Gary Taubes: Bad science and challenging the conventional wisdom of obesity

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Gary Taubes. Gary's an investigative science and health journalist. He's the author of multiple books, including The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Bad Science and Nobel Dreams. Most of you who recognize Gary's name will undoubtedly recognize him from his work in nutrition and that's covered obviously in the most recent of his books. However, we spend the first part of this discussion really talking about his background, how he got into journalism as a physics major and how he spent the first really decade and a half of his career writing about science and how he was particularly drawn to bad science or what would be called pathologic science.
Gary almost stumbled into health sciences in the late 90s and really he's never looked back since in this podcast, we probably spend about two thirds of it covering his career up until that point and about the last third getting into this.
Gary provides a great history of the overview of obesity research and provides his explanation for why the conventional wisdom today is incorrect. Whether or not you come away from this episode believing that Gary is right or wrong, I hope you do come away from this episode at least acknowledging that there perhaps remains some uncertainty with respect to our understanding of obesity and its causes. So without further delay, please join my conversation with Gary Taubes. Hey Gary, how you doing?

**Gary Taubes** (2:25)
I'm good Peter, how are you?

**Peter Attia** (2:26)
I'm good as well. I feel like it's been a very long time. I don't know the last time I actually saw you. It's been how many years?

**Gary Taubes** (2:32)
Probably three or four. In San Francisco, we had Virta offices.

**Peter Attia** (2:37)
Yeah, God, that's maybe four or five years ago now. Who knows?

**Gary Taubes** (2:40)
We were certainly younger.

**Peter Attia** (2:43)
Speak for yourself, come on.

**Gary Taubes** (2:45)
Oh yeah, that's true. You may be aging the other way. I forget.

**Peter Attia** (2:50)
There's so much to talk about. I wanna start with some of the stuff that probably a lot of people forget about you, which is long before you were writing about nutrition, you were writing about other disciplines of science. And I'm curious how you got interested in this whole thing. So remind me what you studied in college. You went to Harvard and did you study physics? Was that your undergrad?

**Gary Taubes** (3:09)
Yeah, I was a physics major. Actually started off as astrophysics major and then got a C minus in quantum physics.
And my advisor suggested I change my major. So we switched to applied physics and I spent my senior year taking writing courses for the most part, but yeah.

**Peter Attia** (3:28)
What drew you to physics in the first place? Were you a good student in high school?

**Gary Taubes** (3:31)
Yeah, well, you gotta be a good student. I didn't high school to get into Harvard. I read science fiction books growing up. This was the sixties, you know, we all wanted to be astronauts. Now our kids want to be billionaires. Back then they wanted to be astronauts. So I read science fiction books. I studied astrophysics. I have an older brother, as you know, who's very smart and was studying physics and I was competing with him. So that's what I did. Problem is my brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept of Hamiltonian.
It was beyond my ability to comprehend. So that was the end of that.

**Peter Attia** (4:06)
So the whole time you're studying physics, you're thinking, I want to now apply this. And I think you went to Stanford thereafter to do a master's in aerospace, if my memory serves me correctly.

**Gary Taubes** (4:18)
I did. And I was still thinking astronaut, weirdly enough. At Stanford, I actually lived with a few Naval pilots in the same housing, you know, apartment building. And I realized, one, that there really wasn't any need for a six foot two, 220 pound astronaut when you could send up a five foot nine, 150 pound astronaut who was in better shape and more fuel efficient. And B, that I wouldn't survive very well on any kind of military hierarchy that required blind acknowledgement to superiors. So started aiming towards journalism from there.