INTERVIEWER What happened when you met with the [UC Berkeley School of Public Health] epidemiology students?

TAUBES Again, it was a little discouraging, only because these kids really want to do good, they want to make a difference in the world. That’s why they go into the field. They want to have an effect. But as I say at the end of the book, to do science right, your primary motivation has to be to learn the truth, and if you’re infected with this desire to change the world, to save lives, it takes you away from the fundamental motivation, which is to get it right. If you want to save lives, then you want to get the word out as quickly as possible. You don’t want to wait ten or twenty years or more for definitive evidence, for the rigorous tests to be done; you want to give advice and tell people what you’ve learned, even if you only think that you’ve learned it. Doing science right takes a long time. So does good journalism. You can say the difference between my book and Gina Kolata’s book is — not counting whatever difference in intellect we begin with– my book took five years, more than full time, because I wasn’t going to say anything until I was certain that what I was saying was sound. She wrote her book in two years, part-time, while still working full-time as a New York Times reporter.

INTERVIEWER Yeah, they’re very different.

TAUBES Even when I was writing magazine articles, if I was in danger of missing a deadline, which was often the case, I would ask my editors, “Do you want it on time, or do you want it right?”.

INTERVIEWER There was a managing editor at The New Yorker, one of the first, whose motto was “Don’t get it right, get it written.”

TAUBES When I was a young journalist working for Discover, which was owned by Time, Inc., the philosophy was that one of the worst things anybody could do was over-report a story. Just get the facts and get it out. Except science doesn’t work like that. Science, you’ve got to get it right, and that takes time, and you can’t do it on deadline. Along those lines, I did read one of your blog entries about settling points versus set points, and I thought it might be… You know, I Google myself, as all writers do fairly regularly, so first you read all news stories that day, hoping that the Google Alert might have missed something, and then you go to the blogs.

INTERVIEWER So you read my post about the most surprising thing in your book?

TAUBES What was the most surprising thing?

INTERVIEWER That you didn’t agree that set points play a role in homeostasis.

TAUBES It’s funny – the more I think about it, the more Claude Bernard was brilliant. (I’d like to do a book on Claude Bernard, but probably can’t because my French is terrible.) In particular, this idea of the milieu interieur? The fundamental idea of homeostasis is that the body works to maintain the stability of what he called the milieu interieur, which gets translated to “internal environment”. What he meant by that is the conditions right outside the membrane of the cell, every cell in the body. So the body wants to maintain stable this internal environment — the pH, the blood pressure, the ionic potential, everything — of the cell itself. So it wants to make sure that the environment the cell lives in — every cell — remains relatively stable. in that sense, we’re this huge symbiotic organism made up of billions of individual cells, and homeostasis functions to keep the conditions that these cell live in stable. So each cell lives in this little isolated world, and it’s got to see stable conditions, or it’s going to die. The idea of the set point is that there’s some central controller in the brain that maintains homeostasis, but that’s naive. Rather, there’s an unbelievably complicated mechanism composed of individual settling points. Like the fatty acid concentration on the interior, and exterior of the fat cell. If there’s more fatty acids on the outside of the cell membrane than the inside, then fatty acids flow into the cell, and you get slightly fatter. There’s no brain in charge. The brain may respond, and the hypothalamus sends signals back and forth, and effects changes in hormones in response to changes in the environment, but there’s so many different interrelated, interconnected feedback loops involved that to refer to a set point is to grossly oversimplify things this beautiful homeostatic system, and it directs attention away from the body, where all these feedback loops interact, to the brain. Did you ever read any books on chaos theory?

INTERVIEWER No, I haven’t.

TAUBES Well, to understand homeostasis you have to understand this concept of dynamic equilibrium, where there can be hundreds of forces acting simultaneously. And the point is, you’ve got these negative feedback loops all over the body, and they involve the brain, but on some level, the dynamic equilibrium you’re looking at is right at the cellular level. That’s where the forces converge to make us leaner or fatter. And the brain is part of these loops, but to concentrate on the brain misses the big picture.

INTERVIEWER The brain is sensitive to the environment — sure, the set point doesn’t really exist anywhere, and sure it’s a function of about a zillion things, not all of them in the brain, sure. But the reason I like that idea of a setpoint is that it’s easy to imagine something going up and down, rather than a million things going up and down.

TAUBES But the problem is once you oversimplify, there’s a tendency to believe the oversimplification. You should go back and read the papers on settling points. There were a couple, if I remember correctly, written by psychologists from the University of Chicago. You should go back and read those original papers. They’re fascinating, and the point they make, is that you don’t need the brain involved. Like we don’t think of the brain regulating blood pressure. You don’t really think of your brain regulating blood glucose. Those cycles I described in my lecture, you know, the triglyceride fatty acid cycle and the Randall cycle, serve to regulate blood sugar. Then hormones are layered on top of those cycles, and the hormones are determined, in part, by the hypothalamus, so you get the brain involved, and the sensing of the environment, but there are other ways to sense the environment, like temperature sensing of the skin, evaporation. There are other ways that we adjust to the environment without the involvement of the brain. One of the things I left out of the book, for instance, is this theory that hunger is perceived by the liver.

INTERVIEWER Perceived, or controlled?

TAUBES Perceived. Or sensed by the liver. You know, your eyes collect photons, and then they send the signal back through the optic nerve. The perception of the universe is done in the inside of the brain, but the eyes are the sense organ that collect the photons. Your ears detect sound waves, but your perception of what you’re hearing is inside of the brain. This theory says that your liver senses fuel availability and then your brain integrates the signals from the liver and registers them as hunger or the absence of hunger.

INTERVIEWER Hunger is internal. It’s like the recognition. Hunger is not something external to the body.

TAUBES Let me re-phrase it. It senses fuel ability. Then your brain perceives it as hunger and initiates — that would be a better way of putting it. But the sense organ of fuel availability is your liver. I had some discussions with Mark Friedman, a fascinating guy, really smart. He’s at the Monell Institute.

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TAUBES I’m definitely more skeptical; even the science journalists I really respect, some of my friends, sometimes I read their stuff and I say, “They just weren’t skeptical enough”.

INTERVIEWER Yeah, that’s my reaction to at least half of the science journalism I read. One of my next questions is, did writing your book radicalize you? But it sounds like you were already radicalized!

TAUBES What do you mean by “radicalize me”?

INTERVIEWER Did it make you even more skeptical of the establishment? Obviously, you were skeptical to begin with.

TAUBES Again, the obesity stuff, in retrospect, is mind-blowing to me. Until I did the research for the book, I never questioned the idea that obesity wasn’t about calories in/calories out. That it wasn’t about overeating. Then you realize that there’s no arrow of causality in the law of energy conservation. That the correct interpretation is that we get overeat because we get fat, we don’t get fat because we overeat. Now that’s a remarkable shift in causality, and yet nobody picked up on that for fifty years. And nobody seems to care even now. There’s one guy I know of — Robert Lustig at UCSF — who has written papers discusssing this causality issue and getting it write. And nobody else seems to care. It blows my mind that an entire field of research could get it so wrong.

INTERVIEWER But you’d seen Nobel-Prize-winning physicists get it very wrong.

TAUBES But what they were getting wrong were subtle; yes, they’d believe incorrectly that they’d discovered elementary particles, but what they were doing was a real subtle game. What they were misinterpreting were extraordinarily subtle aspects of the data. This obesity screw-up is fundamental; it’s like a grade school error in the interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics. And I made it as well, up until five years ago. I never thought differently. But what radicalized me is that they don’t care. If they successfully ward off my threat to their beliefs, then I’m in a very dangerous place. Then it’s, like I said, where I end up a bitter demented old man, one of those guys who’s muttering to himself all the time that they, the establishment, didn’t listen to him…

INTERVIEWER I wondered, too, what other books your book resembles. To me, that’s an interesting question. But there’s many possible answers, and one is “Well, there’s been a long list of books that talk about this scam or that scam, and some of them are awful and some of them are pretty good. One of the ones that’s good is that great cholesterol scam, The Great Cholesterol Con. that’s a good book. But your book is different, because unlike the author of that book, you really had something to lose. You were a respected science writer who could expect to receive many more assignments in the course of a lifetime and write many, many more times for the New York Times in science, and so forth, and might write other books. For a writer in that position — this is an incredible book, because…

TAUBES I actually didn’t think — and this may be my own ignorance — I didn’t ever think of it as endangering my career.

