Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar and What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?, argues obesity stems from hormonal metabolic defects—ignored post-WWII due to anti-German bias—rather than overeating, tracing sugar’s rise from 5 lbs/year in the 1800s to epidemic levels via industrialization and marketing like Dr. Pepper (1870s) and cereal mascots. Fructose drives fatty liver disease, while insulin signals fat storage, not just calorie excess; low-carb diets often break weight-loss plateaus despite individual variability. His 2002 NYT Magazine exposé on dietary fat sparked backlash but revealed Atkins’ success in improving heart health despite high saturated fat. Ultimately, sugar and processed grains disrupt metabolism globally, yet personal responses vary, challenging simplistic "calories in/out" models. [Automatically generated summary]
I've kind of consumed sugar most of my life until the last couple of years, and I slowly sort of tapered off, and about a year ago, maybe last February or so, I just pretty much cut it all out, except for the occasional dessert here or there.
Infinitely better quality of life.
I feel much better.
I have more energy and then I started really getting into it and then I came across your work and What I want to know is first of all, how did you get involved in this and how much resistance have you faced?
Okay, this being the sugar case this being the whole obesity diet nutrition We can get into all of it, but the Sugar one, to me, is absolutely fascinating when you go down.
You know, it's funny, because my kids live with this all the time, right?
We had just come back from spending the holidays with my grandmother, who pumps them up with sugar while we're there, and there's nothing I can do with it.
And then we get back, and I'm making my boys dinner.
They're 8 and 11, and my wife's out.
And after the dinner, my 8-year-old says, are we getting dessert?
Anyway, I got into this, you know, I Okay, I was a physics major in college.
I was like hard science, and then I wasn't any good at it.
I got a C- in quantum physics, and my advisor suggested I find another career.
So I went into journalism, started doing science writing in the early 80s because it was the only work I could get.
And then my first book, I went to live at CERN, the big particle accelerator lab outside of Geneva, and I was what we would call today embedded with the physicists.
And I thought I was going to be following and making this great discovery, which is what the Nobel laureate who ran the experiment was predicting.
And instead, I spent 10 months watching them figure out how they had screwed up, okay?
And it was a learning experience in how to do science right, and I was obsessed with how hard it is to do good science.
And I had a lot of the physicists in the world really didn't like this Nobel laureate, so they were happy to point out to me how he was screwing up, and how he had screwed up in the past, and how he had even screwed up the work that he won the Nobel Prize for.
After I came back, I thought that was actually page six in the New York Post when my book came out.
The headline was, Egghead Squabble Over Nobel Prize, and this Nobel laureate was quoted calling me an asshole in the newspaper, and I'm 29 years old, and I assume my career's over.
Well, because I ended up writing an expose about what a bad scientist he was and about the politics of science.
You know, I thought I was...
I went to Stockholm with this guy when he won the Nobel Prize.
I mean, we got our tuxes fitted together.
I was his guest at the Nobel dinner and the Nobel banquet and the party that follows, which is the most fun I've ever had in my life.
Students of Stockholm throw a party for the laureates, and it's...
Back then, it was crazy.
Anyway, so he was...
I'm justifiably pissed off that I just wrote what I saw instead of what a great man he thought he was.
And I thought my career was going to be over, right?
You're called an asshole in the papers when you're a 29-year-old journalist by a Nobel laureate.
But instead, everybody I would interview in science would say, oh, you think that guy was bad?
You should write about this guy.
And I just started covering different aspects.
And it turns out...
You could get a long way in science if you're willing to sort of cut corners.
It's not actually cheating.
It's just you could discover a lot of stuff if you're not willing to do the rigorous, hard, critical, skeptical work to demonstrate that what you say you've discovered is wrong.
Okay, so I wrote a book about something called Cold Fusion, which was a great scientific fiasco of the 20th century, except for the stuff I'm writing about now.
And some of my friends in the physics community said, if you're interested in bad science, the book was called Bad Science, they said you should look at the stuff in public health because it's terrible.
And so I moved into public health, beginning with this idea that electromagnetic fields from power lines will cause brain cancer or leukemia.
