The History Of Sugar And Its Health Impacts

An interesting interview with Gary Taubes:

In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction. You end up with, I’m going to beat this metaphor to death, but sort of a house of cards. And there will be no way to go back on it. In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you’ve now got these enormous institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the institutions to change their belief systems?

The British Medical Journal is running a series on nutrition policy, and their way of dealing with it is by assigning writers from these different belief systems. So I’m a co-author on an article on dietary fat, along with the former head of the Harvard nutrition department who thinks I’m the worst journalist he’s ever met and who does a form of science that I consider a pseudoscience.

It’s just nuts.

One thought on “The History Of Sugar And Its Health Impacts”

  1. Anybody interested in these topics should be paying attention to Peter Attia’s blog: https://peterattiamd.com

    Dr. Attia was working with Taubes at the Nutrition Science Initiative until recently, when Attia left to focus on his medical practice. Attia is an engineer-turned-MD who most definitely understands and applies the scientific method; his “the truth about cholesterol” series is required reading for anybody who wants to truly understand what’s really going on with dietary cholesterol (answer: not much), serum cholesterol (answer: ignore the standard blood tests), and heart disease.

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