INTERVIEWER But you clearly have more at stake…

TAUBES I always knew I could write about other subjects. I could go back to writing about high-energy physics; I like it. There’s a new accelerator turning on; there’ll be something to write about. I would have to compete with the whole new younger generation of whiz kids who may be better prose stylists than I am, but I could do it. What stuns me is that people may not take me seriously enough to refute me, to ruin my credibility. That’s what bothers me, not that they could ruin it. Here’s a book that might be similar, OK? Not in terms of prose style, or beauty of presentation, but like The Best and the Brightest. A book that came out during the Vietnam War and exposed the sort of irrationality of it. When I was writing my cold fusion book, I read A Bright and Shining Lie and I read Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On. I thought we’re all writing about human idiocy. Shilts’s book was particularly important, because it came out at a time when it could still make a difference, when people still had to change their beliefs. So Shilts actually accomplished something. And A Bright and Shining Lie was an extraordinary book. In my fondest dreams, I couldn’t imagine writing such a book. But maybe my book may be akin to book And The Band Played On and The Best and the Brightest. Those are books that revealed the establishment’s erroneous beliefs and how they were misleading us, and they did so at a time and in a way that could actually help set us on the right path. You use the term “We were misled”; we were literally misled. Not deceived; we were just led down the wrong path. Often, when I think about this, I imagine this situation in the 50s and 60s, when there were these dual paths that could be followed; two paths through the woods, and the establishment took us on this low-fat path. What I had to do when I did this research is I had to back up, back up, back up until I got back to the woods, to the point where the two paths diverged, and see the existence of the other path, and see where that one led us. Did that get to a place where we could actually understand what was going on, and maybe prevent and cure these diseases.

INTERVIEWER Well, when I think about precedents for your book, sometimes I think of The Jungle [by Upton Sinclair]. In the sense that there’s this awful thing going on, and it’s in the interests of many people to keep it going on, but it’s really outrageous. It’s very different, in a way, because the meat-packing industry was very obviously horrible, whereas what you’re saying went on isn’t obviously horrible; it’s more complicated than that. But on the other hand, your thing is kind of a bigger issue; it’s everyone’s health. It’s not just everyone’s health, it’s everyone’s mental health; it’s horrible, being fat; it’s awful every day, not just when you die.

TAUBES I have friends and acquaintances who will often say to me at dinner parties, “Well, who really cares about this stuff, because you want to live well, not just eat the healthiest possible meals.” But they’re not overweight, they don’t have cancer running in their family. Their life, rightfully, is a balance between living healthy and living well. But the problem always is that even though those people want to live well, they eventually get to the point where now they’re sick. Inevitably, when you get to that point, you wish maybe you hadn’t lived quite so well. Unless you’re lucky and you have that massive coronary on the golf course, or on your lover, so you don’t have time to think about it. But both my mother and my father died from long, extended, horrible illnesses. There’s a point at which you think, “Maybe if, 30 years ago, I had lived less well and more healthy, I wouldn’t have to go through this,” but I guess we all have to die of something.

INTERVIEWER Well, I think understanding what causes obesity is a big, big issue. For the medical establishment to be misled, or deluded, to get the wrong answer and insist on it, is a tragedy. It’s a gigantic tragedy, because of all of the people who are overweight. Not the people who are 5, 10, or even 20 pounds overweight. The people who are 50 or 100 pounds overweight.

TAUBES We’re drowning in diabetics; we’re drowning in obese patients. Obviously, physicians and obesity researchers and public health authorities haven’t got a clue. By what right does anyone flippantly discard an alternative hypothesis that can explain the evidence? You would think they’d be desperate for such a thing. You know, this guy presents a compelling argument that we got it wrong. Well, Jesus, we obviously got it wrong. We haven’t cured a person in 100 years! Let’s take him seriously!

INTERVIEWER Let’s praise him for raising an idea that hasn’t yet been proved wrong.

TAUBES We’ll see how it goes. Again, I’m obviously impatient. I expected people to read the book immediately and to send me emails; somebody at NIH saying “Come on down here! Talk to us about what experiments we should do.” If the book has any effect over five years, ten years, that probably would be a great accomplishment. In a sense, I wrote the book for graduate students and post-docs, so that when their professors utter nonsensical statements, like the only that matter is calories in/calories out, these kids will challenge them. It could take awhile; it’s only been a few months.

INTERVIEWER When their ideas failed to produce better ways of losing weight, and fifty years had passed, it was understandable, but not for scientific reasons.

