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Gary Taubes

Author of Rethinking Diabetes, The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories

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Substack 5: Less Meat, More Plants: A rules of evidence controversy (part 1)

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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 by authorities worldwide for other issues of evidence-based medicine, the support for the mostly-plant doctrine evaporated. Needless to say, controversy ensued.

We all want to eat healthy (I assume), but do we have to embrace credulity to know how to do it?

Here’s my latest Unsettled Science Substack article

Substack 4: Nutrition Researchers Say It’s the Doctors Who Are Fooling Themselves – Are They?

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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 for the benefits of carbohydrate restriction, as Unwin does, because they see it work so well in their patients. The authorities in the nutrition/obesity world argue that the doctors are fooling themselves. And they base that belief on their preconceptions, and how they interpret the research they’re funded to do – clinical trials and epidemiologic surveys. The evidence-based medicine hierarchy/pyramid of evidence sides with the authorities.

Somebody has to be wrong; someone is misinterpreting what they’re seeing. Let’s work this out.

Here’s my latest Unsettled Science substack article: https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/nutrition-researchers-say-its-the

Rethinking Diabetes.

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A new book and a Q&A on Substack

The numbers are hard to ignore. One in every four dollars spent on healthcare in the United States goes to treating diabetes and its complications. The cost to society is estimated at over $400 billion a year, more than $1 billion every day. Over $300 billion are in direct medical costs, covering the care for the 30 million Americans who have been diagnosed with diabetes. Another 8 to 9 million have diabetes but have yet to be diagnosed and don’t yet know it.

A disease that was vanishingly rare in the 19th Century now afflicts one in every nine Americans.

Diabetes therapies are better than ever. Diabetes is less of a burden for the patients who suffer from it than ever before, and yet it’s still considered a chronic, progressive disease that will require more and better drugs or higher doses as time goes on. Half of all patients with diabetes are failing to meet the relatively liberal blood sugar goals of the American Diabetes Association.

Obvious questions: how did this happen and is anyone responsible? Are these problems that can really be solved by yet more (expensive) drugs and better devices? Were mistakes made in how we think about this disease and how we treat it?

My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, addresses all of this and it’s out today.

I have a Q&A on the Unsettled Science substack addressing these questions and others.

Please read, comment, pass along, and share. I look forward to hearing what you think.

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