And everything I had learned about how rigorous and meticulous and skeptical and thoughtful you had to do to get the right answer in physics, the public health people didn't think you had to do.
They thought it was kind of a luxury because their science is harder.
And it is kind of harder.
You're dealing with, like, Chronic diseases that happen over decades, and people, and messy systems, and you can't measure anything.
And everything I had learned was that if you don't do this stuff, you get the wrong answer.
So by the late 90s, I had stumbled into nutrition research.
I was what's called a contributing correspondent and I needed a paycheck to pay my rent.
So I called my editor and I said, what do you got?
What kind of story could I turn over quickly?
And he said there was a diet study that was coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine in two weeks, and they wanted to do an article about it.
And what I didn't know was that this diet study had been leaked to science in advance.
And the person who had leaked it had given him a list of sources to talk to.
And who leaks a diet study, right?
And this was a DASH diet, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, which is the most...
Today, U.S. News& World Report says it's the healthiest diet in the world, based on You know, like force studies that did not demonstrate anything.
The way you do those stories as a journalist is you interview the principal investigator and you ask him who to talk to, and he gives you a couple names to talk to who can talk about the study even though it's published, and then you get three interviews, which is enough to justify a page in the magazine, and you get your paycheck.
So I interviewed the PI, and then I interviewed one of the people on the list of documents that had been leaked to science.
And that was a former president of the American Heart Association, and she told me she couldn't talk about the study or she'd lose her funding.
And I said, come on, man, this isn't Lysenko-era Soviet Union.
People don't lose their funding for talking to a journalist about a diet study.
And she refused to talk to me.
I said, let's go off the record, complete confidentiality.
If I'm going to miss the story, That you're not telling me that's bad.
Couldn't get her to talk.
And then I call one of the people that the PI told me to talk to.
And he sounded exactly like Walter Matthau on the other side of the telephone.
It was very weird.
And Walter starts yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and high blood pressure.
And I'm going, but Walter, I'm not calling about salt and high blood pressure.
I'm calling about this DASH diet coming out.
And he keeps going on.
There's no controversy.
There's no evidence that salt doesn't cause high blood pressure.
So I get off the phone.
I call up my editor.
I say, I'm going to finish the story.
But I had this former AHA president say she couldn't talk to me and she'd lose her funding.
And then I had Walter Matthau yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and high blood pressure.
There must be a controversy over whether salt causes high blood pressure, right?
So I'm going to turn this story in, pay my rent, and then I spent the next nine months doing an investigation for science.
I interviewed, I think, 85 sources for one magazine article.
Got paid for like six weeks.
Pissed off my fiancee at the time because she thought if she's going to date someone, they should have a better sort of, you know, work efficiency ratio.
The conclusion was that the only way you would believe that salt causes high blood pressure from the studies that had been done to that point was if God told you so personally.
So you could ignore all the evidence and all the randomized controlled trials, even the observational evidence, But that's what everyone had done.
And I had read a long time ago that that was bullshit.
And that salt is actually an essential mineral, and it's important for your body, and it doesn't cause high blood pressure, and there's a host of other factors that should be considered.
It was kind of intuitively, it was an interesting idea.
It made biological sense.
When you consume salt, you also have to take in water.
That's why they feed you pretzels and, you know, salty peanuts at bars because you want to take in liquids so that you can maintain the same sodium concentration in your blood because you're...
The cells, like the chemical reactions that drive your cells, are dependent on the sodium ratio in the cells.
So if you take in more salt, you're going to drink more fluid, and you're going to have more fluid in your circulation.
That's going to increase your blood pressure.
And it does happen in a very short term.
But the question is, is this a chronic cause of high blood pressure and hypertension?
And once the researchers decided it was, and these guys are terrible scientists.
I mean, I hate to say this, but in my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, in the epilogue, I point out, I say, you know, I never use the word scientist to describe any of these people doing research, except for a few specific examples, because they don't really understand what science is and how to do it.
And they weren't, to their defense, they just were never taught how to be scientists.
They were like physicians and scientists.
Nutritionists who, you know, had a sloppy scientific training and they thought it was easy and you get a hypothesis and you confirm the hypothesis.