TAUBES As I say in the book, they’re not scientists. The funny thing is, they’re not trained as scientists; a lot of the people involved in this field are nutritionists, medical doctors, public health people, and that’s a different way of thinking. I had an apprenticeship in science; I got to spend my ten months at this physics laboratory; I got to delve into cold fusion for three years. In a way, you have to get an apprenticeship in how to think like a scientist. You have to be mentored. It’s not how we naturally think. These people, it’s not part of their training in any way. Not that there aren’t scientists who started as MDs. There are these yellow berets, the guys who went to NIH instead of Vietnam in the late 60s and early 70s, so suddenly, they’re MDs who were working around biologists and PhDs, and they were taught how to do good science. But it’s not how we naturally think; these people just didn’t do it. Then there’s this whole world of nutritionists and epidemiologists who, for whatever reason, far too many of the senior figures in those fields don’t have a clue how to do science. So they passed on this sloppy way of thinking to their students, and the whole field is permeated with less-than-rigorous thinking.

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INTERVIEWER Marc Hellerstein thought that the obesity epidemic was caused by people being sedentary?

TAUBES He believed that the key is whether you’re sedentary compared to how you used to be. When I told him about the Pima and the Sioux Indians and this 1981 study of obesity in oil field workers, he had an excuse for everything. So the Pima and the Sioux Indians, they lived on reservations, so they could be obese because they were relatively sedentary, at least more sedentary than they used to be. And the oil field workers, well, they’re Mexican-American, so they have some kind of “thrifty” gene going. You know…this is what pathological science is: a field in which you can find a reason to explain away all negative evidence. In pathological science, it’s no longer possible to refute the hypothesis. Remember, science is about trying to test your hypothesis and refute it, but in a field like this, if you test it and come up with a counter-example, the counter-example is just explained away with whatever comes to mind. Negative evidence never means anything. So you have an obese person who’s sedentary, that’s proof of my hypothesis. If you have an obese person who’s very active — at least, compared to most people today — the Sioux indians, for instance, who were so poor they had to walk down to the river to get their drinking water; who had no televisions, no cars; they had to walk outside to evacuate their bowels — those people are obese because they used to be more active than they are now.

INTERVIEWER I’ve never heard that before: “They used to be more active.”

TAUBES But that’s the implication of Hellerstein’s knee-jerk reservation hypothesis. They may be poor, and they may be out working in the fields, so compared to us, they’re active, but compared to their former life, they’re sedentary. See what I’m saying?

INTERVIEWER Yeah, I understand the logic. I’ve just never heard it before.

TAUBES Well, the reason you’ve never heard it before is because you’ve never heard anyone have to explain why obesity was common in an impoverished Native American tribe in 1902 or in 1928. When confronted with that observation, they have to come up with an explanation so that they don’t have to question their hypothesis. I happen to challenge someone who believes the conventional wisdom unconditionally, and that’s the response I get: “Well, they’re living on reservations”.

INTERVIEWER Does he do research on weight, on obesity?

TAUBES Absolutely, he does.

INTERVIEWER That’s unfortunate.

TAUBES This is why the field is in the position it’s in. These people believe so strongly in the calories in/calories out/gluttony/sloth combination that they no longer function as scientists. They can’t imagine the existence of an alternative hypothesis. So everything they see, they have to find a way to interpret it so that it supports what they already believe to be true.

INTERVIEWER They don’t see that they’re operating differently…

TAUBES …than other scientists.

INTERVIEWER Do they see that they’re not making progress?

TAUBES No, because that gets blamed on the obese. If you believe that obesity is caused by sloth, then the reason fat people are fat is because they don’t have the moral fortitude to go run ten miles every day the way you do.

INTERVIEWER Well, people have been saying that for 50 or 60 years. So the fact that they’re saying the same thing now as they were saying 60 years is a sign, to me, that they’re not making progress.

TAUBES Yes, that’s a very good sign, but these people don’t realize they’re saying the same things and doing the same experiments and making the same mistakes that their predecessors made a century go because they don’t bother reading that literature. For reasons I still don’t really understand, these people see no reason to pay attention to the history of their field. Imagine if physicists saw no reason to pay attention to Einstein and Plank and Maxwell and Heisenberg? I mean, these guys all lived a century ago, why would anyone want to know about them or the experiments they did? But in physics, mathematics and even biology, the history is carried along with it. As the science progresses, it takes with it the successful ideas and the students learn about the history along with the science. In obesity research, World War II just cut all of that off. For whatever reason, several generations of researchers grew up with this belief that the history of the field doesn’t matter. And so they don’t even know or care that they’re saying the same thing and doing the same experiments that their predecessors did 100 years ago. And then this latest generation is full of young molecular biologists, and they start the clock in 1994, when leptin was discovered. They’re not aware that they’re not making progress, because they believe that nothing of value was done until 1994.

