Taubes Good Calories Bad Calories - A Lost Opportunity?

I recently got a copy of the new Gary Taubes book, Good Calories Bad Calories, which a lot of us have been waiting for with high hopes.

Alas, this was not the book I had hoped it would be. Taubes has done a heroic job of studying and analyzing the history of 75 years worth of dietary research. No one with a shred of intellect can read this book without coming away convinced that the Politics of Personality caused nutritional research to go where the data never led it and to spend 40 years wandering in that high carb/low fat desert.

But the Taubes book is 600 pages of some of the densest writing I've encountered in a long life of reading popular science. How dense? Well, I managed to sprain a finger reading it, that was how heavy it was. And the prose is just as dense as the paper. Long convoluted sentences that just don't come up for air, and explanations of technical issues so impenetrable that they left me scratching my head trying to figure out what the heck was he talking about.

And I'm someone who reads a lot of big fat information dense books. For example, I just this week read, and loved Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver by Arthur Allen which covered as much controversial medical research history as Taubes does and was a similar length.

But where I was reading the Allen book with the kind of excitement with which I read a good detective story, because Allen made his line of argument very clear no matter how much data he introduced, with the Taubes book every fifty pages or so I found myself taking deep gulping breaths and skimming despite myself because Taubes had just plain buried me under the weight of his data.

And if I had that reaction--a person who reads at least a dozen health and nutrition research reports every week and often more--I cannot imagine what Joe Public would make of this book. Indeed, as someone who led a long and happy career in nonfiction publishing I am bewildered as to who exactly it was written for. To me it seemed as if the target reader was envisioned to be someone who reads Science at the breakfast table and then digs into Nature on the train to work. If there are enough of those folks to make this book a success, I'm all for it.

But my impression just looking at the title, cover and packaging is that Good Calories Bad Calories is being marketed to the diet book buyer. Who is going to get about 25 pages into this book and then fall dead from exhaustion.

That is probably why it is looking like this book is only getting discussed online by the hard core diet wonks who already know what it is that Taubes is trying to document: that the mainstream dietary advice that blames saturated fat for heart disease and recommends a high carb/low fat diet as "healthy" was never based on good scientific research and that carbs in general and fructose in particular are probably what is causing the so called "obesity epidemic."

But if the only people reading the book are those who already know what it has to teach us, it's a failure. Which is tragic. Because its core message is VERY important. Fat has never been proven to do any of the things "everyone knows" it does and high carb/high sugar diets are just plain killing people.

If I had a buck for everyone who told me they are eating a low fat diet to lower their cholesterol and prevent heart disease I'd be rich. Ditto all the doctors convinced that saturated fat is what causes heart disease. Reading this book could cure that. But I can't see those people reading this book.

So I came away wishing that there was some way that Taubes could come up with "Taubes Lite"--a 250 page book that would extract the "pearls for practice" buried in his data and pitch that book to the person trying to figure out what a "healthy diet" might be. Something that would help people with diabetes understand why the ADA insistence that they should eat all the sugar they want is dangerous, and get the media to understand that obesity is not caused by overeating. It is caused by eating foods that short circuit the metabolic systems our body uses to keep our weight in homeostasis, foods high in carbs and fructose.

But it ain't going to happen with this book, and that's a damn shame.