And when they didn't confirm it, they thought it must be true anyway.
And then you find the data when people talk about cherry picking.
That means you find the data that does sort of confirm and you ignore the rest.
So, anyway, that was it.
I wrote this article.
It was called The Political Science of Salt.
You know, won some awards.
And while I was doing that, this Walter Matthau character took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, putting us on this low-salt diet, he took credit for getting us on the low-fat diet that we were all eating in the 90s.
And I got off the phone with them, called my editor of science, and I said, when I'm done writing about salt, I'm going to write about fat.
I have no idea what the story is, but this guy's clearly one of the five worst scientists I've ever interviewed in my life.
And everything I learned in my physics period was that bad scientists never get the right answer.
So I spent a year doing an investigation for the journal Science on dietary fat.
And that's why so much journalism is so shallow, is because if you're going to put in the time you get paid for, all you can do is a shallow job.
Nobody can afford to do that.
I actually had corporate jobs that allowed me...
You know, like writing speeches and press releases for IBM that, you know, I really hated doing, but that paid well.
Like, that was my corporate work, so I could do the pro bono stuff I cared about.
Anyway, that story was the same, unless God told you personally.
So, I end up doing this cover story for the New York Times Magazine called What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie, which came out July 2002. It was probably...
One of the top five most controversial articles they ever ran.
And the idea was, I wanted to see what caused the obesity epidemic.
That was what I pitched to the editor.
But we had this idea that you get fat from eating dietary fat.
That was actually the primary logic behind putting the country on low-fat diets.
They thought it might help heart disease, but they hadn't been able to show it in trials.
But they just assumed if we ate less fat, we'd lose weight, because fat's denser calories.
And there was always this competing hypothesis that had been buried and swept aside and ignored and, you know, inhibited, which was that the problem is the carbohydrates, particularly sugar and refined grains.
And so when I got this cover story, I got a big book advance.
Finally, I could afford to do the book I wanted.
It paid for four years of my life.
The book took five.
Again...
Same financial issues, but...
And I love it, because people accused me of, like, I was just going to write anything I could find for a paycheck, and I finally got a big paycheck, and so now...
One of the ideas there that emerged out of my research...
So even when I wrote the 2002 piece, I thought that we got fat because we ate too much.
You know, there's a line in that article, obesity, of course, is caused by consuming too many calories, more calories than we consume.
By the time I was done with this book, I thought that was one of the most inane scientific ideas that had ever come along.
I mean, it's almost incomprehensible to me.
Even though I know exactly the history of the idea and where it came from and why we believed it, it's just crazy naive.
So that's the one that I get the feedback on.
Because I'm out there saying, so 99% of obesity researchers and nutritionists and all our public health policy is based fundamentally on this concept that we get fat because we eat too much or we're too sedentary.
And what I was saying was not only is that naive and meaningless, it's a description, it's not an explanation, and we could go into that.
Clearly obesity is a hormonal metabolic defect, and in fact the best scientists of the world prior to World War II, the best, far and away the best medical science was done in Germany and Austria, in Europe.
Like the U.S. was a backwater of medical science until post-war.
It was a backwater of virtually all science.
And these guys had concluded that obesity had to be a metabolic hormonal defect.
But the American doctors were saying, oh man, saying obesity is hormonal is an excuse for fat people to not eat in moderation and run marathons like a saline people do.
And what I did is I brought that hypothesis sort of—it vanished with the war, literally evaporated with the war.
The German-Austrian medical community evaporated.
We wanted nothing to do with these researchers.
The Ivy League universities had policies in place to keep from being overrun by Jewish academicians from Europe.
So in physics, we embraced them because we had bombs to build and a Cold War to fight.
But in medicine and public health, we wanted nothing to do with them.
So this hypothesis evaporates.
And post-war, you get this creation of basically obesity research created de novo by these young doctors who have no scientific training, who are lean, who hate the Germans.
and so they're not going to quote the German literature, even if they read it.
And nutritionists who do animal research and never even study obese people, and you get this idea that it's a calorie overconsumption problem.
By the 1960s, the field is dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists who are studying ways to get obese people to just stop eating so damn much.
They didn't try to make them exercise back then.