INTERVIEWER The birth of a new world. In your book, you seem to place weight on the fact that Atkins was disliked by people he went to school with. Did I read that wrong?

TAUBES I think that was part of it. I think the fundamental problem with Atkins is that his book emerged in 1972 , when the low-fat dogma was really beginning to be taken seriously, not just by the heart disease researchers, but by physicians and public health authorities. It was viewed as a great triumph of modern medicine. We finally understand what causes heart disease. Then Atkins goes out of his way to throw the high-fat nature of his diet out there: “You can eat Lobster Newberg, double cheeseburgers, and porterhouse steaks” (like my New York Times Magazine cover). The AMA always had this philosophy that even if people wanted to lose weight, they should go to their doctor and discuss it with them. You shouldn’t go on a diet without your physician’s guidance. So here Atkins was end-running all of that. Then he was saying “eat a high-fat diet. It’s harmless”. He actually said “It’s good for you.” If you read Atkins, he read a lot of the papers I read. His understanding wasn’t tremendously sophisticated, but he didn’t have the advantage I had, of coming along 40 years later. For the time, he was doing pretty damned good. He believed that triglycerides were the problem, not cholesterol. He believed that insulin was a problem. He was a working physician; he didn’t have the time that I did to read all of the research, and to have the internet available to allow him to track down all of the references. But the establishment thought his diet was dangerous. And then Atkins made these claims that he had patients who consumed 5000 calories a day and still lost weight, so they also believed Atkins was a quack, a shyster trying to sell impossible dreams. And they thought this because they believed that calories in/calories out was all that mattered. They had this inherent belief that in order to lose weight, you have to restrict calories; Atkins said you didn’t. So, to these establishment nutrition types, Atkins was saying that the laws of thermodynamics can be ignored. So they had reason to think that Atkins’s diet couldn’t possibly work, on the one hand, and that it would kill you, on the other. So these “responsible physicians,” as they perceived themselves to be, felt an obligation to suppress this threat to the public health. The fact that they knew Atkins personally, that some of them had worked with him and gone to medical school with him and didn’t particularly like him, made it all that much more . . .

INTERVIEWER Irresistible.

TAUBES Yes, irresistible. One of the things I mentioned in my lecture was something I didn’t realize this when I wrote the book. Atkins proposed that one reason carbohydrates-restriction worked is that it stimulated the secretion of something that British researchers in the 1950s had called Fat Mobilizing Hormone. The joke is that you didn’t need a Fat Mobilizing Hormone; the thing you have to do to mobilize fat is lower insulin levels and the way to do that is to remove the carbohydrates from the diet. That’s what mobilizes fat from the fat tissue. But Atkins was doing what a lot of diet book authors do, which was combing the literature for everything and maybe anything that might support his argument. He talked about insulin, but he also talked a lot about Fat Mobilizing Hormone, which was controversial at the time but not an outrageous idea. At the time Atkins wrote the book, this Fat Mobilizing Hormone had yet to be nailed down, and it never would be. The fundamental requirement to mobilize fat, as I said, is to lower insulin. So, the American Medical Association publishes this famous article dedicated, effectively, to establishing that Atkins has no credibility and one of the ways they do it is to discuss how Atkins was wrong about this idea of Fat Mobilizing Hormone. Then in the same paragraph they also say “in order to mobilize fat, you have to lower insulin”. Then they go back to talking about how Atkins jumped the gun on Fat Mobilizing Hormone . So they know that insulin controls fat accumulation, and they say actually acknowledge it in the article, but only in the context of it supporting the argument that Atkins has no credibility. They never mention that the way to lower insulin — and so, apparently, to mobilize fat from the fat tissue — is to eat less carbohydrates, which is exactly what Atkins was recommending. I was writing my response to Gina Kolata’s review when I first really noticed that sentence, and it jumped out at me. “Holy shit!” These people knew what regulates fat tissue, and they know what regulates insulin. They just don’t care. That’s how dedicated they were to trying to squash Atkins.

