Peter Attia MD167 - Gary Taubes: Bad science and challenging the conventional wisdom of obesity
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,293 words- 0:00 – 0:10
Intro
- PAPeter Attia
[upbeat music] Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. [upbeat music] Hey,
- 0:10 – 8:27
Gary’s background in science and journalism, and developing a healthy skepticism for science;
- PAPeter Attia
Gary. How you doing?
- GTGary Taubes
I'm good, Peter. How are you?
- PAPeter Attia
I'm, I'm good as well. I feel like it's been, uh, a very long time. I don't know the last time I actually saw you. I, I don't know. It's been how many years?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, probably three or four. San Francisco, we... Virta offices.
- PAPeter Attia
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, God, that's maybe four or five years ago now. Who knows?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. We were certainly younger.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs] Speak for yourself. Come on. Um...
- GTGary Taubes
Oh yeah, that's true [laughs] . You may be aging the other way, I forget. We're in this sort of...
- PAPeter Attia
So, um, look, uh, there's so much to talk about, but I, um, I wanna kinda start with some of the stuff that probably a lot of people forget about you, which is, uh, long before you were writing about nutrition, you were writing about other disciplines of science. And, um, I'm kinda just curious how you got interested in this whole thing. So, uh, remind me what you studied in college. You, you went to Harvard, and did you study physics? Was that your undergrad?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, yeah, I was a physics major. Um, actually started off as, an, as astrophysics major, and then, uh, got a C minus in quantum physics, and my advisor suggested I ch-change my, um, [lips smack] major. So we switched to applied physics, and I spent my senior year taking writing courses for the most part. But yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
What, what drew you to physics in the first place? Were you a good student in high school?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, yeah. Well, you gotta be a good student in high school to get into Harvard. I ju- I t- read science fiction books growing up. This was the '60s. You know, we all wanted to be astronauts. Now our kids wanna 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 [clears throat] very smart and, uh, was studying physics, and I was competing with him. And, uh, so that's what I did. Problem is, my brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept of, uh... Was it a shor- uh, not, uh, a Hamiltonian was, uh, beyond my ability to comprehend, so that was the end of that.
- PAPeter Attia
So the whole time you're studying physics, you're thinking, um, "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.
- GTGary Taubes
I did, and I was still thinking astronaut, weirdly enough. Um, and, uh, at Stanford, I actually lived with a few naval pilots, and, uh, in the same housing, you know, apartment building. And I realized, one, that there really wasn't any need for a 6'2", 220-pound astronaut when you could send up a 5'9", 150-pound astronaut who was in better shape and, uh, more fuel efficient, and, uh, B, that I wouldn't su-survive very well in a, any kind of military hierarchy that required, uh, a kind of blind acknowledgement to, uh, superiors. So that was the end of that. I then went into, uh... Started aiming towards journalism from there.
- PAPeter Attia
Where did that, uh... Where was that seed planted of sort of, uh, call it insatiable skepticism and a refusal to kind of bend to authority?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, [exhales sharply] now you're asking me to, uh, psychoanalyze myself. Um, uh, on one level, I once had a, uh, a editor at Discover Magazine who asked me sarcastically or facetiously whether my brother was as, quote, "well-adjusted" as I was, and my response was, "I didn't have to grow up in his shadow." Uh, you know, it's interesting. I have a, a... Well and my youngest son now is 12 years old, and he's, uh, basketball obsessed, and he plays with the local AAU basketball team. And you notice that, um, I noticed that the best players are the ones who have older brothers who play. They're the scrappiest or the toughest. They refuse to give up a rebound. And I think because they've been playing with their older brothers their whole life, they, um... I mean, the ones that, that can compete quit and go into another sport, and the ones that can become... sort of refuse to give in. And so on some level, that probably started my skepticism. But then when I was s- you know... So I, I go to journalism school. I get-- I wanna be an investigative journalist. I had read All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein. I was fascinated by it. Um, uh, the only job I could get out of journalism school was, uh, well, I had two semi offers. One was at the Dallas Morning News in, in 1979. I wasn't willing to move to Dallas. And, uh, the other was at, uh, CNN in Atlanta, where they didn't allow cigarette smoking in the newsroom, and I was a smoker. So I stayed in New York and took a job with Discover Magazine. And, uh, three or four years in, I did... maybe two or three years in, I did a piece, uh, reported an article on, um, the Shroud of Turin. Do you remember that?
- PAPeter Attia
Of course. I don't remember the piece actually, but I, I know what the shroud is.
- GTGary Taubes
So at the time, researchers from Los Alamos were taking this high-tech imaging equipment to Turin to study the shroud, and they had concluded... So this is, uh, supposedly, uh, the burial shroud of Christ that it appeared in, uh, if I'm remembering this from 40 years ago, it appeared in, in, uh, uh, the, the historical record right around the 11th or 12th century, right when a, there's a big market in sort of fake religious, uh, artifacts. So there's a- Uh, strong prior belief that this is a fake religious artifact, but the Los Alamos researchers take their high-tech imaging equipment to, Turin and they say, and they get permission from the church to do it, and they say that they can't, uh, they can't understand how this was made, even though it's also been carbon dated to the 11th and 12th century. And, uh, I remember a, a Sunday evening, I was living in my, um, studio apartment in New York. I was reading their reports, um, that they had published, and I forget what it was that struck me as profoundly unsupported by the data, but I actually called the researcher in Los Alamos at home to say, "How could you possibly interpret this from what you did?" And it was just the sort of [clears throat] step one in realizing, and maybe 'cause I had gone to Harvard and I'd gone to Stanford and I knew a lot of people who went into science personally, there's nothing fundamentally different about somebody who goes into science and somebody who goes into journalism other than we have sort of different mechanisms of wanting to understand what truth is. So, and then when I w- I did my first book, which-
- PAPeter Attia
What was his response?
- GTGary Taubes
I don't remember. I don't remember. But if he-- He certainly didn't, wasn't able to satisfactorily defend the interpretation. It was also an interesting conclusion about the inter- observation about negative results, which comes up all the time. When somebody gets a negative result, when they're unable to determine how the shroud was created, does that mean that the shroud was created by supernatural means that are beyond the ability of the equipment to detect, or does it mean that the equipment that they used are simply inadequate for doing the job? And in effect, you know, almost 40 years later, we're having the same debate online this week about, you know, the cause of obesity. Are you doing the right experiments? Have you refuted the hypothesis, or are the experiments flawed? And that's, that's always a, a fundamental issue in science.
- 8:27 – 18:55
Gary’s boxing experience, and the challenge of appreciating behavioral risk;
- PAPeter Attia
Let me ask you a question sort of tangential. Um, did y- did you know the harm of cigarette smoking when you were a smoker?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, [chuckles] it's a good question. My mother died of lung cancer, and she was a smoker, but that was about 10 years after I started. Uh, you know, it's interesting. So I started smoking in 1978 when I went out to Stanford for graduate school, and, um, I was depressed, and, uh-
- PAPeter Attia
The sunshine in Palo Alto wasn't helping you?
- GTGary Taubes
[exhales]
- PAPeter Attia
You miss those dark Boston-
- GTGary Taubes
No, oddly, I never-
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles] ... winters?
- GTGary Taubes
You know, I, it's inter- I mean, this is getting deeply into my, uh, psychopathology here, but, um, uh, yeah, I have, uh, I've suffered mild depressions my whole life, as you know, and that's been a, a... Uh, so when I went out to you, you go from, uh, you know, Harvard where I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a, I play football, I'm well-liked, I, I, you know, built a sort of four-year career at the school. You think of yourself in a particular way, and then you go someplace completely new where nobody knows you, and, uh, yeah, I didn't handle that well. So, um, I started smoking to, I don't know, maybe to spite the kids-
- PAPeter Attia
Hmm
- GTGary Taubes
... who seemed so happy and complacent in the Stanford sunshine when I was definitely not happy and complacent, and then it took me 20 years to quit. Um, so, uh, but they... You know, I don't know if children-- and we discussed this when we were doing Newsy. I don't know if kids ever think in terms of the things they do being dangerous. We both did some very dangerous things when we were younger. We were both boxers.
- PAPeter Attia
Although I, I, I, uh, this sounds really dumb, and, and I, I wanna actually talk about your boxing history because the article you wrote in Playboy is such a, a great one. But, um, I don't know if I ever told you this story, but the entire time I was boxing, I never thought it was dangerous. I had this true mental block that was, "I don't get hit, so it's, I'm, it's not dangerous." Like, nothing's happening to me. You know, I'm, I'm evading and I'm hitting and da, da, da, da, da. Which of course was categorically untrue because my style of boxing was actually to get hit, tire out opponents, and eventually overcome them due to superior conditioning.
- GTGary Taubes
[chuckles]
- PAPeter Attia
But it never seemed to hurt, and it wasn't until I suffered a very, very severe concussion when I was 20, um, in this-- I still remember it very well. I was actually hospitalized for two days, had a CT scan, had significant bruising, um, had, had s- had significant cerebral contusions, and had a headache that lasted for three months. I mean, it, this was a real... This was the hardest I've ever had my bell rung. And it was only at that point that I thought, "Oh my God, you actually get hit in this sport."
- GTGary Taubes
[chuckles]
- PAPeter Attia
And by that point, I'd already decided I didn't wanna be a professional boxer. That was the irony of it, is I was already in college, and I was now only boxing as, you know, something fun to do. But it literally took that event for me to go, "This sport is crazy." And from that point on-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, but let me... So I-
- PAPeter Attia
... I, you know, I always l- I always look at it very differently. But while I was doing it, I never thought that
- GTGary Taubes
But I, I, I only got into it competitively after my best friend got killed boxing.
- PAPeter Attia
So say more about that.
- GTGary Taubes
Okay. Yeah. Well, so, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things. So I was a football player in high school and college, and when you're a football player in high school and college, you know, back then getting your bell rung was not... You know, it just was what it was. I mean, I clearly had at least one concussion in high school football. Um, [lip smacks] My best friend in college, who was actually a lot of kids' best friend, a very charming, uh, you know, wonderful young man of Puerto Rican descent from New York, was an amateur boxer in New York, went back to boxing after his football career came to an end due to knee injuries and got our senior year. He had his first fight and he got killed in the ring. He was knocked out. His head hit the mat. Um, we were in Lowell, Massachusetts watching the fight at the time and, uh, you know, he never woke up. Uh, they, my memory is of them unplugging him a week later. It did not stop me from then moving to New York when school was over. Actually three years later and when I got to New York starting to box because I was bored. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
Did you think about him?
- GTGary Taubes
When I did it, uh, yeah, sure. But I never thought that what happened to him could happen to me until I got knocked out in my, in the Golden Gloves, at which point there's this awareness when you get knocked unconscious, when you wake up that there, you, there may have... Some people never wake up from that, that that might have been the moment at which your candle was blown out in effect and there's no relighting it. Um, but it's, it's, you know, talking about this is interesting because we, you know, a lot of what we do in life and talk about when you're talking about prevention of, of chronic illnesses and prevention of disease and, and prevention of, you know, addiction, it's getting, uh, young men and, and women who don't think and, and don't process risk the same way we do as we get older. I always thought it was fascinating that the older we get and there's the, the less life we have less to live, the more risk adverse we become. Where you're, you know, if something bad happens, you're actually losing less of your life than you are when you're younger. And I'm sure that, you know, behavioral psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky could say things or do say things about that.
- PAPeter Attia
Tell me about the Playboy article that you wrote after that, uh, Golden Gloves tournament. I know you still have a, at least the, the last time I was at your house, which may have been eight years ago, you actually had a framed photo of you lying prostrate in the ring.
- GTGary Taubes
You know, I still do. And it's in, it's in our coat entryway. I often thought of, you know, putting it up here instead of this picture because I refer to it as my hubris protection. Um, so while I was working at Discover Magazine and I was boxing, um, so this was 1983, '84. I, uh-
- PAPeter Attia
By the way, not too long after Duk Koo Kim was killed by Ray Mancini. I mean, the early '80s was a very difficult period in boxing. There were a number of high-profile deaths in the ring.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, no, he was, he was... Yeah, he was killed while I was boxing and we actually did a story on it at Discover about what happens to the brain. Um, I was, uh, I remember there was a, uh, a good friend of mine, a New York Times reporter now named Denise Grady was writing that story. And while I was, you know, boxing and getting ready to box in the Golden Gloves and she would come and then slip like, you know, articles under my door about, uh, damn, uh, whatever we were calling, um, the traumatic event back then. Um, yeah, I was just a young man. It was, I was box- I had a friend, a good friend who was, uh, Norman Mailer's nephew. And then Norman Mailer had a group of, uh, young men, not even that young, who met at a gym that's no longer there on 14th Street in Manhattan back when that was a very, um, uh, questionable part of town. And we would go down, I think it was every Saturday morning and we would, uh, we would box for a few hours and then we would go out to lunch. And, uh, yeah, from that I got the idea, why don't I write, uh, box in the Golden Gloves and write about it? So I originally was doing it for Sports Illustrated, but then I realized that I was technically too old to do it, that I missed the cutoff by about two or three months and that if I wanted to box I would have to, um, uh, let's say, uh, revise my birth certificate. And so when I realized that I talked to the editors at Sports Illustrated and I said, "You folks, you do investigative journalism." We were in the same building, Discover and Sports Illustrated were both owned by Time Incorporated at the time. And, uh, so I told the editors, "You're, you do, you know, uh, hard-hitting investigative journalism. Uh, and you know, if I wanna continue to do this article I'm gonna have to fake my age and I think that's a problem." The editor said, "Well, it is now that you told us." Um, so, uh, we pulled it from Sports Illustrated and one of the editors I worked with had a good friend at Playboy so I pitched it to Playboy and my sister-in-law got angry at me for writing for a magazine that, um, uh, doesn't portray women in the most ideal light or depending on how you look at it. And she had a point, but I said some of the best writers in America write for Playboy and, uh, maybe later I'll have the, you know, the, the platform by which I can be too good for this approach. Anyway, we did it. I won my first fight against a, a policeman from Staten Island who beat the crap out of me in the first round and then I realized that if I punched back, um, that might help and I knocked him out in the second round and then, uh, second fight was a week later and, uh, I got knocked out in I think a minute and 37 seconds by the fellow who ended up winning our division, who was not particularly good but I had never really had enough time to work on defense. You had been boxing for many years competitively. I, I had been doing this for about four months at any level other than a Saturday morning hobby. So, um, but it was a reminder that anytime I think I'm... You know, we all, some of us grow up with this kind of James Bond complex. You know, I think it's fair to say between the watches and the fast cars and the archery and things like that, you might have it also that we think we're so cool we can do anything, and that was r- my reminder that I'm certainly not, um, and that there are things I should stay away from if I wanna have a long and healthy life, among them being boxing, and I haven't gone back into-- I never went back into the ring after that.
