Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion (2018)
https://sci-hub.se/10.1001/jama.2018.0245
Taubes interview on Peter Attia's podcast is fascinating. He starts by laying out his career in journalism bringing light to scientific malpractice and otherwise very sharp minds totally deluding themselves when they get stuck on a pet hypothesis. The second half of the podcast was about his later career where he took on sugar. He then illustrates all of the self delusion and poor scientific thinking he had just described. It's kind of amazing.
Can you point to specific instances of self-delusion and poor scientific thinking?
The goalpost for these accusations, as far as I'm concerned, is that you would need to show a pattern of ignoring contradicting evidence, which -- it should be noted -- is distinct from arguing that there are fundamental flaws in studies that prima facie invalidate his theory. In the latter case, it's just scholarly disagreement.
It's late at night, and I'm not sure how to write this comment without it sounding like a loaded question, so please accept my assurances that it is not. It's been a while since I've read Taubes, and while the sugar/obesity debate is hardly settled, my impression was not one of delusion, nor of poor scientific reasoning. Certainly, it was a cut above the average quality of nutritional science research (though this is admittedly a very low bar).
My comment was not just with regards to the facts of the subject but the way of thinking epistemologically about hypotheses in science, because he literally spends the first hour talking about how brilliant physicists could get it so wrong in their thought process toward science. He calls it pathological science. Peter even comments on it (listen starting around 2:08 but I think might be closer to 2:12), right after Taubes says there is absolutely no way to reconcile the standard model with his hormone regulation hypothesis and that it isn't even wrong, he says that 99.9% of the time someone says that they are a quack.
Not long after, he says the problem with pathological science is they establish what they are seeing based on premature data, go public, and then dig in their heels at that point — he's saying it about an adversary but could easily be said about himself. Its like he's almost self aware, but he's so sure of his view that his framework for understanding bad science doesn't apply to him.
I think there's a bit of a motte and bailey that happens with Taubes proponency, where one can say there is this underappreciated role of insulin in obesity, vs the hard line he takes which is the standard energy balance model is "not even wrong", i.e., absolutely no role for a caloric surplus outside of his framework. So sure, demonstrating that a keto diet can be a game changer for a type 2 diabetic is great and Taubes has a hand bringing that to the mainstream. But that doesn't also affirm his hard, and hard to believe stance on the topic. I think what I mean is clear if you listen to the conversation about Doritos starting around 2:16, where Taubes suggests there is no hyperphasia without near-instant hormonal disregulation from adipose tissue in response to a dorito entering the mouth, and it has nothing to do with the team of food scientists that make sure they are additively delicious. Taubes could be 50-90% correct in his hypotheses, but he takes it beyond that point to the absurd and further that there is no reconciling his beliefs with competing hypotheses.
I hate to be the 'just listen to the 200 minute podcast' guy, but it really is fascinating in the juxtaposition I mentioned and I'd be keen to know how much you agree or think I am off base if you did give it a listen.
Ok, I suppose I agree, at least with your motte and bailey analysis.
As for the first part, concerning "pathological" science, I'm less sure to the extent that one can reasonably (at least in theory) hold the following position: "the evidence that contradicts my model all suffers from the same methodological flaw, and that explains why they get the results that they get". It's true that this type of argumentation tends to cluster around an individual researcher and his groupies, which might raise some red flags, but isn't fallacious in and of itself.
Whether or not that's what Taubes is actually doing is something of a judgement call, and I think I'm concluding a bit differently than you here, which is okay. :)
> "the evidence that contradicts my model all suffers from the same methodological flaw, and that explains why they get the results that they get"
Note that Taubes says this constantly about a wide range of evidence that contradicts his model, including studies like the one lead by Hill that were funded by NuSI and personally signed off on by Taubes himself.
I wanted to get a dose of his recent thinking outside of that podcast and this article and just listened to Joe Rogan pod #1267 (2019) when driving the past couple days, it is a debate with Taubes and Guyunet, a neurologist and former Taubesian that Taubes criticised on a former podcast and comes back. Again hate to be the 'listen to a 3 hour podcast' guy but it was really interesting and a better format for this subject than essays or back-and-forth in blog posts where people tend to talk past each other- transcript is available on Spotify so probably can find it elsewhere as well.
It affects my relatives when everything they can buy has all the fiber stripped out, and is pre-loaded with sugar. I stay away from it, but my kids have less ability to stay clear. All the media they encounter primes them to believe that sugar is normal to expect in everything. They have no resistance.
My mother-in-law just died of cancer in October. Her heavy sugar habit must have contributed to how fast it spread. In the hospital, the meals they provided were all loaded with sugar and stripped of fiber and fat. So, it affects us all, xbecause the full industrial might of the modern world is turned to pushing sugar on the population.
It probably does because they'll need to go to doctors regularly, and that could be taking away budget that could be used for your health insurance down the road. But who knows, not an expert.
As for your Covid worries, isn't it already established that Omicron is more contagious but with much milder symptoms? Or is that still unconfirmed? Not trying to start a flame war here but it's fairly obvious at this point that barring imprisoning everyone in their homes, Covid contraction still happens quite a lot out there. We can't seem to stop it, only reduce the rate at which it happens.
Obesity is a major risk factor for severe COVID, and hence transmission and hospital occupation. Like the supposed factors that we are segregating the unvaccinated for.
In our observational cohort study of the exhaled breath particles of 194 healthy human subjects, and in our experimental infection study of eight nonhuman primates infected, by aerosol, with SARS-CoV-2, we found that exhaled aerosol particles vary between subjects by three orders of magnitude, with exhaled respiratory droplet number increasing with degree of COVID-19 infection and elevated BMI-years.
This is very sketchy.
The guy came in with an agenda.
He wrote the book first, then raised money to do the research to prove his hypothesis and finally failed to do so.
Now apparently they're shutting down and we are non the wiser.
All these studies can be explained by the long known effect that changing diets makes you use more energy temporarily.
There might also be some truth to the old story that reducing your calories is easier when eating salad and chicken than when eating cake and ice cream.
> But the subjects all lost weight even before they cut out carbs. Taubes contended that was because the standard diet didn’t have enough refined sugary beverages to depict average American consumption.
nutrition science is really hard, in part because different people react to foods differently.
The general advice is: eat mostly whole foods, not too much, exercise sleep and avoid stress. After that, it’s really up to you to find what foods make you feel better and more satisfied (and of course taste better)
>nutrition science is really hard, in part because different people react to foods differently.
Nutrition science is really hard because people LIE, and all western run studies use self reporting. 'My 600-lb Life' is all you need to know about self reporting.
2 and 3 are mostly self-explanatory. 1 is to differentiate between food (things you make yourself or ones with a small number of pronuncible ingredients) from the rest, the vaguely edible processed food-like substances that aren't often good for you.
Energy expenditure and body composition changes after an isocaloric ketogenic diet in overweight and obese men (2016) https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/104/2/324/4564649
Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial (2018) https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4583
Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion (2018) https://sci-hub.se/10.1001/jama.2018.0245
Effect of a Low Free Sugar Diet vs Usual Diet on Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Adolescent Boys (2019) https://sci-hub.se/10.1001/jama.2018.20579
Dietary sugar restriction reduces hepatic de novo lipogenesis in adolescent boys with fatty liver disease (2021) https://www.jci.org/articles/view/150996