INTERVIEWER It didn’t matter whether evidence supported them or that there was something there that they couldn’t explain. It just mattered that he was wrong about something.

TAUBES All they wanted to do was establish that Atkins was not a credible source, and people shouldn’t follow these bizarre practices of nutrition, or whatever they called it. One of the things I’m curious about is whether, from here on, the American Heart Association and other health authorities will continue to refer to low-carb diets, the Atkins diet, as these fad diets. Even though, if nothing else, as I point out in the book, these diets constituted the preferred medical treatment of obesity for 150 years, or 100 years, until the low-fat diet came along. It’s the low-fat diet that’s the fad.

INTERVIEWER That’s an interesting point. What is the fad diet? Is it the absence of the Atkins Diet, or its presence? Which is temporary?

TAUBES The idea that you could somehow lose weight by removing fat and increasing carbohydrates is as ludicrous as the idea that you could do it by eating ice cream for any extended period of time. I’m sure there’s something about the ice cream diet that works in the short term. I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

INTERVIEWER Was your response to Kolata’s review published?

TAUBES Yes. If you search me in the Times, you can read my response.

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INTERVIEWER I was a member of the Center for Weight and Health. But the other members didn’t know what I was up to, and had no idea it could have anything to do with actual weight loss.

TAUBES That’s one of the things I’ve found most amusing about obesity research, that you have this disconnect from pre-World War Two, when the people doing it were clinicians who were treating obese patients, to post-World War Two, where first, it’s nutritionists, who do rat experiments. Then, by the 1960s, obesity is considered an eating disorder and it’s being treated by psychologists and psychiatrists. So today, if you looking at some of the major obesity centers in the country — at Yale, at University of Cincinnati, they’re all run by psychologists or psychiatrists. Here’s a physiological disorder of the body, and it’s being studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. They’re not interested in anecdotal evidence, unless it agrees with their preconceptions.

INTERVIEWER In my department, we don’t have any of that. Obesity is not handled much on the Berkeley campus.

TAUBES But think about it: it’s a physiological disorder.

INTERVIEWER Well, hunger is controlled by the brain.

TAUBES I know, I know, but you know, diabetics get hungry. Type I diabetics are starving. Literally starving, without insulin. But it’s not psychologists who treat diabetics.

INTERVIEWER I think that with Type I diabetes, you can say, “look at this problem; it’s not in the brain”. But I think with most obesity, it’s no so obvious that the problem isn’t in the brain. Sure, they’re fat, but maybe they’re fat because they’re hungry too much. That could easily be a brain disorder. It could easily have something to do with the brain.

TAUBES It could have something to do with the brain, but the problem is in the body. This is the paradigm problem. If you just think of it as hunger, then…

INTERVIEWER I’m not saying you just think of it as hunger, but you wouldn’t want to rule it out.

TAUBES Yeah, I know. That’s why the book is so long, because I’m trying to do it — I’m trying to say “Look, your fat tissue is trying to get fat. Hunger and gluttony and sloth are side-effects of what’s happening at a hormonal level in your fat tissue.”

INTERVIEWER Right. What effect did Weston Price have on you?

TAUBES Price was interesting. It’s funny. He got cut from the book for reasons of length and narrative, but reading Price was a revelation to me, as I say in the acknowledgments. I think that Price should be required reading for every nutritionist in the world. And then, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” is a great read, as well.

INTERVIEWER How did you come to read his book?

TAUBES How did I come to Price? I don’t remember, actually. Somebody in the field must have recommended him.

INTERVIEWER It was after your New York Times article?

TAUBES Oh, yes, definitely. I did not read Weston Price prior to that. I have to say, by the way, that I was trying to decide how much to believe of Price’s stories. I decided that if his story about migrating, tree-climbing crabs in the South Pacific was true, I would believe everything Price said. This was my calibration. Because some of his stories are wild: about how pygmies, for instance, kill elephants by slowly hamstringing them over the course of a few days. Even with his photos as evidence, they’re still hard to believe. So, anyway, this being the 21st century, I googled the tree-climbing crabs , and indeed, there are migrating, tree-climbing crabs in the South Pacific. The article I found didn’t say whether the local natives hunted them by putting nets under the trees and making the sounds of coconuts falling, so that the crabs would climb back down into their nets, which is what Price wrote, but the crabs definitely exist. I decided that’s it. As far as I’m concerned, Weston Price is an unimpeachable source.