- 18:55 – 29:53
How Gary developed his writing skills, and what the best science writers do well;
- PAPeter Attia
What's the process like of learning to write? I, um, I was rereading an article, uh, yesterday that you had, had recently written and, uh, uh, don't, don't, don't get too c- don't get too flattered by this, but I forgot how well you write. You know, one of the, one of the things that... I think I write reasonably well. I've learned to write better over the years, and I think a lot of that came from how often I used to write and how often you used to rip what I used to write apart. [lip smack] You know, back when we were at Newsea, I was doing so much of the writing and you were doing so much of the editing and revising of, of internal stuff that I would write. And that process, of course, I think made me much better, and I can now see it when I look at the writing of other people. But, but, you know, your writing today I think is, is, is really excellent. At least it's a style that I find really good, right? You can write about science in a way that's, that's very readable. Um, how does one learn that craft? When you show up at Columbia, which ostensibly is the best journalism school in the country, I assume you're coming in incredibly raw. Did, did you believe you had some talent, some hidden talent for, for, for writing, or is that not even a part of what they're selecting at a top journalism school? Is it more the thought process they're selecting for and the writing is the easy thing to teach on top?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, I thought I could write because, um, [lip smack] I used to write letters to friends and girlfriends that I thought were clever and they liked. [chuckles] So there was always this sense that somewhere inside me I was a writer. Um, when I first started taking writing classes, it was actually at night school, uh, at Harvard. Um, after I got out of, uh-- After I got my master's degree from Stanford, I went back to Boston and, uh, I don't even remember what I was doing for a living. But, uh, over the course of a, a semester, I took two writing courses, one taught by a, a science writer from the Boston Herald, who I later worked with at Discover Magazine, and one taught by a fiction editor from The Atlantic named Michael Curtis, who had, uh, been a roommate of Thomas Pynchon and Dick Farina at Cornell in the early 1960s, and was a, a, a f- already a famous fiction editor at The Atlantic. And the very first article I, I wrote for him, could probably remember the subject if I had to, but what I do remember is it came back with the words "puerile" written in one-inch-high letters on the front, underlined twice, and I had to look up puerile, which meant basically, uh, childish and amateurish and thoughtless. And, uh, over the course of a semester, Michael Curtis started to hammer me into, uh, being a functional writer by constant and relentless criticism of what I did, and I appreciate it. In fact, the Boston Herald science editor was so nice. He would read people's work, and he believed you should never say anything negative about their work, and I gained absolutely nothing from being in his class. And I, I-- He was a lovely man, but I don't think anyone else did either, except maybe, you know, a, a unjustified sense of their own talent. Um, Curtis hammered into me. And then when I got to journalism school, it was just about basically teaching you to w- write and report. Um, and so it's a steady learning process. And then as a journalist, when I started at Discover, I started as a reporter. So Time Inc. back then had reporters who did the information gathering, and then we would write files, and the files would be given to the writers, and the writers were-- They were true craftsmen. And, uh, I started off, I don't know, the first story I remember doing was about some type of, uh, particle accelerator at Michigan State. And, uh, I had the writers there probably, you know, friends who were writers would read this draft and then hammer, you know, just relentlessly critique it until I ended up with something that was worth submitting to the editors, and then the editors would do the same thing before it would be published. And as I became a writer and got older, I did that same thing for other reporters who came in under me, and there are, you know, s- a few very well-respected journalists who I think benefited from me being relentlessly critical. And then the actual process of writing is just... You know, I told you this years ago, Calvin Trillin, the famous New Yorker writer, had a phrase. He called the first draft the vomit out, where you just get everything down on paper, and it kind of relieves the pressure of a first draft. So you get everything down on paper or the computer, and then you just keep rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it until it reads like something I would have wanted to read if it hadn't been written by me. And because I read a lot and I read a lot of, you know, uh, very talented authors, I know what good writing looks like and feels like, and then you just continue to revise and edit until it gets there. It's-
- PAPeter Attia
Who's the best living science writer, in your opinion?
- GTGary Taubes
Oh, best living science writer, in my opinion. Um, I don't think I could answer that question. There are a lot of people who have a lot of different skills. It's like saying who's the best living football player or the best... My 12-year-old is always asking me who I think the five best basketball players, you know, is, is... Was Wilt Chamberlain better than Steph Curry? Well, they were different, [chuckles] right? Um, there are science journalists, uh, geez, there's a young man at The Atlantic now whose name I'm, uh, going to forget, Henry somebody, who writes a thoughtful, well-reported article on a different subject every three or four days. [lip smack] And I often read his stuff and I think, "Could I have done that when I was his age and, you know, worked 70, 80 hours a week?" Um, possibly, but I don't think so, and I don't think I could have done it as well. When I was growing up, uh, the best out there was Jim Glick, uh, who wrote, remember Chaos?
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- GTGary Taubes
And, uh, the Feynman biography, the name of which I forget at the moment. Um, there were a whole series of science journa- whole, you know, collection of science journalists who came of age in the 1980s when science magazines had first started. Um, there was a magazine called Science, well, it was Science 80, then it was Science 81, Science 82. There was Discover. Um, some of those like, uh, s- Charles Mann and Steve Hall, um-
- PAPeter Attia
Chaos in the Blood
- GTGary Taubes
... John Tierney. Chaos in the Blood, yeah. Um, just exquisitely beautiful, thoughtful writers. In fact, I can't-- [chuckles] I, Charles Mann, I, I, I, he's a friend and Steve's a friend and I think I call... Charles goes by Cam, and I can't read Cam's books because they're so painfully-- the writing is so painfully beautiful that I feel inadequate when I read them. It's very difficult. Um, and, uh, the same goes for Steve. I think what they do, they do much better than I do. But they're now the older, you know, we're now the senior figures in the field. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
What is it about their work, though? What-- I mean, you once told me that great science writing isn't really about the science. Um, what is it about Steve, for example, that, that, that you read and think he's doing that so well?
- GTGary Taubes
It just, it, it's a combination of, of... So reporting, um, you know, comprehensive, rigorous reporting so you know you have the story, although you can never really judge if somebody else has a story right unless they're writing about your field. Um, the, you know, the prose style, the, you know, the, the ability to tell a story around a complicated subject. Yeah, I was gonna say, I just read The Ghost Map by Steven Levy. Have you ever read that?
- PAPeter Attia
No.
- GTGary Taubes
It's a extraordinary book. I almost... I, you know, I hope that's the best book he ever wrote, because if he's written better books, then [chuckles] I'm in the wrong field, and I know many people say that anyway. But, um, the, uh, you know, on one level, just the prose. So the ability to, to, to, to write a sentence and a paragraph that other people wanna read, but then the story that you tell and the digressions to the story and keeping it always interesting and making it both bigger than it-- other people might see and yet simultaneously, um, you know, getting the details of the lives and the times and, uh... You know, it's a, uh, it's an enti-- I mean, I'm sure every genre has its own challenges, but science has this challenge that you're inherently writing about a subject that's very, you know, complex. It's hard for even the people who, who-- the scientists themselves to wrap their heads around. So, um, I'm still gonna have to think about who the best science-- who I think the best science writer is today, if there is one. Um, and there's so many out there today. The question you always ask is what books out there, like The Ghost Map, um, uh... And again, on one level, it's about the, you know, the John Snow and the cholera epidemic in England in whatever, 1864, um, in London, and how John Snow and his compatriots figured out that this was, cholera was not bad air, but, um, uh, you know, a, a infectious agent in the water supply. But then it's, it's about the birth of modern cities, about urbanization, about the problems of, of-- that cities faced coming together, about cities into the future. Um, a-as, and then fundamentally about, you know, what it-- the, the scientific process, the, the challenge of an outsider doing science, which might be one reason why it, it resonated so much with me. The, uh... You know, it's, it-- you take, you start with a small story and you turn it into something, you know, uh, large and intricate and meaningful. Um, extraordinary book.
- 29:53 – 43:22
Example of how science can go wrong, and the story behind Gary’s first book, Nobel Dreams;
- PAPeter Attia
So at, at what point during your, your time at Discover did you become interested with the subject matter that would eventually become your first book?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, I did a, uh, I did an article for, uh... So I, I was, you know, my background was in physics, so it was natural for me to write about physics and, uh, this, uh, Harvard physicist named Carlo Rubbia working at the, uh, European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Geneva, had, uh, his, uh, research collaboration of 150 people, uh, physicists known as UA1 had, uh- discovered two fundamental particles that were sort of the two of the three last remaining, well, two of the four last remaining particles of the standard model of physics. So physics, you know, the, the, uh, electricity and magnetism had been united with the weak force, the electroweak theory, and that was a great, uh, step forward in the 1960s and '70s. And by 1973, that theory had mostly been confirmed, and it predicted the existence of two particles that, uh, transmit or f- car- particles that carry the electroweak force. This was the W and Z boson. And Rubbia's group, uh, Rubbia, who was this, uh, very controversial physicist who taught at Harvard, had convinced the Europe to, in effect, spend the money to build an accelerator that could-- had the power to detect the W and Z particles. And, um, when they announced the discovery, we did an article on it at, at, uh, Discover. I forget who... I must have written that. Um, but then Discover was part of Time Magazine, and Time has their Man of the Year cover, right? So Discover had this concept of the Scientist of the Year. And because of this great discovery, and everyone knew that Rubbia was gonna get the Nobel Prize for it, uh, Discover made Rubbia the Scientist of the Year. So I get to fly to Geneva. Actually, I flew to Belgium, rented a BMW, drove through Paris, went to Geneva. Um, the, uh, life was-- Time had a very good expense account back then.
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, my life has been downhill ever since. The, uh... Anyway, I spent time with Rubbia in Geneva. I interviewed his friends. I wrote him up as a profile for the Scientist of the Year. Uh, Time Inc. flew him to New York at the Explorers Club. He was given, uh, the award.
- PAPeter Attia
And this was before Stockholm or after Stockholm?
- GTGary Taubes
This was before Stockholm.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
Um, and-
- PAPeter Attia
'Cause he, he was awarded the Nobel Prize what? In, like, it's always the fall, so was it the fall of '84?
- GTGary Taubes
It's '85, yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
It was '85, okay.
- GTGary Taubes
'85, yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
And the d- the, the publish- they published the, the two bosons in, like, January or February of '83. Is that, is that right, or was it earlier, '82?
- GTGary Taubes
'83 or '84.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
Must have been... Yeah, '83 or probably '83.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
So yeah, that would've been right. Okay. So anyway, the point is, uh, not only does Rubbia get this award, he gets a nice gold Rolex from the Explorers Club. [chuckles] So he's very grateful to Gary Taubes for he thinks somehow- and I m- probably was the one who suggested him for Scientist of the Year. So that April, which would be April of '84, he comes to Washington. There's an American f- uh, uh, Institute of Physics. Uh, the, the big physics meeting every year is in Washington, and, and Rubbia gives a presentation announcing that he's now on to the next step, which is physics beyond the standard model. And he shows what they've got, and he shows a few events, and we could talk about that. And, uh, the message is that all he has-- It's the biggest discovery in physics in 40 years, and all he has to do is turn on the accelerator, which will happen that autumn, and gather more data and nail it down, and it's Nobel Prize number two. And so I was at that talk, so I came up to him afterwards and I said, "Look, it's, you know, this is terrifically exciting, and it's rare that anyone predicts a great discovery in advance, so can I write a book about this? Can I-- Maybe I can come to CERN, live with you guys, and document this as it happens." And Rubbia liked me. He thought of me as his personal scribe, so he said yes. And I put together, uh... Well, first I put together a proposal for The Atlantic that they, um, rejected because Charles Mann and, uh, his co-author at the time, Bob Crease, had just put their own proposal in to do a piece on high energy physics. So when I was always following behind Mann and Crease, um, sure, if you're gonna follow behind two writers, those are two very good writers to lose out to. Anyway, so I pitched it as a, as a book deal instead. Uh, actually, I was approached by a publisher who was publishing a book by Shelly Glashow, who's a Nobel laureate at Harvard, who I knew, and they had asked Shelly who the good science writers were, and Shelly said, "You could-- You should get Taubes. He's probably the best." So they approached me. I had this proposal from The Atlantic that they rejected. I sent it to the publisher, and they said they'd be willing to pay me to do the book. So I, uh, left Discover Magazine and flew to Geneva and got a room at the hostel in the lab, and was-- Today we'd say I was embedded with the physicists for the next nine months, and, uh, 10 months. Nine. And thought I was gonna write about a great discovery, and pretty quickly realized that this was far less compelling, the evidence were far less compelling than Rubbia had claimed in Washington, and that there was a very good story here, and it was probably not the story of a great discovery. And, uh, that was... You know, when you ask sort of what informed my approach to science and science journalism, that was a learning experience because-- So there's 150 physicists on the experiment. There's numerous technicians. There's a group of physicists who-- Or should I-- Let's back up. Should I describe what they're doing?
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah. I think it's-- I think for most people, a particle collider is a very complicated, counterintuitive-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... process. We're talking about subatomic particles. I don't think most people can comprehend-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... the scope of what, how rich the data are and what you're looking for, what type of a needle in how big a haystack.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. So the gist of it is you've got, uh, well, an atom smasher, part of a collider. So you're colliding subatomic particles together at speeds as close as you can get them to the speed of light to create the, the faster the particles go, the greater the energy in the collisions, and then you're looking in the collisions for the signs for particles that might be made that your theory of physics, the standard model, does not predict. So in that sense, you're testing the standard model, and as the accelerators are able to put more and more energy into these, uh, collisions, you're able to test your predictions of the standard model further and further out, and then you've gotta create a sort of... You have to understand the predictions, which is part of what we're dealing with here. But, um, what you end up doing in these then-- And so you've got this huge particle accelerator. If I remember correctly, it was maybe four miles in circumference. It straddles the French-Swiss border. Uh, at points on the accelerator where you're colliding the two beams together, you build a detector. And a detector, these things are with the size of a mansion, uh, three, four stories high. Uh, that's where the money... That's, you know, they're as expensive. So the accelerator itself might cost $50 million or $100 million. Today they cost billions. Back then it was hundreds of millions. And the detector, which you, I always thought of as kind of a camera, that's created to photograph to be able to detect the passage or the emittance of all the various particles that you will come out of these collisions. So you've got, uh, photon detectors to detect photons that come out. You've got muon detectors to detect muons that come out. And so you collide it, and of the billions of collisions you're making, I don't know, every day, uh, you're looking for [chuckles] one, one collision that creates one particle that your standard model doesn't predict.
