In 2012, he moved into advocacy by co-founding a nonprofit, the Nutrition Science Initiative, with the aim of supporting high-quality nutrition studies to give us firmer answers to questions like the ones he explores in the book.īut the NuSI work has been more difficult than Taubes anticipated, and he has attracted criticism for what some view as reductionist arguments and cherry-picked science. (As Michael Pollan put it: 'I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition.”) He built his reporting career on being skeptical of the research community, particularly researchers in nutrition science. Taubes is no stranger to pushing controversial ideas about nutrition: He has championed the high-fat, low-carb diet - an approach scientists are fervently debating but one that has already had a big impact. (By sugar, he’s mainly focused on the refined crystals and high-fructose corn syrups that sweeten much of our food and drink these days.) Ideally, Taubes says, we should eliminate sugar from our diets - or at least treat the decision to munch on sweets with the same gravity as smoking or drinking alcohol.

In his newest book, The Case Against Sugar, he argues that it’s actually the sweet stuff in our food that’s the most probable cause of the parallel obesity and diabetes epidemics today (as well as contributing to heart disease, cancer, stroke, high blood pressure, and even dementia). Gary Taubes, the enfant terrible of nutrition writing, has long been making the case that that’s wrong. For years, the conventional wisdom about diet has been that we get fat because we eat too many calories.

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes