I am an obesity researcher and I think that in some sense the idea that we are programmed to eat and to store fat for lean days is correct, and that our current environment of abundance combines with this innate tendency to increase the prevalence of obesity. But this general statement hides many unknowns. For example, why are some people more prone to weight gain than others (in the same environment)? Why is obesity heritable (20-80% heritable depending on how you calculate it and the population you use)? Taubes is absolutely correct in stating that the "low-fat diet" mantra was promoted without any evidence to back it up and the evidence we do have seems to favor low-carb diets, at least in the short run. Fructose (and its not just high fructose corn syrup...sucrose is 50% fructose, HFCS is 55% fructose) does indeed seem to be deleterious above and beyond just adding calories, but its not the whole story either. Toxins and endocrine disruptors may play a role, but we really dont know too much about that yet. Bottom line: the notion that we know NOTHING about nutrition is false. But the notion that we know all we need to know about diets and obesity is also false. The n... (read more)

Here are the food heuristics I like to use:

• Variety, variety, variety. I don't always succeed at this when I'm not in full control of my food purchases or fall into a rut. But eating many different things is likely to capture more of the nutrients I need than eating just a few things.

• If something tastes better than it usually tastes, or seems more appealing than it usually does, eat it until it stops doing that. Flavors aren't static things that only signal what's in a food - they are also somewhat responsive to the body's needs.

• Exception to the above: If I eat a lot of something and the craving doesn't let up, it's probably not actually helping, it's just a stand-in for something nearby in foodspace that I actually need. At this time it's better to think of what it might stand in for. Really persistent legume cravings tend to go away more readily if I eat fish; if I want fruit more than usual it can mean I'm thirsty.

• Remember that food does not lose nutritional value if you add things to it. For example, broccoli is not deprived of the broccoli-nature by the addition of cheese. It's still broccoli and still contains all the goodies it contained before it was doused with dairy.

• Supplement key nutrients that my diet may not cover. For instance, I crisp up in the sun and therefore avoid it - I take vitamin D. I have a history of anemia - I take iron.

As CronoDAS has pointed out, the field of nutrition science has a long history of releasing bad studies leading to conclusions that were later proven false. Here are some of the stupid things which researchers have done, which have lead to bad dietary advice:

1. Inferring what's good or bad for humans from its effect on lab rats
2. Studying a diet's effect on one particular disease, then using it to argue for its effects on overall health
3. Conducting a controlled study, losing half the sample to dropouts and non-compliance, and pretending that the group that dropped out did so for a reason other than because the diet was hurting them
4. Measuring weight loss, but failing to distinguish between loss of fat and loss of muscle.

I believe Taubes is correct, and that the idea that low-fat diets are healthy is due to errors 3 and 4. What convinced me was hearing a bodybuilder talk about fat and muscle weight as separate things, and connecting that observation to the "rebound effect" - that is, the observation that people who lose weight on low-fat diets tend to gain it back plus extra. My interpretation of this is that some of the weight they lose is muscle, not fat, and this lowers th... (read more)

Great post. Since I have had (a diluted form of) the position Taubes describes for a long time (since before I was exposed to OvercomingBias, much less LessWrong) I cannot speak too much about the influences from here but it is a useful exercise to to try to trace how I update my beliefs in practice.

Caveat: I know damn well that I suck at giving true reports on what really causes me to change my mind. Our self awareness isn't particularly motivated to be honest about such things. Nevertheless I can give a best estimate on what influenced me.

If you've already thought about this, do you believe Taubes' thesis, and how did you come to this conclusion?

Yes. From what I can tell I formed the belief based on exposure to various experts that appeared to be Correct Contrarians. As someone who has taken an interest in a whole range of topics regarding health I have been exposed to experts in all sorts of fields that overlap with nutrition. It is not hard to distinguish between experts that seek out research to form accurate opinions and 'experts' who specialise in presenting authoritative beliefs. It is also not hard (given the right skillset) to independently verify the positions of suc... (read more)

My conclusion has been: nobody really knows anything about nutrition, so I'm going to eat what I damn well please. (They used to say that margarine was better than butter, but now they've concluded that "trans fat" is actually worse than ordinary saturated fat.) Summing up all the various advice, it all seems to come down to "eating is bad for you." (And data on caloric restriction seems to confirm this!)