- PAPeter Attia
And just to put that in context, right? I mean, as you said, you could have billions of collisions per day, but I think if I recall, I mean, Rubbia would say, "Look, you might get 20 a year that are relevant." And, and so you just think about-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... the signal-to-noise ratio there. And, and again-
- GTGary Taubes
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... I think just for folks to understand, y-you're trying to look at is there... You know, so, so you would have a prediction of the mass effect of that collision, right? So you have to have some conservation of mass. You have to have some conservation of charge, and you're trying to sort of coalesce all of these different things to look for discrepancies that are occurring at almost an infinitesimal fraction of the number of collisions.
- GTGary Taubes
But-
- 43:22 – 48:52
Theoretical vs. experimental physicists: The important differentiation and the relationship between the two;
- GTGary Taubes
it's new physics.
- PAPeter Attia
Before you go further, there's one thing I want you to explain to listeners because it's a beautiful part of physics, but it doesn't exist in every other field of science, which is the relationship between the theoretical and the experimental physicists. Um, it's, I think it's worth it pointing out here how that is a collaborative nature in physics.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, physicists divides up into theory and experiment, okay? It wasn't always quite so clear, but even if you think of, you know, Einstein was a theorist, Eddington who, you know, did the, the seminal test of the theory of relativity was an experimentalist. Um, so as physics evolves, you have people who wrestle with the theory, and then they have to come up with a theory that makes predictions that can be experimentally tested, and then you have experts who are experimentalists whose job is to do the experiment. And then there's gotta be crosstalk between the theorists and the experimentalists because the, the experimentalists have to know precisely what they're looking for, and they need the help of the theorists to tell them how this might manifest itself. And the experimentalists have to understand their detectors, their experiments to this sort of superhuman ability. That's one of the, the, the defining characteristics of an experimentalist is the, the awareness of a, of a exquisite physicist is the awareness of how their equipment could fool them. Um, and so this is how physics has always developed, and then you-- so you get to the point that, like theorists' job is to come up with a good theory and make a prediction, and the experimentalists' job is to test that. In the fields in biology and medicine, you don't have that diversion, which I think is a problem, and we talked about this through our years. You've got the theorists and the experimentalists are merged into one person. Everyone's a theorist. Everyone should be capable of doing the experiment. And I think they're two entirely different skill sets, you know? And they both require such a fine level of detail and thinking and rigor that I'm not sure that, you know, after a certain point, like say [chuckles] from 1900 onward, I don't think one person could encompass both aspects of... You know, they're in, they're almost different endeavors. So to get back to CERN, 'cause this is where it's relevant, when I get to CERN, I'm, I move into the hostel. I'm hanging out with the physicists. Um, there's a group... Once Rubbia started doing, you know, published the W and Z discoveries and everyone knew this was the place to be in physics, even before that, he collected a group of very ambitious young, mostly men, physicists from some of the best physics schools in the world who came to work with him to analyze the data.
- PAPeter Attia
So have, has UA1 and UA2 collapsed at this point, and is it all-
- GTGary Taubes
No, there's-- it's always both.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
You always need both detectors, 'cause if you see something in one-
- PAPeter Attia
You gotta verify it in the-
- GTGary Taubes
... you still need independent replication. Yeah. So if it, if you don't see it in both, you got a problem.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
Um, that's why even now the, uh, is it the Large Hadron Collider-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- GTGary Taubes
... at CERN has four, I think four or five different detectors. Um, it's not enough to see something in one detector. You always need independent replication. Um, and again, that's true of every science. Uh, the... I get there, so you have these young men who are doing the analysis, and they're sort of the-- they've become, they've moved in, they've come in late, they've become sort of the, the, you know, chosen, uh, g- uh, courtiers of Rubbia. They, they, they hang with him, they eat with him, they, they meet with him, they tell him what he wants to hear, which is what the, what's happening with the data. And then you've got the, the, the physicists who actually built the damn detector and the technicians who built the detector. And these are, you know, these, I used to think of them as they come from, they don't come from Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge. They, they work at like the red brick universities in the Midland and the UK, and they've, they've been there from the beginning. They built this mansion-sized piece of $30 million equipment with, by, with their hands. There's no mass produced, you know? They know how it can fool them 'cause they built it. So as soon as I get there, I've got these young physicists who are new to the experiment who are all excited about this great discovery, and I'm also hanging with these, you know, the old hands who built the equipment by hand, and they're basically poo-pooing everything and saying this is crazy. Yeah, our detectors, we cannot understand the flaws in our detectors well enough to make the kind of claims that Rubbia has been making. And, uh, so that's a kind of learning experience, right? 'Cause as I was there-
- PAPeter Attia
Now are they voicing that? Are they voicing that to-
- GTGary Taubes
Well, they're trying to, but the problem is you need a group leader who wants, who's willing to hear that. So once Rubbia started talking that he had made a discovery you know, in Washington in 1984. What he wants to hear, he's gone out on a limb, right? And so he wants to hear
- PAPeter Attia
I thought he only predicted it. I didn't think he actually said it had happened.
- 48:52 – 1:00:39
Pathological science: research tainted by unconscious bias or subjective effects;
- GTGary Taubes
You know, you've probably read my book more recently than I have. Um, when you're, even if you're claiming that it will happen.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
So this is a, you know, again, if you think of, there's this term that the physicists use, pathological science, which is the science of things that aren't so. And my whole career on some level has been, you know, writing this. Right or wrong now, I think I understand pathological science and have studied it as much as any human being alive. One of the defining characteristics of pathological science is people commit themselves publicly to a result based on premature evidence. So they don't, it's not ironclad. They haven't locked it down. There's still a chance they could be wrong and they don't understand the likelihood of that chance. No one ever does until you get very good at this when you realize that chance is enormous. Um, and so once you go public, what you, you know, science is supposed to be hypothesis and tests, right? The idea is you're supposed to rigorously test your hypotheses and ideally you're trying to prove that you're wrong. You know, Richard Feynman, first principle of science, uh, is that you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool. So you get evidence that you've discovered something new. Your assumption should be that you're wrong, that somehow your equipment is fooling yourself and now you try and go out to demonstrate that's true and you do everything you can to prove it. And if you fail to find out how you're wrong, right, now you write a paper that says, uh, evidence for the observation of particle X question mark and you put together a presentation and you go around, you start in your department at whatever university you're at and you give the presentation to your colleagues and basically you're asking them to explain to you how you fucked up, if you'll pardon the language, because surely you did. And if they can't explain it to you, right, then you give, you just, you march around the country or the world giving this symposium. You still haven't published the paper, the evidence for the observation of particle X question mark, because you're still working under the assumption that you screwed up and you just don't understand either your equipment. And as you're traveling around the country, people should be saying to you, "Well, what about this? Did you think of this? Did you know that the, you know, the muon detectors, actually there's a, there's a glitch in the detectors that are made in Belgium versus the ones made in Switzerland and the ones made in Belgium are gonna, you know, spark in the, in the, you know, once every seven and a half months. Have you checked that?" And if you checked it, great. If you didn't, you go back to CERN or wherever you are and you check it. And so you keep giving this lecture. Finally, at the end of, I don't know, 20 seminars, nobody can explain to you how you fucked up. Now you publish the paper with the question mark. And what you're asking them to do is tell you how you screwed up, because if you assume that you did and then they tell you, you don't resist it. But if you claim that you didn't and you publish the paper first, now what you're doing, instead of that exercise of trying to find out how you assuredly screwed up, you're trying to collect evidence for how you got the right answer. So you go from paying attention to the negative evidence to paying attention to the positive evidence. Again, everyone does this. I'm accused of that all the time. It's like a study comes out that confirms what I believe. I don't question it the same way I will question a study that comes out that appears to challenge it. So once Rubia had gotten to the point where he was predicting a discovery, all he wanted to hear from his physicists was the evidence supporting that. That's the first mistake along the way, okay? So the physicists who wanted to tell him about the problems with the detector and all the ways the detector could fool them and what they weren't thinking about and what they were missing, if those people did their job, they were sort of seen as downers. They're like, like, "Nobody wants to hear from that." Um, so after a while, what happens is you get this sort of polarization in the experiment where the, the, the principal investigator tends to only selectively listen to the people who support what he wants to believe and selectively resist, subtly resist the people who argue against it. And then as the experiment goes on, the more the people who tell him what they wants to believe confirm his beliefs, then that confirms his belief that he should not listen to the, to the critics, the skeptics. And this happens in all of science is what, you know, we've seen it in an extreme way in COVID. It, it goes on in climate change. It goes on in nutrition and chronic disease. Once you decide you know what the truth is, you tend to stop listening to the people who disagree with you and then you surround yourself with the people. This is also classic groupthink theory.
- PAPeter Attia
At what point did Rubia realize you were no longer his, uh, his scribe in residence during this 10-month period?
- GTGary Taubes
Probably when he read a draft of the book. Um, you know, Carlo was interesting because, um, well, he had enormous self-confidence. So you have to picture he's larger than life. He's, he's, he's Italian. He's overweight. He's got this exuberance. He's-
- PAPeter Attia
He's a Nobel laureate.
- GTGary Taubes
He's a Nobel laureate. I went to Stockholm with him. We went to, I, you know, I was fitted with, for my tuxedo with Carlo. I mean, that's how close we were. Um, once I started realizing there were serious issues with this experiment, I would challenge him on this. So he, I didn't hide my skepticism. I would say, well, you're saying this, but you know, so-and-so from, from Edinburgh or, or, or College de France or, you know, uh, uh, University of Pisa is telling me this. I, I wouldn't out them like that, but this is what I'm hearing from your experimenters. And Carlo, my take was that he was something of a pathological liar. So he defined truth as what was convenient for him that he could get people to believe. So I would challenge him on an issue and say, well, you say this, but it's not what I'm hearing from your, your, your researchers. And he would say, yeah, well, that's a good point. And then he would take a step back and tell me something else, um, hoping I would believe it. And if I challenged that, he would acknowledge it and then tell me something else. And we just keep going. It never got to the point where I felt from him any awareness that what I was going to write was not the story he wanted to tell. And I think this is a classic problem with, you know, people of his sort of quality and, and strength of ego, which is the, uh, he couldn't imagine that I could see the universe differently than he did. I don't think he could imagine that anyone could really see the universe differently than he did. So, um, when I wrote the book, which was called Nobel Dreams and described what had happened, he asked, he had an executive committee at the experiment made up of, you know, a dozen or so physicists from all these collaborating institutions. And he asked, he wanted to sue me and he asked them to join in the suit so that, um, you know, it would have more power and they refused. And what they didn't tell him is that most of them had read my book and critiqued it in draft as a favor to me. I didn't say that in the book because had I said that in the book, I would have created problems for them professionally and the book was accurate. So, but he just, he didn't see the universe that way.
- PAPeter Attia
Did you like the book itself?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, the writing makes me cringe. I can see the book it could have been. You know, it came out when I was still 29 years old, I guess. I was, I, the story, the story in it is interesting, but, um, but I can't read it. I, my prose, my 29-year-old prose still makes me, uh, you know, cringe. So.
- PAPeter Attia
It came out in what year? 87-ish?
- GTGary Taubes
86.
- PAPeter Attia
86.
- GTGary Taubes
86, I think. No, it must've been, maybe it was February 87. Yeah. So I would have been not 29, but, uh, 31, 30.
- PAPeter Attia
So how did you, did you go back to Discover at that point or did you immediately jump into the investigative work that would ultimately become the book Bad Science?
- GTGary Taubes
No, I went back to Discover. I was freelancing for Discover. And actually it's interesting. When the book came out, uh, it was February 1987. I was living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I, my publisher's idea of getting me publicity was to get page six in the New York Post, which is the gossip column. So I heard that page six was covering it. And it was, I remember it was a dark snowy day in New York and dreary. And I went across the street and went down Columbus Avenue and there, there was scaffolding and there was a newspaper stand and I bought the New York Post and I'm sitting at the headline of page six is Egghead Squabble Over Nobel Prize. And in it, this Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia is calling me a 30-year-old writer in New York an asshole. And I'm thinking that my career and yeah, I'm never going to eat lunch in this town again. And my career in journalism is over. Um, and as I continue to report stories, I start talking to researchers about, you know, my book and Rubbia and they want to know about Rubbia. And they'll say to me, well, if you think Rubbia is bad, you should write about so-and-so. And it turns out that there are characters like him in every area of science, characters who, so we can talk about this pathological science. People tend to think of fraud, right? And when you're committing fraud in science, you're knowingly trying to fool other people by manipulating the evidence. But there are two ways you can manipulate the evidence. You could create a signal, right? Or you could do an inadequate job of studying your background. Remember, it's a signal to noise problem. So you could fudge a signal or create a signal or move a signal, or you could ignore the background. And if you ignore the background and do a poor job in the background, you'll still end up with a big signal to noise ratio. You haven't technically committed fraud. You're not actively trying to fool anyone else. You're fooling yourself. And that's the kind of science Rubbia did. He was ambitious. He was looking for discoveries. He didn't want to, doing a background analysis is the hard, relentless, rigorous grunt work of science. It's endless and thankless. Because if you do it right, all you'll do is prove that you were wrong all along. Publicizing a signal and getting a Nobel Prize
- 1:00:39 – 1:05:39
Reflecting on the aftermath of writing Nobel Dreams and the legacy of Carlo Rubbia;
- GTGary Taubes
is the good part, right? So-
- PAPeter Attia
So how do you reconcile that dichotomy, which is You know, this is a guy that's not committing fraud, of course, but in your words, he's doing bad science because he's omitting to do the background check. But at the same time, he is the guy through sheer personality and force of will that discovers these two bosons that up until the discovery of the Higgs boson were the last two pieces of this puzzle. So it's, I mean, and I don't think anybody's disputing the work that went into that Nobel Prize, right? So it's a very unnerving, it's an unnerving revelation, right? It suggests that even at the upper, the uppermost echelon of science, you can have people that are committing these omissions.
- GTGary Taubes
Well, and this is, so first of all, one of the messages in my book, I didn't go into this in great depth, but the papers that won him the Nobel Prize, and again, I'm remembering from almost 40 years ago now, those were probably wrong too.