INTERVIEWER That’s good to know. I really like his work, too.

TAUBES And those photos of the teeth of populations that do and do not eat sugar and white flour. Compelling stuff. I have a 2 year old and I try to keep him away from sugar and white flour just because of Price’s photos. And you know, in this day and age, it’s not easy to keep a child away from sugar and white flour. But it’s the photos in Price’s book that keeps me motivated: we’ve got to survive in Manhattan on a science writer’s salary. It would be nice to save the $6,000 for braces, if I could keep him off sugar and white flour. I still don’t understand how the sugar and flour can effect how the teeth actually grow in, but Price makes a compelling argument that they do.

INTERVIEWER There’s disagreement about that. Weston Price thinks it’s one thing. A professor in Illinois thinks it’s that that people who eat the urban diets have soft food, and the people who eat the rural diets have chewy food. The chewy food makes the kids’ jaws grow to be the right size.

TAUBES My problem with that is that he’s making the assumption that the addition of sugar and flour removes some significant portion of the baseline diet. It could be true, but again, it’s an extra assumption. Take the Inuits, for example: one of the things I did in the course of my research was try to refute this notion that cancer didn’t exist in the Inuits until the 1930s. So I tracked down whatever memoirs I could find from physicians working with the Inuits to see if any of them mentioned cancer prior to the 1930s. And one of the things I found fascinating was that at the turn of the early years of the 20th century, the Inuit were eating mostly their native diet. By the 1950s, they were eating tons of sugar and flour and drinking beer and other alcohol, and tuberculosis had decimated them, but they were still eating their baseline diet; it’s just that all these other things had been added on top. So they’re still eating seal and whale and caribou, but they’re also eating these Western foods. In general, it’s never a good idea to add that extra assumption until you absolutely have to — that something else critical changes with the addition of sugar and flour. Maybe it’s just the addition that’s the cause. That’s the one thing you know for sure that happened. This is Occam’s Razor. The key thing is that cavities are caused by the sugar and flour. The simplest hypothesis is that the orthodontal problems are too. It is possible that the sugar and flour affect growth hormones — insulin-like growth hormone, for instance — which could have local effects on how the teeth grow in. The sugar and flour could affect bacterial growth locally and that could have some effect. Either way, I find the evidence sufficiently compelling to wonder whether my son will grow up with nice teeth if he doesn’t eat a lot of sugar and candy and white flour.

INTERVIEWER Changing the subject slightly, you mentioned that the obesity center at Yale is run by psychologists. Did you ever ask Kelly Brownell how he reconciles his toxic environment view with the fact that many people in poor countries are fat?

TAUBES Not yet. I would like to lecture at Yale some day, and I’m hoping that I don’t have to invite myself. You know, I’m fairly confident that if I were to ask many of these people if they’d get me a lecture — call them and say I’d like to come and talk — they’d arrange it. They ‘re intellectually honest enough on that level. But again, it’s people like Kelly Brownell that I was thinking of when I was compiling that list of populations. And what boggles my mind is that people have been peddling this nonsense for 30 years, and they never bothered to look. They never bothered to do their research, to see if there was evidence that refuted their hypotheses. Again, this is what you do in science; you get a hypothesis, and you try to test it. So how would you test the hypothesis that prosperity causes obesity, or that our modern toxic environment, as defined by Brownell, is the cause. Let’s see if we can find examples of non-toxic populations, you know, poor populations without McDonald’s, without televisions, without remote controls, who are obviously physically active, at least by our standards. It’s funny, I was talking with Hellerstein at Berkeley. When I told him about the Pima and the Sioux Indians, and he said “Well, do they live on reservations?” Like, if they live on reservations, then that means they’re sedentary, at least relatively, compared to their previous lives, and so you can evoke sedentary behavior as the cause of their obesity. So now you have this idea that it’s not how sedentary you are, it’s how sedentary you are in comparison to how active you used to be. So like, Sioux Indians, who rode along the Great Plains and chased after Custer — they were so active that if they only have to move onto reservations and stop riding their horses all the time, they get obese. So it can actually be a detriment to be extremely active, because then being only mildly active causes obesity.

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INTERVIEWER When I started your book, I already kind of believed all of your main points. Not all of them, but I was sympathetic. I knew where it was going. I thought “Oh, good. More evidence. This is interesting, and that’s an interesting way to tell that story”.

