soda and then hope that they would produce rats with
birth defects so they could say it was as bad as thalidomide. This executive is quoted as saying, "If
someone could undersell you one cent to a dime, wouldn't you throw a brickbat at them if you could?"

So if our government and other public health institutions are consistently offering bad
nutritional advice, what is the solution to that?

That's the problem, isn't it?

Is there a solution?

In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you
want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing
it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction. You
end up with, I'm going to beat this metaphor to death, but sort of a house of cards. And there will be no
way to go back on it. In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you've now got these enormous
institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the
institutions to change their belief systems?

The British Medical Journal is running a series on nutrition policy, and their way of dealing with it is by
assigning writers from these different belief systems. So I'm a co-author on an article on dietary fat,
along with the former head of the Harvard nutrition department who thinks I'm the worst journalist he's
ever met and who does a form of science that I consider a pseudoscience.

But that is kind of the Enlightenment model of science, right? You have competing truth claims
and you put them in a cockfighting ring?

What's the cockfighting ring? That's the key. The cockfighting ring is experimental tests. You have a
hypothesis, you do an experiment, you intervene while limiting the number of variables you change.
The problem with these sciences is you can't really test the hypotheses. They're too hard to do. I
mean, you could if you had enough societal motivation. If you're willing to spend $10 billion, the way
we do to try and find out if the Higgs boson exists in high-energy physics. You get everyone to work
together, you identify the key questions, and you spend whatever money is necessary to do it.

Food producers spend billions of dollars a year on R&D. Are they capable of doing
disinterested research?

Well, the assumption is no. Nowadays there's a whole journalistic industry of identifying conflicts of
interest when researchers take money from industry. There are models which work better, where you
just have the industry donate money for research to clearinghouses or to the government, which then
identifies what things have to be studied. But the argument I'm making is that you have multiple
generations of nutrition and obesity researchers who really fundamentally don't know how to do
science. They don't know how to think critically, how to keep multiple hypotheses in their heads at one
time, what it means to rigorously test hypotheses. So even if you had them do the studies, they would
probably do a bad job.

"This whole story is about

government interference that went
awry. If they had stayed out of
things…the scientists might have had
time to get the science right."

You compare sugar to a drug. To go into kind of a different register of government

malfeasance, the government has arbitrarily declared certain drugs good and certain drugs
illicit. The war on drugs has been a failure. The war on tobacco I guess has been successful at
helping to drive down the number of people who smoke. Are you proposing anything along the
lines of a war on sugar?

No, government interference worries me the same way I think it worries you guys. This whole story is
about government interference that went awry. If they had stayed out of things in the '60s through the
'80s, and never inflicted us with what I think are these incorrect ideas, the scientists might have had
time to get the science right. We might have really understood what's happening.

When the USDA sets up federal guidelines, those influence how people talk about things, how
grants get given, what gets served in school lunches, etc. So there's an indirect power by
which the government really does get to set a lot of dietary practice.

Yeah. I have what is maybe too simplistic a notion: We have these obesity and diabetes epidemics.
Let's unambiguously identify the cause. Now we know what we shouldn't be eating. If we get that
message across—

I don't know how much government regulation helped people cut back on smoking, and how much the
awareness that smoking causes lung cancer did. I didn't quit because of government regulation. I quit
because I don't want to kill myself, and I was coughing all the time. It was clear that was cigarette-
related. If we could get people to understand, assuming I'm right, that sugar is the problem, then you
get rid of sugar and refined high-glycemic-index carbs if you don't want to be obese and diabetic.

In the '70s and '80s there was a discount clothing guy named Sy
Syms. He would always say, "An educated consumer is our best
customer." There are always going to be quacks, and who is a
quack and who is a legitimate scientist is always going to vary,
but is the answer having voices out there forcing people to
become educated, critical consumers of their own nutrition?

Well, again, it's hard to do, because there are all these different
sources of information, and who do you trust? Do you trust the
Joanna Andreasson journalist, do you trust the vegan diet doctor, do you trust the
ketogenic diet doctor, do you trust the researchers?

We can agree we don't trust Dr. Oz, though, right?

Yeah, for the most part. Diabetes prevalence in this country has increased 700 percent since the early
1960s. That's unprecedented. We have to get that straight. As long as we think it's eating too much
and exercising too little and sedentary behavior, [we're in trouble]. And the obesity/diabetes community
will say these are multi-factorial, complex diseases, which means the [National Institutes of Health] will
fund thousands of researchers to look at hundreds of things, and we're going to say it's a little bit of
this and a little bit of that. But something's triggering the epidemic everywhere, and it's probably the
same thing everywhere.

The null hypothesis should be that it's something simple. Sugar's not just at the scene of the crime
when it happens in populations. It's at the scene of the crime in the human body, which is the liver.

These are disorders that nobody wants. I think if we truly understood the cause, if we got it right, if that
message was consistent from diet doctors to insurance agents to hospitals to physicians, then I think
there would be a societal move to fix it. But again, we have to get the science right.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a video version, visit
reason.com.

Photo Credit: Cody Pickens

Nick Gillespie is the editor at large of Reason and the co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of
Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (2011/2012).

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