- PAPeter Attia
He rushed them. He rushed it, I think is generally, yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Well, he rushed them, yeah. Yeah, because he was competing, but the particles had to exist. That discovery had already been made, the neutral currents in 1973 or 74, I think it was Fermilab. So those particles had to exist, and they had to exist with the characteristics that he was looking for. So when he published, you know, the discovery based on, I think it was seven events that had these characteristics.
- PAPeter Attia
I think that's right.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, no one asked were these really W particles. In retrospect, most to all of them probably were detector flaws that they didn't understand yet, that they still had to work out over the next year when they're trying to discover particles beyond the standard model. This was the issue with Rubia. It was the reason he got the award immediately is there was a political issue behind all this also, which is since World War II, all the major discoveries in physics had been made in the U.S. The U.S. had spent the big money on particle accelerators. So this was CERN's opportunity, Europe's opportunity to achieve relevance again. And the award was given almost instantaneously because this discovery made Europe basically redistributed the center of gravity of the physics world back to, you know, if nothing else, the center of the Atlantic. When I was reporting the book, one of the things I did was travel around the country and actually around Europe talking to other physicists about their work, their discoveries, and about Rubia and trying to rationalize what they told me with who he was and who I thought he was. You know, in defense of Rubia, none of this gets done without him. No, I'm going to rephrase that. None of it gets done as quickly without him. It all gets done better without him. There are people who, from the experiment, who Rubia ground up and chewed up and spit out, whose careers basically came to an end because of him. And I said this in, I remember in the introduction of the book, I said there were sort of three types of physicists in the world. There were those who were at Rubia's level and told me he was brilliant. There were those who were, you know, knew Rubia well and said he was a very smart guy, but they wouldn't want to work for him. And then there were those who worked for him. And there were points in the course of the experiment I would sit in on group meetings and watch some young French physicists be reduced to tears by Rubia's bullying. And bullying can be very beneficial in science because you're really trying to force someone to think critically and, you know, force any sloppiness out of them. But there were times I considered like, look, just ask Rubia to step inside. Don't write the book. Punch him out. Will physics be the better for it? I decided physics might be, but I couldn't afford it. So, you know, that's what you wrestle with as a young writer. The reviewers who didn't like my book, which included Christopher Lehman Hount at the New York Times and Jeremy Bernstein, who was a New Yorker physicist writer writing, if I remember correctly, for the Boston Globe. They thought I had no right to write the book I wrote, to take on a physicist of this level to, you know, the, I think it was Bernstein who said this sort of sociology and character flaws of physicists at this level don't interest him in the least. The only thing that's important is this glorious cathedral of knowledge. Wasn't my interest.
- 1:05:39 – 1:24:45
Scientific fraud: The story of the cold fusion experiments at Georgia Tech and the subject of Gary’s book, Bad Science;
- PAPeter Attia
So when did you happen upon Fleischmann and Pons?
- GTGary Taubes
Okay, Discover. So I went back to Discover as a freelancer. I had a terrific contract with Discover. I loved living in Paris where I wrote Nobel Dreams. So I moved back to Paris writing for Discover and then Time Inc. sold Discover. Science magazines have trouble making money because it turns out the only people who really read them are high school boys, or at least back then were high school boys, and they don't spend a lot of money. So they don't support advertising revenue. So Time Inc. sold Discover to a low-budget publisher and I lost my freelancing gig and I had a choice of living in Paris and getting by on scrapping to do freelance articles or moving to the States. I had friends in L.A. who were writing screenplays and making enormous sums of money and they said, as have been said to screenwriters in the past, come to L.A. Write screenplays, get rich, do what you want. So I moved to Los Angeles, started writing screenplays, and in March 1989, cold fusion broke. And my publisher called me up and said, "Do you want to write a book about this?" And I needed to supplement my income. I thought I could spend a year doing the book and make enough money to write screenplays for two years after that. And then, as is my want, I got obsessed and ended up spending three years on the book and owed my father $40,000 when I was done. I've bonded with many writers over the years, young writers, about how much money we owed our parents by the time we were done with our first book. And, uh, you know, it was another fascinating story. I actually read the-- So cold fusion two, uh, chemist Stan Pons from the University of Utah and his mentor, Martin Fleischmann from Southampton University in the UK, announced that they've basically created nuclear fusion in a test tube. March 23rd, 1989, it's the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Within a day, it's front page news all around the country. Um, the very first article I read in the Los Angeles Times mentioned there was a competing group at CERN-- uh, excuse me, at CERN, at, um, Brigham Young University. And as soon as I saw that there was a competing group, I assumed they were wrong. Because as you mentioned, with UA1, UA2, you have two experiments competing with each other. So the motivation is to establish reliable knowledge beyond reasonable doubt, right? That's what you're trying to do in science. But if your motivation is also to beat the other people to the reliable knowledge, you're going to allow one motivation to compromise the other. And now the beyond reliable doubt part is gonna be tossed out in an effort to win. And that's, that was one of the fundamental problems at CERN with the work UA1 was doing. UA2 got everything right, 'cause once they came in second, they were willing to do a good-- they were perfectly happy to do the good job I think they were doing all along. Um, so yeah, they, uh-
- PAPeter Attia
On first principles, did you just think it was ridiculous based on your knowledge of physics?
- GTGary Taubes
I didn't know enough. No, I didn't know enough-
- PAPeter Attia
Okay
- GTGary Taubes
... to think that. I mean, um, I just smelled like bad science. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
And, and it's been a while since I read Bad Science, actually. I think that was your first-- I think I read that, actually the first one I went back to read. But, um, did they claim it was net energy positive, or did they-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, the idea is you-- So how do you make nuclear fusion? [chuckles] Well, you, you put heavy water in a test tube with a, an electrode made of palladium, and you plug it into the wall, and the deuterium gets sucked into the palladium, and the idea somehow it gets compressed so much that it fuses and generates ideally neutrons, which are one sign of fusion, or gamma rays or some radioactivity which would tell you that there was a nuclear reaction going on. Um, if not, at least generating a lot of heat. So Pons and Fleischmann had had an, uh, an explosion in their laboratory with one of these cold fusion cells. It was being run by Pons' son. It might've been their garage. I forget the details. And when the cell exploded, right, if you're looking for trying to create nuclear fusion in a test tube and your cell explodes, um, you know, eureka. But even more important to that, it wasn't just that there was a competition with the people, uh, physicists at Brigham Young, you know, uh, 30 miles, 40 miles down the highway from University of Utah in Salt Lake City. But the physicists at Brigham Young was, had studied something called muon-catalyzed fusion, which was a type of cold fusion of a sort, and had been shown Pons and Fleischmann's proposal and had started working on this after reading Pons and Fleischmann's proposal. So Pons and Fleischmann thought their discovery was being stolen from them by a physicist who should know enough to know whether it's right or not. And as I discuss this at the very end of my research when I spent about eight hours with the then president of the University of Utah, a very thoughtful, wonderful man named Chase Peterson, and he was explaining to me, you know, we were talking about their thought process and going public with something that became this huge fiasco. He said, you know, "Yeah, you know, somebody's-- nothing makes your girlfriend look more attractive than your best friend trying to steal her from you." And so once they decided that these people at Brigham Young were trying to steal it from them, they decided it must be right. They had to throw a press release. They threw a press release, and this, and this enormous phenomena kicks in where everyone in the world tries to replicate it because it seems it holds the promise of infinite free energy. It's the wealth of OPEC, and anyone can study it. It costs like $3,000 worth of materials to put together a cold fusion cell. So you have basically created a bad science generator.
- PAPeter Attia
So when did you-- when did it become abundantly clear to you what was going on? How long into your investigation?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, th- and this is a very different kind of story, right? 'Cause this is immediately front page news.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- GTGary Taubes
So when I jump into it, there are meetings, there are conferences, there are other people discussing this. I, I, you know, I probably flew out to Utah within, you know, a week of having that conversation with my editor. And Utah is, of course, surrounded by, you know, journalists who wanna know if infinite free energy has been created. Um, [sighs] funny coincidence. S- so the Wall Street Journal ran it on the front page. The author was a, a, a, a science writer for The Wall Street Journal named Jeremy Bishop. And he sort of took... So I write a book explaining why Jeremy Bishop was sort of not thinking things through clearly when he put this on the front page. Uh, I move back to New York in 1993 or so. I move onto a block on, uh, the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I, Jeremy Bishop and I are looking into each other's windows from across the street. I mean, just the coincidence. Well, anyway, um, the world was finding out that this was wrong. And so I'm, I'm following all the attempts to replicate it. So the... You know, in a sense, this was how, how science is supposed to work, right? Somebody makes a claim of a discovery and they publish the data necessary to replicate that discovery by independent laboratories. And so independent laboratories go out and try to do that. And around the world, chemists and physicists tried to do that, and most people got the right answer, which is cold fusion doesn't exist. But a half dozen laboratories around the world, for reasons that tended to be different in each lab, got the wrong answer. Uh, usually, and it's, we can talk about that. I mean, there would be a lot of interesting reasons why, but, um, so the, the phenomena keeps going because of the signal being generated from these six labs while the, again, the, the, the, all these other labs in the world are working out the background. And, uh, some of the best scientists in the world are involved with... This is a major discovery if it's true, so one of the things it attracted was some of the very best physicists and nuclear physicists in the world, and then I had the... And chemists, and I had the opportunity to work closely with these people, basically to embed myself with them while they tried to replicate the experiment and did, in effect, the background analysis that Pons and Fleischmann and, and Steve Jones of Brigham Young never had the time to do. So now you get to find out all the ways your equipment could have fooled you and assuredly did, and that's the science working the way it should work. And so by June of that year, it was clear that this was wrong, that they had... Pons and Flei- that whole thing was wrong. And then I continued reporting it for about nine months to tie up all the loose ends, to explain some of the other positive results. But it was clear to the world by within two to three months that this was just wrong, and then it faded from the papers.
- PAPeter Attia
And then w- obviously you s- you wrote a book about this, of course. So the book was really less about, hey, letting everybody know this was wrong, because by the time the book came out it was... 'Cause the book came out in '91 or something like that?
- GTGary Taubes
Three.
- PAPeter Attia
'93.
- GTGary Taubes
'93.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, so it was long. It was long, yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Oh, wait, no, no, no. Mm. Yeah, it would've been... Yeah, maybe '92.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
I forget. Yeah, no, the book was-
- PAPeter Attia
The purpose of the book was to explain how it became wrong, right? How did this happen?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, I became obsessed with how this happened. Uh, that's what fascin- it's still what fascinates me. So, um, you know, when I'm writing about nutrition and chronic disease, obesity, diabetes, the question is how do you come to the conclusions... How do people establish conventional wisdom, uh, dogma, the, the ruling theory in any science, and on what evidence? And in this case, cold fusion, I wrote it as kind of, I saw it as a sort of case study in bad science. Something, my fantasy, something that every graduate student who goes into science would be required to read so they could see the price, all the different ways you're gonna fool yourself and, um, the price of doing so. How you're gonna, y- you know, of, of claiming something to be true that then later turns out not to be.
- PAPeter Attia
What were the, what are, what are the hallmarks of pathological science again? There was a, a great paper written about this, um, that, that w- wasn't it brought back to light after the cold fusion-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... debacle?
- GTGary Taubes
Um, Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate chemist, gave a talk at IBM in, uh, you know, the suburbs of New York in, uh, 1957 on pathological. He called it pathological science, which is the science of things that aren't so. And, um, these are things he said. It's not about, you know, fraud or manipulation of the data. It's about the scientists not realizing how easily they can be fooled. And there are certain signs and symptoms. You know, the, the effects tend to be at the very level of the equipment's ability to detect them. Um, there, there were four, uh, criteria that he listed. I should remember them, but I can't. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, there was a sensitivity analysis in there as well.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, there's-
- PAPeter Attia
Uh, small perturbations. Um...
- GTGary Taubes
You know, there... I don't know. We can look it up while we're at it.
- 1:24:45 – 1:46:51
Problems with epidemiology, history of the scientific method, and the conflict of public health science;
- GTGary Taubes
to do.
- PAPeter Attia
Well, I do want to come back to the point about, um, your flexibility or lack thereof with respect to current belief systems around nutrition. But let's now really pivot from a, a career that spans, you know, a decade and a half ... uh, writing about physics, uh, and other means of science to the, the pursuit of, uh, public health. What-- How, how did your curiosity get piqued there? What, what took you into, um, a new avenue of science?
- GTGary Taubes
Okay, so the cold fusion book, Bad Science, is basically... I, I interviewed around 300 people for this book. Um, Horace Freeland Judson, who was one of the great science writers of the late 20th century, he wrote the, uh, oh, Christ, Eighth Day of Creation. Is that what it's called? I always get it confused with, uh, uh, Man in Crease's book. Um, a book about the history of, uh... Yeah, The Eighth Day of Creation. The book about the history of, uh, of, uh, the, uh, molecular biology revolution. Anyway, he said I had done more research than, for the stupidest scientific subject than any human being alive.
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
Um, I was obsessed with how this had happened, how people made the mistakes, how the sociology worked. Um, again, I became obsessed with pathological science as a concept. Um, and when I was done with the book, I had a lot of friends in the physics community who really respected and appreciated what I did, and some of my friends in the physics community were involved in this, uh, uh, debate about whether or not electromagnetic fields from, can, from power lines can cause cancer. And that involved, so on one level, physics, because you're the-- what we know about physics is they can cause cancer because their wavelengths are too big to interact with something as small as cells. Um, and on the other side, you have epidemiology. You have the science of, you know, uh, uh, disease, how diseases spread and, and, and researchers saying we can measure the s- field strength around power lines and, and somehow make an association between that and the levels of cancer in people living near the power lines. And so my physicist friends were horrified at the level of science they were seeing. And when my book came out, they said, "Well look, if you're interested in bad science, maybe you should look at this stuff in public health 'cause it's terrible." And so the very first article I did, I did an article for The Atlantic on the power line cancer connection, and, um, it was dependent on this field of epidemiology which I had never paid any attention to, never had any reason to. But I had spent the previous six, seven years learning about how hard science is to get right and being, uh, schooled and tutored and, um, you know, uh, uh, lectured into believing that the, you have to be extraordinarily rigorous and methodical and relentless or you'll get the wrong answer. And here was a field where basically people just said, "We're gonna look at this. We're gonna look at that. We're gonna get an association. We're gonna assume it's causal." Uh, they considered doing the kind of rigorous testing of hypotheses to be a luxury that they couldn't afford. So I wrote The Atlantic piece, and then I wrote a piece on epidemiology for the journal Science, um, that was infamous. I was-- It used to be that if you wanted to publish critics of the field, first you published, uh, Alvin Feinstein, who was at Yale, and then it was Feinstein and Taubes, and now it's Ioannidis. And Feinstein and Taubes have kind of been, you know, dwarfed by, by John Ioannidis' contribution, and Feinstein was a controversial character. [chuckles] So anyway, that was it. It was sort of, here's a field of science where-
- PAPeter Attia
Both, both great pieces, by the way, which we'll be linking to in the show notes. Um, e- epic pieces.