TAUBES The way I see it is that the establishment has an immune system to protect itself from challenges. Every science needs that kind of immune system to protect itself from quacks and easy-to-swallow but erroneous ideas that might infect the good science in the field. My question is whether I can infect enough people, enough serious scientists, that I can pose a threat to this immune system, that I could compromise the immune system of the establishment and make them take this idea seriously. Because some times these immune systems work against challenges that are legitimate. I honestly don’t know if I can. It’s going to be an interesting year. I hope I don’t become one of those bitter old men who, when I fail to do so, who can’t let it go.

INTERVIEWER How did you end up giving your recent talk at Berkeley? Obviously someone in the establishment was willing to invite you?

TAUBES Yes. It was actually epidemiologists at the School of Public Health who invited me initially to talk about epidemiology after I had a cover story called “Unhealthy Science” in the New York Times. I told them that the subtext of that story was my book. If what I say in the book is correct, then an observational epidemiology has done an enormous amount of damage. One line that was taken out of the New York Times article said that this was a story about the risks and benefits of observational epidemiology. There are certainly some successes in that endeavor, but if we’re living through an obesity and diabetes epidemic because of its failures, then it’s conceivable that more people have died because of observational epidemiology than have been saved. You always have to look at the negatives, the false negatives and the false positives. You can’t just look at the true positives and say that this is a valuable field of science. We’re digressing again, but the game of poker is relevant here. Are you a poker player?

INTERVIEWER I’ve played a lot of poker, yeah.

TAUBES Bad poker players base their methodology, their strategy, only on what happens when they win. They don’t notice that that strategy is making them lose more money when they’re losing than they win when they’re winning. The best strategy, of course, minimizes the losses and maximizes the gains. But they don’t think like that; the wins are so seductive that that’s all they pay attention to. Anyway, getting back to the question, these Berkeley epidemiologists invited me to lecture on epidemiology; I said “let me talk about the book”; it gives me a chance to sit down and try to convince some unbiased observers, I hope, that their beliefs about calories-in/calories-out has to be questioned.

INTERVIEWER What effect do you think your lecture had?
TAUBES I don’t know actually. I don’t know how many of the people I was preaching to are already converted. I thought it went over well. I mean, I couldn’t believe that I had spoken for almost two hours and had 90% of the audience awake. There were a few people I lost (you know, you focus on the girl in the seventh row on the right, who’s asleep). But most people seemed pretty attentive. But when I say I’m trying to infect others with these beliefs, if I convinced even a few of the faculty Berkeley that these ideas have to be taken seriously I’ve made progress. OK, now I’ve got a little infection growing at Berkeley. Indeed, I asked one of the epidemiologists who invited me to e-mail, say, ten of his colleagues and say, “You should get Taubes to come lecture, because it’s fascinating, and you might think his book is a little dubious, but when you hear his lecture…”. So we’ll see if it has any effect or if they’ve found it compelling enough that they went through with it. I hope so.

INTERVIEWER I’m just surprised that they found your book dubious. I think they might disagree with your interpretation of the evidence, but I don’t think they would find the reporting dubious.

TAUBES I’ve got to get to the people who take this knee-jerk response that they know what I think, and they don’t have to read the book. For instance, I had lunch with a Berkeley obesity researcher that I’d interviewed five years ago. We spent a couple of hours together five years ago and I sent him a copy of the book when it came out.

INTERVIEWER Who is this?

TAUBES A guy named Marc Hellerstein. He’s a runner and, of course, he believes that sloth is the cause of overweight. He joined us for lunch on Wednesday, but he didn’t eat, and I had about 35 minutes to try and convince him to read the obesity section of the book. The way he sees it, he’s got a lot to do; he’s a busy man, doing all of these experiments, trying to get funding, what could he possibly learn from reading the book and it’s a big book? So I was basically sparring with him for 35 minutes trying to inflict enough damage that he might conclude that he might actually learn something about his own subject of expertise if he reads it. And he actually said “OK, OK, OK, I’m going to read it, I’m going to read it”. (If he does, I’d be surprised, because after the lecture I e-mailed him a few follow-up notes, and he never bothered to respond.) I believe his initial response is probably common among obesity researchers, and even if they’re tempted, they first have to wade through 200 pages on chronic disease that try to convince them that everything else they believed is wrong. The exceptions are those people like you, who already had reason to agree with me.