This is a fantastic talk by Gary Taubes. Taubes is a science journalist who started out pointing out bad science in physics, until some of his sciencey friends told him for the really juicy stuff he ought to go look at the science being done in public health. He’s been doing that ever since, and has written a couple of books on the subject. One of them, Good Calories, Bad Calories, is a 500-page treatise written to doctors, researchers and policy-makers, giving them a history of the bad science and governance that has gotten us to where we are. It’s essentially a very long and detailed way of saying “You’re very wrong,” which is obviously super happy-making with all of them. The other, Why We Get Fat, is more of a layman’s instruction manual. It’s a diet book for the thinking man, I guess.
Anyway, he also has a talk he gives wherein he explains this exact issue. Why do we get fat? Has the science of the past 30-40 years been as good as we think it is? Have we been mislead or misinformed by our government diet recommendations? What can we do about our obesity problem? Yeah, it’s awesome. So here it is. Enjoy!