- GTGary Taubes
Oh, thank you. Yeah. So Feinstein's piece was, um... I mean, the, the, you've got a, a, a field of science where there's-- you can't do the experiments, so that's, that's the first problem. That's a problem with every field where there's an active controversy. If you can do the experiments easily, like cold fusion, "I think I've discovered infinite free energy." "Well, tell me how you did it. Let me see if I can do the same thing, and if I can't, we ought to talk."
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
And if he can't and she can't and, and they can't, then you're, you probably screwed up, dude. Um, if you can't do the experiment, then depending how interesting it is, y- you then develop a field of science around basically a hypothesis, and often people assume that hypo- as more and more people see the same phenomena but without using the rigorous experimental techniques of, uh, of an experimental science, they start to believe that this hypothesis is true. And you, again, what I described with Rubbia, with this sort of groupthink phenomenon where you collect the people who see the signal and you ignore the people who work on the background. In epidemiology, there was never any significant work on the background. So you could think of epidemiology where you, you have a cohort of people, say the Nurses' Health Study, the most famous in the US, um, you know, 110,000 nurses. And you give them questionnaires, food frequency questionnaires, and you ask them what they're eating, and they tell you what they're eating, and then you follow them, and you see who gets sick and who doesn't. And then you look at what the people who get sick tended to be eating versus what the people who didn't get sick tend to be eating, and you have an association between diet and disease, and there's no causal information in that association. But now you hypothesize that the association is causal, what the, whatever they're eating or not eating causes disease or, you know, keeps these people prevent. And there's no way to rigorously test that.
- PAPeter Attia
But let's, let's, let's stop for a second, Gary, and explain to people why the intuitive is not so. Because I, I, I think it's worth spending a second on the fact that, and you've probably heard me on this rant before, but, you know, the... All of this stuff that we talk about in terms of the rigor of scientific thinking, it, it's a relatively recent phenomenon. It's less than 400 years old.
- GTGary Taubes
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
All of the things you're describing are less than 400 years old, which means from an evolutionary perspective, they're nonexistent. It's not wired into our DNA. And-
- GTGary Taubes
You know, I-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, go ahead
- GTGary Taubes
... just might add that everything I'm describing is in... So Francis Bacon, 401 years ago, publishes Novum Organum, which is sort of the, uh, uh, beginning text in the scientific method. And, um, and everything's in there. I had to go back around 2001, 2002, I read Bacon, because I was thinking maybe I'm just crazy.
- PAPeter Attia
Uh, and that's where I'm starting.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
I'm basically starting at Bacon, which is why I'm saying call it 400.
- GTGary Taubes
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
I didn't realize it was... I, I thought Bacon was six- I thought he was a little later in the 17th century. But okay.
- GTGary Taubes
No, 1620.
- PAPeter Attia
Directionally four... So, so directionally 400 years ago. But if you think back to 4,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, right? If you think back into the roots of our genes-
- GTGary Taubes
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... the ability to pattern recognize and make an inference that by definition is presumed to be causal from an association must have been a vital trait for our success, right? You know, "I saw Larry doing X. Larry has, you know, more mating opportunities than me. Doing X must be the reason that Larry has more mating opportunities than me."
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
You know?
- GTGary Taubes
But the interesting thing is that's true. So you, you make the association, and then you test it, right? I'm gonna do X and see if I get more mating, you know? And evolution is gonna test it, right? Because if, you know, John now does X and it ends up getting him killed-
- PAPeter Attia
But we didn't codify it. I think that's the difference.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
We didn't live long enough-
- 1:46:51 – 1:58:04
Gary’s first foray into the bad science of nutrition;
- PAPeter Attia
[lip smacks] And this is an enormous problem. It's the dietary salt, dietary fat. It's where we're gonna be going in the next couple of minutes here. So, um, [laughs] okay. So you've, you've, you've struggled through power lines and cancer. Um, you've, you've come to wrestle with the pitfalls of epidemiology. What, what brings you into, uh, into the den of, of nutrition?
- GTGary Taubes
Um, I'm living in LA, Venice, near the beach. I'm doing freelance science journalism and working on screenplays probably still, not making any money. So my friends were wrong about at least my ability to get rich writing screenplays. Um, I call up my editor at "Science," and I say, "Look, I gotta pay the rent next month. This month. I need a story I could turn over quickly. Do you have anything I could write that'll generate a paycheck?" And so, uh, researchers have just reported... They're reporting, uh, on the first results on the DASH diet. This Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. It's a, a sort of low fat, uh, lots of fruits and vegetables dietary approach. And the paper's coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine, and they have a preprint. They have a, a pre-release copy. It's embargoed. And so I should write about this. So the way you do these stories-
- PAPeter Attia
And you, and you've never written about, like, nutrition and health science and this is-
- GTGary Taubes
Never written about nutrition, no.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay. So he's pretty-
- GTGary Taubes
So-
- PAPeter Attia
... desperate if he's giving you this, because this is-
- GTGary Taubes
[laughs]
- PAPeter Attia
... a little outside of your wheelhouse, right?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. It's one page in the magazine. It's not a lot of... not a lot going on. So the way you do a one-page story, right? You, you call up the principal investigator. If it's a... The article hasn't been published yet. You ask the PI, you, you interview him. You ask the PI for the names of a couple of other people who know about the research who could comment. Uh, three interviews for one page is doing your job. So it takes a morning to do the interviews, an afternoon to write the article. It's a day and a half. I get my rent money. Um, what I didn't know about this article is it had been leaked to "Science," okay? In advance. And it had been leaked with a list of researchers who I could interview Um, so I, I-
- PAPeter Attia
This is what year?
- GTGary Taubes
... my editor gave... This was 1998 or '99.
- PAPeter Attia
Okay.
- GTGary Taubes
'98 probably. Um, my editor gives me the list. He doesn't tell me it was leaked, or if he did, I didn't pay attention. Um, so I get the article. I call up the principal investigator, Larry Appel at Johns Hopkins. Uh, I interview him. I ask him for the names of people I could talk to. Um, I call up one of the people on the list. This is a former president of the American Heart Association at the University of Alabama Birmingham, and this person tells me that they can't talk about the paper or they'll lose their funding. And I say, "It's... This... We're talking about a diet trial in the New England Journal of Medicine. Nobody loses their funding for talking about that. It's gonna be... It's not gonna come out till after the embargo." The woman, she refuses to talk to me. She won't tell me anything. I said, "Look, if there's something wrong with this paper, let's go off the record, not for attribution, like Woodward and Bernstein in the garage with Deep Throat. Tell me what's wrong with this paper, what the issue is, 'cause if you don't tell me, I'll never know, and I'll report it incorrectly." She refuses even to do that. So then I get off the phone with her. I call up one of the people that Larry Appel at Johns Hopkins has given me, and he's a, a researcher who is... starts yelling at me. This guy is a, the grand old man of the field. I don't know this. And he starts yelling at me over the phone that there's no controversy over salt and blood pressure. And I say, "I'm not calling about salt and blood pressure, Professor. I'm calling about this diet trial that lowered blood pressure in the New England Journal of Medicine." And he continues to berate me that there's no controversy. So I get off the phone with him, and I call up my editor at Science. I said, "I had an American Heart Association former president refuse to talk to me because she would lose her funding, she said, if she did. And then I had this other guy yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and blood pressure when I'm not writing about salt and blood pressure. There must be a controversy about salt and blood pressure that I know nothing about."
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
"So I'm gonna write up this article, get my paycheck, and then if you don't mind, I'm gonna look into the salt blood pre- the assumed salt blood pressure controversy and see what we're missing." And I spent the next nine months reporting that. I interviewed about 85 people for one magazine article. Turns out that it is one of the most vitriolic controversies in the history of medicine. And even though already by 1998 we'd all been eating low salt diets in America for 15 to 20 years, it was clear that the randomized control evidence never really supported the intervention, and that it was backed up by a lot of bad epidemiology and researchers assuming that associations were causal that weren't and that were even questionable associations to begin with. And while I was doing that story, this fellow who was yelling at me, um, I like to joke, he sounded exactly like Walter Matthau over the telephone. By the way, he's still alive. He's about 101 years old. So while I'm running him down as a scientist, that's argu- uh, evidence that maybe he understands nutrition and diet far better than I do. Um, anyway, while I was interviewing him, this Walter Matthau character, it was clearly the... You know, I had spent 10 years of my life studying bad science. It was clear this guy was one of the worst scientists I'd ever interviewed in my life, in the bottom five at least, and I thought I had interviewed the worst. And he took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, but eat less fat as well for the low fat diet we had all been on since 1984. So at one point, I called up my editor and I said, "Look, you know, if this guy was involved in this controversy, the fat controversy in any way, the fat story, there's gotta be a story there." You know, the message from Nobel Dreams and Bad Science was that bad scientists never get the right answer.
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
You know, it's just, it's too hard to get the right answer for you to go in being sloppy and slipshod and lazy and ambitious and get it right. Nature isn't that kind.
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
So I said, "You know, when I'm done writing about salt, I'm gonna write about fat. I have no idea what the story is. I've been eating... I've been living in LA, you know, eating my egg whites and, you know, probably a 15% fat diet. Dean Ornish would've been proud of me. But if the dogma was based in any substantive way on this fellow's work, there's a story there." And I spent a year writing that piece. I interviewed 145 researchers and administrators for one magazine article and, um, you know...
- PAPeter Attia
The Big Fat Lie?
- GTGary Taubes
The same. No, this was, uh, The Soft Science of Dietary Fat. So this was... The salt story was called The (Political) Science of Salt, pol- political in parentheses, and the fat story was called The (Soft) Science of Dietary Fat, soft in parentheses. They both won National Association of Science Writers Science and Society Awards. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
What made you decide to go even further and, and write what would become, uh, perhaps the biggest and most controversial piece you wrote, at least in the newspaper? Um, and I believe it was for The, The Times Magazine, wasn't it?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, New York Times Magazine. Um, I wanted to write a book when I was done with, uh, the two science articles on whatever was happening in medical science that could lead to these kind of mistakes. Remember, my obsession is pathological science. The nutrition aspect of it is just an interesting vehicle through which to explore it. Um, I realized that if I did a book then, I would go broke. Um, I was married. I had responsibilities. Um, remember I had come out $40,000 in debt just doing the cold fusion book. It was clear I didn't work fast and I didn't wanna work fast, and that I would not be able to get an advance large enough to cover the time it would take to do the book. So I was living in New York. I was having lunch once a month with an editor from The New York Times magazine 'cause, among other things, we, uh, shared an affinity for the same local French cafe in the Village. And we would talk about story ideas, and we decided it might be a good idea to see about... to ask the question, what caused the obesity epidemic? And I said to this guy, when I was reporting the dietary fat story for Science, I had had, uh... met up with a, a administrator from the NIH who said, "You know, it's interesting. When we told people to go on low-fat diets in 1984, we assumed... We really didn't have the evidence to support the heart disease connection." And the message of my story is they never got that evidence. Um, but we thought if nothing else, we'd be telling people to avoid the densest calories in the diet, so if they avoided fat, they'd lose weight, and that would take care of the, if you... You know, obesity and, and overweight are the greatest risk factors for heart disease. And he said, "Lo and behold, now we have an obesity epidemic, and apparently people stopped eating fat and eating more carbohydrates, and that got them fatter." So I always had this two hypotheses for what caused the obesity epidemic, um, which you can see in the data begins somewhere between 1978 and 1991, and it coincides with two fundamental changes in the American diet. One was the low-fat, uh, the embracing of the idea that a low-fat diet is a heart-healthy diet. So carbohydrates in general go from being considered inherently fattening, which is sort of the conventional wisdom up till the 1960s, and then they get transformed into heart-healthy diet foods. And you may be too young to remember this, but we all stopped eating butter and started having pasta and bagels every day, and, uh, lo and behold, everybody starts getting fatter. The other thing is high-fructose corn syrup came in, um, 1977, '78. High-fructose corn syrup 55 comes in, which can replace sugar in Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and by 1984 it saturates the beverage industry. And this coincides with the beginning of the epidemic, and people like Michael Pollan had suggested that high-fructose corn syrup was the cause of the epidemic.
- 1:58:04 – 2:10:00
Research implicating insulin’s role in obesity, and the story behind what led to Gary’s book, Good Calories, Bad Calories;
- GTGary Taubes
So we decided I would write an article about what might have caused the obesity epidemic. It was new enough then that people cared, and this would be an important story. And in the course of writing that article, I came upon five studies that had been publ- that had been finished but not yet published, that all been discussed in conferences, so I could discuss them in the article, which had compared the Atkins diet, which is a low carbohydrate, high fat, eat as much as you want diet, to the kind of low fat, calorie restricted diet the American Heart Association was pushing. And in all five trials, the Atkins diet, not only did people lose more weight, but their heart disease risk factors improved. So remember, I'm coming at this kind of from... I'm programmed to think from a scientific perspective. I won't say that I'm coming from it, to it as a scientist 'cause I know people don't like to hear that from a journalist. Um, [clears throat] there are two fundament- there are two hypotheses out there. One is that people get fat 'cause they eat too much, and the other is that people get heart disease because they eat high-fat foods. And now you run a diet trial where you compare a high-fat, eat as much as you want diet to a low-fat, calorie restricted diet, and your two hypotheses would predict that the high-fat diet, the Atkins diet, those patients would get fatter 'cause they could eat as much as they want, and clearly they got fat to begin with because they ate too much, and that they would have worse heart disease risk factors. And in both cases, the hypothesis failed to pan out. So from a scientific perspective, the first five clinical trials on low-carb, high-fat diets... Actually, it was, uh, second through sixth. There was one earlier one that saw the same thing that no one discussed. Um, all refuted two of the fundamental hypotheses of modern nutrition science.
- PAPeter Attia
How did, how did you find these? I mean, I know one of them, one of these in there is the Minnesota Heart Study, which wasn't published until 1989, right?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, no, this is... These are the clinical trials. So this is Eric Westman's first trial at Duke. Um, there was a group at, uh, the VA hospital in Pennsylvania that was doing a trial. There was a long... Some researchers at Ohio that did a trial.