Remember this scene from Woody Allen's movie Sleeper?

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat

Great case study, in that studying my own reaction to your article has thought me a lot about my own decision making. And my conclusion is that reading a rationalist blog isn't sufficient to become rational!

I am thin, despite having very bad eating habits (according to conventional dietary wisdom). I had not heard of Taubes before. Specifically, I have never considered that conventional dietary wisdom could be incorrect; people say that I eat unhealthily, and I have simply taken their word for it. The fact that I continue to eat unhealthily has more to do ... (read more)

This is a fascinating topic, and I hope it attracts more commentary. As Bentarm says, it is important and relevant to each of us, yet the topic is fraught with uncertainty, and it is expensive to try to reduce the uncertainty.

I do not believe Taubes. No one book can outweigh the millions of pages of scientific research which have led to the current consensus in the field. Taubes is polemical, argumentative, biased, and one-sided in his presentation. He makes no pretense of offering an objective weighing of the evidence for and against various nutritional h... (read more)

One problem with all these debates about nutrition and exercise is that they mostly don't take into account individual differences. How exactly your body will react to a certain regime of diet and exercise, and which regimes are compatible with reaching and maintaining your optimal weight while feeling good and healthy -- the correct answers to these questions depend very strongly on your genotype, and possibly also on a number of entirely non-obvious and unknown environmental and lifestyle factors. (And to make things especially un-PC, the relevant genet... (read more)

I put high levels of trust in my own repeated experience, and even moderately low fat eating leaves me feeling lousy within a day or less. This inclines me to believe that Taubes is on to something. And that people who push extreme low fat may mostly like the drama of aesceticism.

On the other hand, there are people who tolerate low fat diets much better than I do, and my general assumption is that people's dietary needs vary a fair amount.

My theory (which I don't follow consistently) is that people will do pretty well if they eat according to what will lea... (read more)

I have not read Taubes but I do read almost all the announcements on nutrition science that hit reviews like ScienceDaily etc. From what you have said of him, I probably would agree with him. I find main stream nutritional science to be tawdy if not positively dishonest. My view on fat is: trans fats are very dangerous, way too much fat is dangerous, way too little is more dangerous, cholesterol is important but dietary cholesterol is not as important (if you eat lots than the body makes less and vice versa), essential fatty acids are really essential and... (read more)

I once read a great quotation, which unfortunately I can no longer find (so I understand if you vote this comment down for spreading rumours), from a person involved in the anti-fat movement (AHA, USDA, or something like that). The quoted person said that they knew perfectly well that which fats one eats is far more important than how much fat one eats, but that saying ‘Make saturated fat [and trans fats, but this was before people talked about that] a low proportion of your total fat intake.’ was too complicated a message for the public to understand, so... (read more)

When people talk about diet, the phrasing often seems to be "fats are bad for you" versus "carbs are bad for you" or "this is bad for you" versus "that is bad for you."

The question that I came up with while reading this post was, why are these hypotheses in conflict? Why should there be an option that is "good for you"? Assuming that "eating" evolved by way of "things that eat tend to reproduce more" and "things that feel good when eating things that help them reproduce will eat t... (read more)

Semi-random thought:

I think that my current antidepressant medication (Venlafaxine) gave me a sweet tooth; shortly after beginning to take it, I wanted sweets much more than I used to, and the effect hasn't subsided. (My mom says that many psychoactive medications tend to cause weight gain.)

Given that everyone needs to eat something, we all need to decide whether we believe Taubes or whether we believe Change 4 Life.

Not true at all. There are a thousand factors besides nutrition on which one could base one's dietary choices: taste, convenience, culture, ethics...

Personally I think the Taubes/paleo picture is probably more right than the conventional picture (based mainly on the smart people I know who have studied the issue), but I'm far from convinced that optimizing my diet for paleo-nutrition would produce a net benefit for my life. (... (read more)

From the New York Times article:

On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer.

Either Taubes is throwing out a straw man here, or his opponents are ridiculously simplistic. It's pretty well established that some fat can be good for you, and length of life is based on a whole ton of factors.

The problem with... (read more)