Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes, a science journalist, contends that decades of low-fat dietary advice got the science wrong. His target is refined carbohydrates such as sugar, white flour and starches, which act on insulin, the hormone that governs fat storage, and which he links to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and also cancer. He traces how the older view that carbohydrates are fattening was dropped in the 1960s, once fat and cholesterol took the blame for heart disease. His evidence is biological, epidemiological and anthropological, including the experience of peoples whose traditional diets were high in meat or fat. The work rests on seven years of research and appeared in 2007; in Britain and Australia it is titled The Diet Delusion.

In an Amazon review, Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised Taubes as a true empiricist and described two readings of it, one for the diet and one as a record of the history of science.