- PAPeter Attia
Why, why weren't they published?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, they just hadn't been published yet. They had been finished-
- PAPeter Attia
I see
- GTGary Taubes
... and the researchers were talking about it. Then once I did my article, it made it both, um, more important for them to get published and simultaneously harder for them to get published, 'cause nobody wanted to hear. They wanted to see what these people really had, but not [chuckles] actually have to publish what these people really had. But over the next two or three years, they all came out in the journals. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
How, how did you sort of come to grips with this? This is now challenging your own beliefs. Uh, presumably you had believed that this low-fat diet was healthier. Had, had you ever struggled with your weight?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. [clears throat] Well, remember, I was a college football player, so in college I tried to be as heavy as humanly possible and eating constantly I don't know if you did this in college, but, um, we would go out at 11 o'clock at night to, uh, Elsie's, a r- a diner across the street from the dorm, and eat 1,000 calories or 1,500 calories worth of the biggest sandwiches they had, and then go home and go to bed. I mean, that's what you... You know. Anyway, I could get up to 240. Uh, my boxing weight was 212, and, uh, once I turned 30 and simultaneously had moved to California, I just started drifting upward. Uh, while I was reporting the science article, I was simultaneously doing a piece for Discover Magazine on the mathematics of the stock market. And so I was up at MIT interviewing a, a economist who ran the Laboratory for Financial Engineering up there about his research, you know, trying to establish whether people like Warren Buffett are brilliant or just lucky, which is an interesting question 'cause you're looking for the signal of talent over the signal of luck, over the background of luck. Um, and you don't, of course, fully understand your background. Uh, so we got to talking about good science and bad science. I told him about the dietary fat article I was writing, and he said, "Oh, well, if you're doing a story on fat, you gotta try Atkins." Um, he said his collaborator Warden's father lost 200 pounds on Atkins, and this fellow at MIT is a, uh, Asian American, and he said he gave up, basically gave up white rice and lost 40 pounds. So I went back to LA where I was living. At that point, I was unmarried. I... My parents had passed away. [chuckles] Uh, I had no children. Uh, if I killed myself on Atkins, the only one who might care were my cats. And so I did Atkins in ex- as an experiment and lost 25 pounds in six weeks. And then like everyone else, I sort of drifted off the diet by the time I started this New York Times Magazine piece. [clears throat] But, um, if you go back to read the New York Time Magazine article, there's a line in it that says, you know, uh, "Overweight, of course, is caused by taking in more calories than you expend," which today I think is a meaningless statement and both wrong and meaningless. Um, the, uh... There were a lot of ways I had already... Because of my research on the dietary fat story, I could already accept the idea that these diets would not raise the risk of heart disease. Um, but it was clear to me the dietary fat story was uncompelling at best, um, and there was no compelling evidence to, to avoid saturated fats. Um, the question about the fundamental cause of obesity and how best to regulate weight was something I didn't really understand when I did that article, but that article would be, you know, a exceedingly controversial article on the front page of The New York Times Magazine will indeed get you a large book advance if the subject's one of, you know, uh, natural interest to readers. It did get me a large book advance. People like to say that that's the only reason I came to, um, the controversial conclusions I did, because it would sell more books. Um, what they don't realize is that a large advance in New York was enough to live for four years, and the book took me five years. [chuckles] Um, the, uh... Anyway, so that was it. That- that's when I started the research for Good Calories, Bad Calories and got obsessed with that story. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
And how did your thinking of the nuance around this topic evolve during the writing of Good Calories, Bad Calories, which I think came out in '07, right?
- GTGary Taubes
Right. I mean, it's still evolving. That's what's so bizarre about this, is I still wake up at 3:00 in the morning thinking, "Why didn't I say that 13 years ago?" Um-
- PAPeter Attia
Because... So, so there's these two issues, right? Which I, I, it, I, I mean, I don't think we'll have time to go into both of them. Uh, the one being the saturated fat, uh, issue, which is that dietary saturated fat, uh, drives atherosclerosis.
- GTGary Taubes
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
And the other being the cause of obesity, uh, being calo- calorie imbalance.
- GTGary Taubes
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
And you kind of go after both of these in parallel, but they're really different. One... They're not, they're not, uh, they're not mutually exclusive.
- GTGary Taubes
Right. Well, they're... But they're related.
- PAPeter Attia
They're very related, yes.
- GTGary Taubes
They're, they're ve- And that's the issue. So the, uh, diet, if, uh... You know, the dietary heart story was that we get heart disease because of the dietary fat, uh, saturated fat content of the diet elevating LDL cholesterol. And here a guy like Atkins comes along and says, "Well, look, don't eat carbohydrates." So if you wanna minimize your risk of heart disease by the dietary fat story, you avoid fats, saturated fats. You replace them with carbohydrates back then. Now they say monounsaturated or unsaturated fats. And you're now eating a carbohydrate rich diet, and in theory you're going to minimize your risk of heart disease. The flip side was that carbohydrates are fattening. That's the simplest way to describe what's now called the carbohydrate insulin model. To those of us who gain weight easily, it's the carbohydrates that do it, and we can eat carbs. But if you don't eat carbs, what are you gonna replace those with? And your choices are protein and fat, and protein usually comes with fat attached in real foods. And so you're gonna increase your fat consumption one way or the other, and now you're eating a diet that in theory is supposed to kill you. And that was the... One of the many arguments against Atkins was it's gonna trigger heart disease and you're gonna drop dead. When I first tried it as an experiment, I was kept waiting to drop dead, and I'm still waiting. I mean, I still have a piece of bacon and... or a piece of, you know, pat of butter, and I wait for my heart to blow up. Um, so- One of the issues I had to deal with in the book is, is a diet... How did we come to believe that dietary fat's the problem? [clears throat] So the first third of the book is the evolution of the... It's the soft science of dietary fat at book length. That how did we, how did this theory evolve? What was the real data? What were the problems with the data? You know? Um, [clears throat] why is it likely wrong? And then the second part of the book is a, as doing the research, I realized that there had always been a competing hypothesis, which is that the chronic diseases that associate with, uh, modern diets and lifestyles are driven by the carbohydrate content of the diet. [clears throat] So this started as a British hypothesis, a British nutritionist, and then it, it should have embraced in the 1960s the research by people like Jerry Reaven and others on insulin resistance. And all of that targeted the quality and the type of carbohydrates we're eating, the glycemic index and the fructose content. And I didn't know anything about that when I started this research. But by the time... And so the first third of Good Calories, Bad Calories is the deconstruction of the fat hypothesis. The second third is the replacement with a carbohydrate centric hypothesis. And then the third third of the second half of the book actually is this question of obesity, because it's clear that whatever causes... Obesity is so closely associated in our disease and diabetes, type 2 diabetes, that whatever makes us fat also causes these chronic diseases that associate with us. And the question is, what makes us fat? And now I, doing the research, I also came upon a whole other stream of research that had kind of been ignored. Uh, first by pre-World War II European researchers saying obesity is not a energy balance problem. It's not caused by people eating too much. It's a hormonal regulatory disorder. And then post-World War II by people studying primarily the science of hunger, saying, in effect, hunger is caused by fuel availability in the periphery. So if you have enough fuel, if your liver thinks there's enough fuel available, then you're not gonna be hungry. And when your liver starts thinking fuel is being crimped, then it'll
- 2:10:00 – 2:21:47
The history of obesity research, dietary fat, and fat metabolism;
- GTGary Taubes
release inhibitions on food seeking behavior. And that work done by people in this field of physiological psychology all implicated that insulin is the hormone determining fuel availability, the primary hormone. And then there was also, uh... And this I, I think is what gets me most. Um, beginning around 1930, the... Until 1930, virtually no one studied fat tissue. It wasn't, it was a v- th- the... In all the sort of burgeoning fields of physiology and endocrinology, nobody really cared. The assumption was it was inert, it was for padding and cushioning, and if you starved people, somehow the fat tissue would shrink. Um, then you get this revolution beginning... And they, they had no way to study fat tissue or fat accumulation. Then beginning in 1933 with this work of this German emigre, uh, Schoenheimer at, uh, working at Columbia, you start having people studying fat tissue. They're, they become aware that mobilization deposition goes into fat goes on constantly. Like even when you're in between meals or starving, your body is still depositing calories as fat and mobilizing calories as fat. And through the 1940s and '50s, they begin to work out the details as more and more tools become available to study this problem. And by the mid-1960s, you have very well established science of what we could call intermediary metabolism, which is what the researchers... What your body does with the foods, the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates after you eat them, and then what your body continues to do to c- make fuel available as necessary to your body. And all of this is left out of the science of obesity. As soon as the obesity researchers start saying, "We've demonstrated that obesity's caused by energy balance, imbalance," uh, the impolitical way of saying that is people eat too much. Uh, that's a fact of life. We can see it in our animal models, 'cause when we create a obese animal model, it tends to be what they call hyperphagia, which is very hungry. So we have an association between hunger and obesity, and we assume causality. And, um, they never actually... They just kind of ignore the entire science of fat metabolism. And even to this day when I try to make that point, it's excruciatingly hard to... Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to deal with it. It's... And you know, if I had to prove it to an editor, I could. I, ideally I would have the fact checker fly out to my office at Oakland and say, "Let's go through these textbooks from 1965 onward, and I'll show you the complete and utter absence of any discussion of the science of fat metabolism, fat storage from the obesity discussion." And from the 1960s onward, the obesity researchers are dominant. Well, obesity research in the 1960s is dominated by psychiatrists and psychologists trying to get fat people to eat less. People like Mickey Stunkard, who was a wonderful man, but his expertise was psychology. And this idea that obesity's a hormonal dysregulation of fat storage, fatty acid oxidation and storage, a fuel partitioning disorder, gets left out of the field.
- PAPeter Attia
What, who do, who do you most credit for the, the, the, that changing, that, that, that new course in the 1930s, thereabouts? I mean, where, where did this Where did this idea that, um, the, the idea that we now take for granted that, that, that, um, that is the dominant point of view with respect to, uh, obesity being caused by caloric imbalance rather than being the result, um, of caloric, uh, uh, or, or rather resulting from, um... What, what sowed the seeds and, and frankly, what w- what, what were the, what were the, um... 'Cause there has to be luck sometimes, right? Like, sometimes there's a dominant personality wins out or something like that. So
- GTGary Taubes
Well, this is the issue. One of the, um, [sighs] you know, I, I mentioned I'm working on a book on diabetes now, and it very much delves into the history of the field and how much, uh, you know, it's, I can imagine six, maybe seven people reading it once it's published. Um, you think of a field like diabetes, where Elliot Joslin opens the first diabetes clinic in the US, dedicated diabetes clinic in the US around 1900. And by 1916, he's seen 1,000 patients, which is about 950 more diabetic patients than any other doctor in America. So he writes the first textbook in 1916, and he does another edition in 1917 and 1923 and '28 and '33, and we're now on, I think, uh, edition 14 of Joslin's Diabetes Mellitus. Joslin's became the determinant of truth, the arbitrator of truth in the diabetes world. One researcher, one physician. He's a wonderful physician, not a great scientist. Because of his position in the field. This doesn't happen in other... I don't know if it hap- it didn't happen in physics, because there are too many bright people arguing about the data, and not enough people outside cared. But in medicine, you get fields in which single individuals, like the, the, the, what was the famous breast cancer surgeon from Hopkins? Uh-
- PAPeter Attia
Halsted.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. And it's just, it's maybe a kind of unique phenomena in science. Um, in obesity research... So there, there was no such thing as obesity research pre-1930. If, when you read the literature and you go back and look at the literature, there's half a dozen physicians around the world who are writing articles about obesity, and often with some statement of causality. And there's kind of two competing hypotheses. One is fat people just eat too much. And you know that's true because you have an association between gluttony and obesity, right? They... Watch Shakespeare. We know Falstaff was obese. He had this zest for living. He ate people out of house and home, so therefore you assume causality from an association. That's classic pathological science. And the other is that people who suffer from obesity have some kind of hormonal dysreg- some kind of dysregulation where they're gonna get fat regardless of how much they eat. Okay? So 1930, Lewis Newberg comes along. He's a, a physician at the University of Michigan. He does, uh, what he considers the first experimental test of the hormonal regulatory disorder hypothesis, that you get fat no matter how much you eat or how little. Um, he runs a test on six or seven people. He discusses it at a medical meeting in Boston. So this guy is now, we'll call him the, uh, if not the Newton of the field, the Eddington of modern... You know, this is a guy's name that everyone... If obesity research was a functioning science, every obesity researcher would be insulted if they, you thought they didn't know who Lewis Newberg was. He publishes a series of papers in 1930 based on, '30, '31, based on the one experiment with like seven patients, where he basically, uh, starves lean people and, uh, um, patients with obesity and says they lose weight at roughly the same rate when starved. Therefore, the obese people, [chuckles] God, I'm not making this up, got fat because they ate too much. Um, th-this, he saw this as, uh, uh, refuting the conventional, the, this hormonal regulatory hypothesis. Nobody's ever done an experiment in obesity before. So Newberg's papers begin to be taken as gospel. And even though there are European researchers, particularly Julius Bauer, who's one of the pioneers of the science of endocrinology at the University of Vienna in Austria, which, uh, the Germans and Austrians at this period of time are the sort of, uh, apex of the, the, the height of medical science. He's writing that this is naive and, um, can't possibly be right based on a series of, you know, uh, what I think are very logical and undeniable observations. Even back in 1920, as soon as Newberg publishes his article, uh, Bauer co-authors an article, the first thing he ever writes in English, explaining why Newberg's argument is inane, uh, this idea that people get fat 'cause they take in more calories than they expend. Um, 1938, the first animal model of obesity is, um, pioneered at, uh, uh, the laboratory of, uh, of a fellow named Ranson, the leading neuroanatomist of the era, and by his graduate student, Albert Hetherington. And they take, uh, what's called a stereotaxic instrument, where you could use it to direct a needle into the brain of an animal, and it'd been used on dogs. Hetherington pioneers so he could use it on rats, and he can reproducibly create obesity if they lesion the ventromedial hypothalamus of the rat. Hetherington has a... He's a postdoc. Uh, there's a fellow postdoc at the lab named John Brobeck, who, 1939, gets a job to go back to Yale to go to get the gets accepted at Yale for medical school. He's got his doctorate. He goes back to New Haven. He needs to get a job to help finance medical school. Uh, he gets a job in a laboratory, and he realizes there's a stereotaxic instrument, and he can do the same experiments that Hetherington did. And Brobeck starts doing the DMH lesion experiments at Yale. And Brobeck comes, creates what he believes he discovers, what he calls, um, hyperphagic obesity. So you lesion the VMH of the rat, the rat gets obese, and it gets w- crazy hungry. And so you now have the association between hunger and obesity.
