Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes (April 30, 1956 — ) is a journalist and author known for his investigations of a number of controversial issues in science. His articles have appeared in publications such as Science, Discover, and The New York Times among others. He wrote the books Nobel Dreams (1987) about the pursuit of a Nobel Prize in the field of particle physics, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993) which deals with the controversy surrounding an infamous claim of a success in cold fusion, and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), which is titled The Diet Delusion in the United Kingdom, and Why We Get Fat (2011) that question the medical establishment's dietary advice and the science behind it. He is the three time winner of the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers and a recipient of an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97.

Originally from Rochester, New York, he attended Harvard University studying applied physics and then aerospace engineering at Stanford (MS, 1978).  He received a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981. His early work mainly dealt with scientific issues in physics but have shifted into medicine and nutrition.

He has become a well-known critic of the science justifying low-fat diets and the warnings attached to salt and fat intake arguing the largely epidemiological evidence they are based on is weak.  He is also a proponent of low-carbohydrate diets and is skeptical of the rationale that how much one eats—that a calorie is a calorie—is the sole determinant of weight in the dieting process and puts forth the alternative hypothesis that weight is also modulated by insulin sensitivity so that what one eats, whether carbohydrate or fat, is an important factor.

Sources

• Interview – Gary Taubes. (April 8, 2004). Frontline.
• Not All Calories Are Created Equal, Author Says. (November 2, 2007). NPR.
• Taubes, Gary. (1998). The (Political) Science of Salt. Science 281: 898-907.
• Taubes, Gary. (2001). The Soft Science of Dietary Fat. Science. 291: 2536-2545.
• Taubes, Gary. (July 7, 2002). What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? The New York Times Magazine.
• Taubes, Gary. (September 16, 2007). Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? The New York Times.
• Taubes, Gary. (September 27, 2007). The Scientist and the Stairmaster. New York.
• Taubes, Gary. (February 2011). Is This Any Way to Lose Weight? Reader's Digest.
• Taubes, Gary. (April 5, 2012). Chocolate & Red Meat Can Be Bad for Your Science: Why Many Nutrition Studies Are All Wrong. Discover Magazine. 
• Taubes, Gary. (May 7, 2012). Why the Campaign to Stop America's Obesity Crisis Keeps Failing. Newsweek.
• Taubes, Gary. (June 2, 2012). Salt, We Misjudged You. The New York Times. 
• Taubes, Gary. (June 30, 2012). What Really Makes Us Fat. The New York Times.

Links

• Gary Taubes's website
• Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) website