- PAPeter Attia
I- I've read that the rats got so hungry that even as you're, um, taking the anesthesia off them, they're basically trying to eat as they're coming out of anesthesia.
- GTGary Taubes
It's like they're g- ... The way I, I interviewed recently a researcher who did these experiments in the '70s. He, he compared it to gasping for breath. So, like, if you are drowning and you suddenly come up above the water and you're going [gasps] , the animals are eating like that. And it's a fascinating observation 'cause you can explain it pretty easily. And in fact, if you don't allow the anesthesia to wear off, if you allow the animal to eat while it's still under the influence of the anesthesia, it, it might choke to death, and they often did. And so the researchers had to learn to give the animal a couple hours despite its evident starvation. Um, Brobeck has read Newberg, okay? So Brobeck interprets this, these experiments as, um, "I created hyperphagia, extreme hunger in the animals. That's the discovery, and the animal got obese. The fact that the animal got obese because it was hyperphagic is just boring. Animals get fat 'cause they eat too much. I know that 'cause that's what Newberg says." Um, back in Chicago
- 2:21:47 – 2:32:37
The evolving understanding of the role of fat metabolism in obesity and weight gain;
- GTGary Taubes
at Ranson's lab, Hetherington and Rans-
- PAPeter Attia
Let's pause for one sec because that's a very important point, right? I think this gets to something you've already talked about twice, but I wanna make sure the reader doesn't miss the subtlety of this, or the listener rather. Um, the observation is undeniable. If you lesion the part of the brain in question, the animal eats in an uncontrolled manner.
- GTGary Taubes
Right.
- PAPeter Attia
However, if your incoming hypothesis is that overeating leads to obesity, you will interpret it as lesioning that part of the brain leads to overeating. If your hypothesis is that fat accumulation, dysregulated fat accumulation leads to obesity, you would interpret that finding as lesioning that part of the brain leads to dysregulated fat accumulation, which then causes overeating. And that's a-
- GTGary Taubes
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... that's a very subtle difference. And, uh, I try to be fair to the people of the era to see how easy it could be to make that mistake, right?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, and now let's put it in the context of remember the cold fusion. What's your control?
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
So if your hypothesis is that eating too much causes obesity, okay, in these animals when they're lesioned, the proper control is control for the eating too much. So what I was gonna say, back in Chicago, Hetherington and Ranson had animals that got obese independent of the hyperphagia. So some of their animals got fat anyway. Actually, some of Brobeck's animals also got fat despite not eating any more than lean animals.
- PAPeter Attia
Did he ever pair feed his animals with l- with non-lesioned animals?
- GTGary Taubes
Um, Brobeck did. He did an experiment where he pair fed them with... I forget it. Yeah, uh, non-lesioned animals. And if I remember correctly, it was a dozen animals. Nine of them manifested, uh, did not get that much fat, did not get fatter, but three of them did despite being pair fed. So Brobeck, because he had a preexisting hypothesis, assumed that there must have been something wrong with these three animals, or he did the lesion incorrectly, or maybe they were eating at different times. So he left them out of the analysis. He mentions it in their paper, but they're the counterargument. They're the evidence for this counterhypothesis, which something about the lesion dysregulates fat accumulation.
- PAPeter Attia
But then why did nine of them not-
- GTGary Taubes
And the hyperphagia
- PAPeter Attia
... why did, why did... What do, what do you think explains the other nine?
- GTGary Taubes
Oh, Christ. Um, you can imagine that if you dysregulate the fat... So let's say we take a animal that, uh, normally would grow naturally, and we create, uh, a dysregulation in their fat tissue such that it's going to store excess fat. It might not be able to do that if you restrict its calories. It's that simple. So that's the idea that, you know, we both know, we all know from personal experience we can lose weight by starving ourselves. So we can somehow starve our f- our, our predisposition to get fatter by restricting the foods, the amount of food we eat. But the question is, you know, what we wanna know is the animals that the, the, the, the counterargument to the hyperphagia causes obesity evidence is obesity being caused in the absence of hyperphagia, okay? So what Ranson and, uh, Hetherington argued is Hetherington... Ranson was a leading neuroanatomist of the day. He had just come from studying diabetes insipidus. And in diabetes insipidus, you can also cause it by lesioning a different part of the hypothalamus. You have animals that are, um, uh, what's the They're extremely thirsty. I forget the technical term.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah
- GTGary Taubes
The hyper-
- PAPeter Attia
I, I don't recall actually. I'm blanking on it, but yeah
- GTGary Taubes
Anyway
- PAPeter Attia
... endless thirst.
- GTGary Taubes
They pee a lot. Yeah. So like any di- they have endless thirst, and they're peeing constantly. So the conventional thinking might be the reason they're so th- peeing so much-
- PAPeter Attia
Is because they're drinking so much
- GTGary Taubes
... is because they're so thirsty.
- PAPeter Attia
Right.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, and the counter-hypothesis is that the thirst is a response. The, the, the lesion c- causes them to pee constantly. They're losing body water. That makes them thirsty. So-
- PAPeter Attia
Which by the way is what... That, that's become unequivocally the case. We now know that-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... diabetes insipidus is the result of the loss of the hormone called, uh, a, uh, antidiuretic hormone or DDAVP. And so the-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... the, the hyperdrinking-
- 2:32:37 – 2:38:30
Mutant mice experiments giving way to competing theories about obesity;
- GTGary Taubes
leptin's an interesting story in this way also.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, I was about to say, how, how do the ob/ob mice also give us a clue into what-- into both ways to interpret the same observation?
- GTGary Taubes
Okay. So the, uh, ob/ob and the db/db mice.
- PAPeter Attia
Tell people what they are. Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. So the ob/ob mouse is a mouse that's discovered at the Jackson Laboratories in Maine, and it is a, a, [clears throat] has a, a, a... It's a mutant that manifests, uh, obesity, uh, dramatic obesity. And, uh, there turns out there's two different, uh... Depending on what strain you breed these animals into, the db/db mouse is diabetic, obese and diabetic. The ob/ob mouse is just obese. Um, the work is done at the Jackson Laboratory. Uh, what's interesting is the assumption is always right that these animals get fat, that they're missing some kind of satiety hormone. Uh, the theories through the 1950s based on Newberg's work and this idea that obese people get fat not 'cause they partition fuel preferentially into fat tissue, but because they take in more energy than they expend. The, the dominant-- The only hypotheses of obesity in the 1950s, there's a lipostat hypothesis from a guy named Kennedy and a glucostat hypothesis from Jean Mayer. There's a kind of thermostat hypothesis with body heat. They're all hypotheses trying to explain eating too much in the animal.
- PAPeter Attia
And none of these pan out?
- GTGary Taubes
[chuckles] Well, none of these-- Not only they not pan out, you've got these animals that get obese. If you think they're caused by eating too much, again, what's the correct control? Just pair feed the animal. Don't let the animal eat more than a lean animal. So this experiment is done numerous times with leptin, uh, the ob/ob mice. If you take a lean animal, measure how much it's eating, give half of that to the ob/ob mouse, so you're literally semi-starving it-
- PAPeter Attia
It still gets fat
- GTGary Taubes
... it gets obese anyway.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. And the fellow who did, uh, one of the fellows who published these results is Douglas Coleman. But anyone who's ever done this experiment... Coleman, uh, [lip smack] Jeff Friedman, uh, gets credit for doing the work that identified leptin as a hormone that's missing in the ob/ob animal or dysfunctional, and he did it based on Coleman's parabiosis experiments at Jackson Lab with the ob/ob and db/db animals. So Jeff Friedman comes along. He's a young, ambitious researcher. He wants to look for the obesity hormone, the satiety hormone that's missing in the ob/ob mice. He comes with this assumption [lip smack] that what's missing is a signal from the fat tissue to the brain telling the brain not to eat too much. When he discovers leptin, he interprets that signal as being the satiety hormone. It's been identified as the satiety hormone ever since. Uh, when people write books with titles like "The Hungry Brain," they're assuming that the absence of leptin makes a brain hungry. The person gets hungry, eats too much, and that's why they get fat. And yet, you always have this observation in the field that the animal gets fat even when it's, uh, half-starved. Basically, the ob/ob, db/db animals completely confirm the hormonal regulatory disorder, fuel partitioning disorder. The point is, you know, I'm doing this book on diabetes now. I was, I was curious, what is it about the db/db animal? Why would, uh, the absence of a leptin receptor as opposed to the absence-
- PAPeter Attia
Absence of the hormone. Yeah
- GTGary Taubes
... of this leptin signal cause diabetes? And I never really thought about it. Um, and so you look into the literature. We actually asked Rudy Leibel, and Rudy said, "Well, it's, it's just, it's a background dependent." It's the same-- Basically, it depends what background you breed the animal onto. And, uh, you know, on a particular breed, you get this diabetic animal. Then I went back, and I found where Douglas Coleman discussed it. And so the issue is both animals are obese. Both animals are hyperinsulinemic from weaning onward. Okay? So in the db/db animals, the background strain can't sustain the hyperinsulinemia, so its pancreas fails, and you manifest frank diabetes. The ob/ob strain can continue to keep pumping out the necessary insulin. But now you've got leptin basically triggering hyperinsulinemia, and it's always been known these animals are hyperinsulinemic, and now you're back to the hypothesis that insulin, you know, the Bauer-Ranson hypothesis. I didn't say, by the way, that when Ranson and Hetherington interpreted the data the way they did, they cited Julius Bauer. So Brobeck cites Newberg. He's got a preconceived opinion, and Ranson had his own preconceived opinion based on the diabetes insipidus work, and Julius Bauer's paper supported that. But We and then we grew up with one hypothesis, which is the Brobeck eating too much hypothesis, and it influenced how the leptin work was interpreted. It's influenced virtually every experiment afterwards. And then somebody like me comes along and says, "Well, wait a minute. All this evidence supports the alternative hypothesis, and you have not been considering that for 60, 70 years. How can you even trust anything you've done when you weren't aware that there was a competing hypothesis?" It's an awkward place
- 2:38:30 – 2:45:19
How Gary thinks about the findings that do not support his alternative hypothesis about obesity;
- GTGary Taubes
to be in.
- PAPeter Attia
Now, your work has brought a lot of attention to this alternative hypothesis over the past decade, and there have been a number of people who have tried to test it. Um, how would you reconcile the findings that have, have not demonstrated, um, what one would be... What, what, what would be predicted by the carbohydrate insulin model?
- GTGary Taubes
Well, [sighs] and this then gets into the kind of questions we talked about earlier about judging the value of the experiments, how rigorously they're done, and, uh, the biases and preconceptions of the researchers. So, and again, I've been having these arguments on Twitter this week, and I have to stay the hell off Twitter. Um, waste of time. You know, and you know this. We funded these people at NuSi. We funded two groups of researchers, one, uh, who was inherently basically had a hypothesis, uh, that dietary fat and fat balance was a driver of obesity. And we... And one that had a carbohydrate insulin model like we did. And, uh, the researchers who believed the conventional wisdom, uh, interpreted their results, uh, as supporting the conventional wisdom and refuting the carbohydrate insulin model. And the researchers who supported, believed the carbohydrate insulin model interpreted their results as supporting that model.
- PAPeter Attia
So, so let's pause there for a second because I simply don't see how this field can make any progress, and I'm trying to understand how this field can make progress in a way that physics does when, as you point out, everybody in this field is biased, everybody has a point of view, and everyone seems to do experiments that simply confirm their point of view. Um, it, it strikes me as a very difficult... And, and, and, and here's... There's one other thing that makes this more difficult, which is the inherent messiness of biology, right? Um, and I s- it's messy for several reasons, right? It's messy because it's, a- as, as complicated as physics is, I think biology is more complicated. We don't have a standard model of biology the way we have a standard model of physics, so there are more unknown unknowns in biology. And then secondly, the experiments are far more difficult to control. I think there's more noise in the biologic experiments. And then you couple that with everything we just said, I just don't understand what a path forward looks like towards a reconciliation.
- GTGary Taubes
Well, yeah. I don't know if reconciliation is the word you're looking for. You wanna know which hypothesis is right, and we're now in effect recapitulating the-
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, I mean a scientific reconciliation
- GTGary Taubes
... discussions.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. Uh, we're recapitulating the discussions we had, whatever, 8, 10 years ago now when NuSi was starting. Um, the first thing you have to do... So I was thinking about this 'cause, you know, one of my favorite stories is back around 2009 after "Good Calories, Bad Calories" came out. I was invited to lecture at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, which is the largest obesity research center in the country, uh, academic. And I gave my, uh, this lecture, Why We Get Fat, uh, Adiposity 101, and I suggested that the energy balance hypothesis thinking was, as I like to say, not even wrong, stealing from Wolfgang Pauli, and then why all the reasons why it should be replaced with this hormonal regulatory disorder focusing on, um, uh, insulin. And after my talk, one of the faculty raised his hand very politely, a gentleman who was probably then as old as I am now, maybe 65, and he said, "Excuse me, Mr. Taubes, would it be correct to assume that you think we are all idiots?"
- PAPeter Attia
[chuckles]
- GTGary Taubes
Because the argument I was making is that they embrace the wrong paradigm. And it was a tough question 'cause partially the answer, I wanna say, "Well, that's one way to look at it." Um, I can't say that. So what I said to them is, "I think the problem here is that when you entered the field, there was a paradigm, a way of thinking about obesity that seemed intu- so intuitively obvious, this idea that it's an energy balance disorder, that you never questioned it. And certainly your, you know, your mentors didn't question it, and so you were... assumed this had been well-tested and well-proven and, you know, uh, unambiguous and that it deserved to be dogma, and it hadn't been and it didn't, and that's been a problem ever since." Um, now we come along 50 years later, 40 years later, and we have to get people to, a huge proportion of the community to entertain the possibility that their fundamental belief system is wrong. So this isn't a subtle shift in thinking. This is you're operating under the wrong paradigm. You think the Earth is flat and it's round, or you think the Earth rotates... the sun rotates around the Earth, but it's the other way around. Um, 99.9999, throw in as many nines as you want, percent of the time people say that they're quacks.
- PAPeter Attia
So why are you not?
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, that's a good question. I often argue this with m- my old friend, our old colleague, Mark Friedman, and Mark says, "Well, we're not because we're right." And I say, "Well, every quack thinks they're right, Mark. That's not evidence that we're not quacks."
- PAPeter Attia
That's the same tautology that you argue against, uh, yeah.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. Well, the other argument is an even better one. I'm not a doctor, so technically I can't be a quack. The best I could, uh, hope for is whack job. Um-
- PAPeter Attia
I, I would offer a more compelling reason if you're, if you turn out to not be a quack, which is the application of the current model is failing Um, that's probably the most compelling reason to continue to question it, I would say, right? So in other words, if we, if we believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and every time we tried to launch a rocket into space, it blew up because we failed to understand gravity and orbits-
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah
- PAPeter Attia
... I would hope we would then say, "God, what if the Earth is actually moving even though it doesn't feel like it?" Um-
- GTGary Taubes
And that's how... That's the, uh, that, that's where all these discussions start. It's where we, you know, the new C things start. Look, failure to prevent obesity, failure to treat obesity, the obesity and diabetes epidemics are out of control. Let us question these fundamental hypotheses. How do we test them? Um, you know, I'm thinking at the moment, having done that and moved to the next stage where we now have competing researchers arguing. You know, one says, "I'm right," the other says, "I'm right." I side with the one who thinks like I
- 2:45:19 – 2:57:30
Challenges with addressing the obesity and diabetes epidemics, palatability and convenience of food, and other hypotheses;
- GTGary Taubes
do. Um, how do we get people to care? How do we move this? It's still this issue. How do you get to move it outside the diet issue as we discussed over the years? There's a lot of, uh... You know, the, the conventional wisdom comes with a lot of explanations for why people don't lose weight on various dietary interventions, and some of those are, are true. You know, people don't comply with interventions. They... Like dude, nobody sticks with the diet, so maybe everybody's different. And so maybe we have to invest huge sums into individual... What's the buzzword now for individualized nutritional therapy?
- PAPeter Attia
Precision nutrition.
- GTGary Taubes
Um, yeah. That's, that's the way the NIH is going. So the idea is, well, these people are arguing it's carbohydrates. Yeah, we don't believe that, so we're not gonna spend any money researching that. We... There are people believing it's fat, and there are people who think it's meat. Um, in an ideal world, and we discussed this for eight years, right? The federal government would say, "We... COVID is gonna pass, and obesity and diabetes are gonna go back to being the long pole," is using NASA terminology. They're, they were costing a billion dollars a year in direct medical costs. We have to understand how we failed because we have to stop blaming it on industry and blaming it on the individuals. And so let us put together teams of researchers, red teams, blue teams, multiple colors [chuckles] and hash this out and try and figure out how we failed to control these epidemics. And until we do that, we're not gonna reject any reasonable hypothesis.
- PAPeter Attia
But how would you even populate said teams? I mean, to your point, there really aren't that many people that would still stand by this idea that you propose.
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, yeah. No, it's a, uh [chuckles] ... I mean, if we're gonna get practical here, Peter, um, we're not gonna make any progress whatsoever. Uh, the, uh... Yeah, uh, you know, in my, my dreams it like, it's like, uh, uh, uh, populating a jury in a, in a trial. You pick people, unbiased scientists who are good at what they do, have demonstrated that they're good at what they do. You can't pick obesity researchers 'cause they have biases. Uh, you certainly can't pick nutritionists 'cause they have biases, and they m- I question whether any of them are ever taught to think critically enough about scientific res- uh, progress. Um, and y- you know, they treat it like we did... I mean, think about the kind of effort that went into COVID, the amount of money that was spent on research to prevent, you know, this disease from killing, what, one-tenth of the number of people who die from a chronic diseases related to obesity and diabetes every year. I mean, I'm not... I'm glad they did it, but you make that kind of effort, you can solve this problem. But step one is saying, "Look, we failed." The conventional wisdom fails. It's clear it fails because we have obesity and diabetes epidemics that haven't been stemmed in any way. We have to question our assumptions. Let's go back and look at... We, we did. If the... You know, who, who actually does that job? There's a lot of very intelligent critical thinkers out there. The question is, how do you get them to care?
- PAPeter Attia
N- now, some of them would argue that, hey, we know the answer, and the, the palatability of food, the availability of food, the affordability of food are driving this equation, and the convenience of modern life is making inactivity even a, a greater-
- GTGary Taubes
Right
- PAPeter Attia
... and greater issue. And, and so i- you might argue, well, look, we haven't put all the steps in place to address those issues. This answer is going to be one through policy. We have to make foods that don't taste as good, that aren't... You know what I mean? Like, we... You know, like I'll give you a funny story.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, yeah.
- PAPeter Attia
Like my, my son came home the other day and he said, "Mommy, um, one of the kids at school today had something for school, and I really want it too." And she was like, "Okay, what, what is it?" He's like, "I don't know. It w- it came in a blue bag, and it was a triangle." And of course it was Cool Ranch Doritos. So what does Jill go and do? She goes and buys Cool Ranch Doritos for Reese for lunch for a little snack. And you know, m- uh, he's got a... This is not a kid who, who... This is a kid who really likes to eat good food. And, and so every day he gets a little Ziploc with like five Cool Ranch Doritos. The problem is I can't eat just five Cool Ranch Doritos. So the other day I'm inhaling half a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and all I'm thinking is this is almost as impressive as the Apollo 11 program. Like from an engineering perspective, like the way they made this thing, the crunch, the taste, the lingering flavor, it's unbelievable. Like there's no denying how good this stuff is. So why did I just sit there and eat a whole bag of that thing?
- GTGary Taubes
You know, that's a very good question. Okay? But here's the counterargument. Uh, I gave a talk a couple months ago in Tahoe, and it was just as the ability to give talks in person was winding down. And the fellow who invited me to give the talk, he's from Texas, afterwards sent me a gift box of, uh, Wagyu steaks from a, a butcher in New York. And these are the Wagyus that cost, uh, it's about $170 a pound. Okay? And, um, like one of them was called Wagyu sashimi.
- PAPeter Attia
[laughs]
- GTGary Taubes
And the other Wa... And they, they... It's just, it's, it's... You're just looking at it, you know it's by weight as much fat as protein, and by calories and farm, you know-
- PAPeter Attia
Right
- GTGary Taubes
... it's gonna be 80% fat. And I actually made one of these for lunch, and I looked up how to do it. So you get the skillet and you use the fat on the edge-
- PAPeter Attia
Yep
- GTGary Taubes
... to grease the skillet and hot, and then it's a minute on each side, and it was eight ounces, and I couldn't finish it. It was so filling. My son Harry said... [laughs] He, he got a taste. He said, "This is, this is beef butter, Dad." Um, I still finished it. Okay? So it was delicious. However, even if I could afford it, w- I still have some in the freezer. I didn't... It wasn't like a Dorito issue. So yeah, it's not quite as accessible. But the question would then be, is it did I get fatter? Did I somehow dysregulate my fat tissue by eating that the way you might be doing eating the Dorito? And then of c- you know, we can go back and forth. Did, did you... Uh, why is the... Is it Dorito? Is it the palatability that drives your particular hyperphagia, or is it the peripheral response to the macronutrient composition that then drives your hyperphagia when it comes to Doritos?
- PAPeter Attia
I mean, I just think if you look at the response time, it has to be more central than peripheral, right? I mean, it's barely-
- GTGary Taubes
Uh, on one level-
- PAPeter Attia
... exiting my esophagus while I'm inhaling these things.
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah, yeah. No. But, but still the response is going to be a response to an expected peripheral change. So, you know, your body is, uh, evolution and homos- homeostasis are very good at what they do. They know what's about to happen, so they're gonna prepare your body for that to happen. Um, but then we go back to, and we've had... You know, think about your experience when you were 205 pounds and swimming, working out three hours a day, and eating as healthy as any human being could eat. And the question is, again, why then, and what's changed between then and now? And that wasn't a Dorito induced effect. So are there other... You know, this idea that some people are just gonna get fat are pre-programmed. The, the quote is from a George Bernard Shaw play, uh, I forget which one at the moment, where the, one of the leads says, you know, "Some of them are just, we're just gonna get fat no matter how much we eat." So if that's the case, what's tr- what triggers that? The Doritos, I would say, trigger it, whereas the Wagyu, which is far more calories, does not. Um, how do we get people to care? How do you get people... Whether right or wrong, there's a lot of people... Clearly, the conventional wisdom is what you just argued. We know what causes it. It's too much food available. It's very easy to blame industry. You know, Michael Moss has done... He's written two terrific books that get a lot of publicity 'cause he's blaming industry. He's not blaming the scientists. He's not blaming the administrators of the government. He's blaming the industry. Nobody has to... You know, it's very easy. When I was blaming the industry, people love what I do. As soon as I shift to blaming the scientific community for doing unacceptable science, then I have trouble finding, you know, with getting the message heard. Um, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. You know? It's something I think about every day. How when people are programmed to assume you're wrong, how do you get them to accept the possibility that you're not and that somebody has to study this? Um, and I don't know what the answer is. I do know it's the challenge. I, you know, said this before during the NuSI years. It's like you decide you're gonna tilt at windmills for life. You gotta get used to the fact that the windmills are gonna kick you in the ass when you ride by.
- PAPeter Attia
I don't know. I think people do care, Gary. I, I mean, I guess it depends how you define care, right? I, uh, people certainly care about obesity. I, I, I guess, are you really asking the question not how do we get people to care, but how do we get people to question?
- GTGary Taubes
I'm asking, yeah, how do we... And by people, I mean, uh, people in a position of authority.
- PAPeter Attia
Mm-hmm.
- GTGary Taubes
Okay? So who are in the, have the ability to, uh, put the necessary funds and effort towards, uh, addressing this question. And I think one of the problems is that, uh, the way we fund research in this country, for instance, is a kind of, uh, you know, you get together, uh, study groups of, um, mostly like-minded individuals, and they give out small... These are all the issues we discussed at NuSI. Um, they give out small R01 grants of $500,000 a year for five years to do, um, you know, uh, what, uh, Kuhn would have called normal science. So we have our conventional wisdom, our dominant paradigm. We're just going to continue to fund the whatever research people happen to do, uh, to, you know, uh, create bricks to fit in that, uh, paradigm. We don't... There is no method by which paradigms are questioned and research programs can shift. There's an assumption that it could happen naturally The science is self-correcting, but it's the, the way we fund research in this country doesn't actually allow that to happen. Uh, if there's money to be made, then capitalism will kick in and people will take advantage of the opportunities that other people might be missing. Um, and that's why you have operations like Virta Health, which is doing very well, uh, you know, advocating, uh, you know, using nutritional ketosis to treat type 2 diabetes. And you have other people who have started operations, you know, like Diet Doctor to... But, um, there is no mechanism. So when I say people, I mean like how do I get Francis Collins to care? And a journalist in living in Oakland talking on a podcast, you know, it's just, it's so many levels from, uh, influence. And even if you did get him to care, could you get the NIH to do anything about it? To say...
- 2:57:30 – 3:02:06
Challenging the energy balance hypothesis, and the difficulty of doing good nutrition studies;
- GTGary Taubes
And this is, uh, we're having this conversation the day after there was an article in "Science" by two researchers who we know very well arguing that this carbohydrate insulin model of obesity is just wrong. It failed. It was interesting. We tested it. It failed. That's what we were talking about when we discussed why not... How do I reconcile my beliefs with that? Um, my response was, you know, "Okay, you leave out these people who tested it and that supported the model. Um, you're looking at only a small proportion of the evidence here. Uh, but even if you're right, we have a problem. You've avoided the elephant in the living room, which are the obesity and diabetes epidemics. What do we do about it?"
- PAPeter Attia
So, so the, the paper that came out yesterday, uh, by, by John Speakman and, and Kevin Hall is, is, you know, a relatively short paper, but an interesting, you know, summation of, of what would be viewed as a possible refutation of this carbohydrate insulin model. I, I think of it less as a, a public health paper. I don't see them trying to address obesity, and I don't see them offering or proposing to offer a solution to obesity. Um, but I, I think they're really trying to understand a mechanistic thing. And, and I, I don't know John, but I do know Kevin. And, um, uh, my, my view of Kevin is this is a guy who came in as an outsider, so he has at least the benefit of not having some of the, the limitations that, that others might have who have come up through the field without kind of the historical context. And while, um, maybe Kevin doesn't have that historical context just as, as, as no one would, at least he came in, I think, as a physicist kind of looking at this from, from first principles, uh, which, which you could argue could be an advantage to him, right?
- GTGary Taubes
Yeah. And in, in fact, uh, if you'll recall, that's how I was introduced to Kevin by Mitch Lazar at Penn because he thought we saw the problem in similar ways, which we did back then. Um, and then I introduced him to you because, you know, he's a, a smart, uh, young on- uh, researcher with, yeah, without biases at the time. Um, through the course of our interaction with the Energy Balance Consortium, I think we, you know, uh, our belief system, uh, it gets complicated. The, uh... If you'll recall, his, uh, initial claim to, uh, uh, fame as a researcher, what got him his position at NIH, uh, as I understand it, is the, the model that he has of, uh, uh, metabolism and how that influences body weight. And at one point, I had asked him to... You know, he had suggested we could use his model to test my beliefs, and, uh, his model rejected them. And [chuckles] I argued, "Well, you've rejected them because we're working in an area that your model has no data. So why don't we do the experiment to generate that data?" And before Nusi hired him, I was arguing to Kevin that he could do this experiment with an NM 1 or 2 at NIH with the metabolic chamber. Um, anyway, so that's, uh... You know, as soon as they started interpreting their experiment, remember the idea of one of the f- fundamental, uh, problems with, uh, pathological science is you, you sort of establish what you believe based on premature data. So you don't... Rather than, uh, entertaining multiple hypotheses as possible explaining what you see, you kind of collapse down onto one, and then you go public with that prematurely, and now you're trying to support that hypothesis rather than test that hypothesis. So once Kevin started to interpret the evidence from the Energy Balance Consortium as supportive of or as a refutation of the carbohydrate-insulin model, I think it's basically... And supportive of his mo- his computer model. I think it basically, um, began to create his bias and lock it in. Then the more conflict he and I had, you know, which you witnessed, the more that, uh, locked in his bias as it might have locked in mine. The other possibility is that he's just right and I'm wrong, which, you know, if we could do more experiments, we might find out.
Episode duration: 3:13:03
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Transcript of episode 8js28V95flc