That was a kind of torture they would push later.
So this was the thing I get feedback on.
This is where I'm saying, you know, the entire medical, nutritional, obesity, diabetes dogma is based on just a bad idea.
You know, a failed paradigm.
And, you know, who's going to accept that coming from a journalist?
So the answer is either, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm self-interested and I'm only making this up to get a paycheck or, you know, I'm just wrong.
When you see what's going on now where it's pretty much common knowledge that sugar is terrible for you and that added sugar is a huge factor in diabetes and hypertension and heart disease and obesity and it's pretty much across the board now.
Even though there are public health organizations that are now saying, you know, got to cut back on the sugar and putting limits on sugar consumption, the logic is still that it's just empty calories.
Because this is fascinating to me because I understand that there must be a guy like you who does what's kind of ridiculous and spends nine months on six weeks worth of pay and does that kind of shit because otherwise once an idea is clearly established and gets repeated like salt causes hypertension I mean, goddammit, if you ask the average person on the street, hey, does salt cause high blood pressure?
Oh, yeah.
They just say it because it's like sort of this peripheral idea.
They hear it in the distance.
They don't research it.
They don't really look into it very far other than maybe they read something somewhere at one point in time and then they just decide it's dogma.
It's sort of when you live in a community, in an institution where everybody believes exactly what you do.
And so the people you respect, I mean, think about it.
The people you respect are the people who think like you do, who agree with you on the important points because you think, oh, they're smart.
They get it just like I get it.
So institutions sort of...
Collect groupthink.
It's just a natural emergent phenomenon from institutions.
And now, if you look at the data, you're somebody like me and you come along and you say, I don't really buy this idea.
It's just empty calories.
So I'm going to look at the data and see what it says.
And now you try to convince You're friends that they're wrong, and now you're the heretic, and you're the one who's saying, and you know, you're getting in arguments with people, and they make people uncomfortable because you're trying to get them to change their minds about something they all believe.
And they've all been, you know, they're successful, they're promoted, they're leaders in their field because they believed this, and now you're telling them it's that.
And people do it.
But the this just keeps going and going and going, and even to the point...
I mean, just when my sugar book came out, there's a book called The Secret Life of Fat, written by a PhD, and it's...
It's as though everything I've done in the past 15 years just was never done.
Like somehow she managed to do an entire book on dietary fat where if anyone said to her, talk to Taubes, even if he's wrong, his ideas are worth hearing because they're provocative and interesting.
Effectively, it all comes back effectively to energy balance.
You could talk about overconsumption.
This is what dogmas do.
They reproduce themselves.
They continue to grow.
They're like tumors for that fact.
They basically fight off all challenges.
They absorb around them.
You know, so somebody starts saying it's something else.
Eventually, ideally, everything changes.
So we're definitely winning the sugar battle.
So in sugar, even though the official word is it's empty calories, we just have to consume less because they have this dogma that obesity is caused by consuming too many calories.
So the way that a food influences your body mass is through its caloric content or how much of those calories you digest and absorb because if it's got fiber, you'll excrete some.
And that's the wisdom.
If a calorie is a calorie, then the worst you could say about sugar is that it's empty calories.
It's got no vitamins and minerals, micronutrients attached, and so we consume too much of it.
People say it's the low-hanging fruit.
So it's not that it's uniquely toxic, because if it's uniquely toxic, if it actually causes disease, and we could talk about clearly what I'm saying it causes, Then a calorie isn't a calorie.
When you started doing this research and you started writing this book, The Case Against Sugar, when this was all unfolding in front of you, were you shocked?
I mean, is this something that you were saying, how am I, a guy who got a C plus and a C minus, sorry.
Okay, so I understood why, but it is weird, because again, you know, sometimes I was in Washington on my book tour, and I had dinner with the former chief science medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.
It's a very, you know, influential, high-ranking, successful man.
He's completely convinced that I'm wrong.
And I said, but you believe this thing that obesity is caused by eating too much, and you have no idea why you believe it.
So I can tell you exactly the history of that belief.
Just like if we were talking about relativity, we could go back to Einstein, and you would know about Einstein.
And even if we were talking quantum physics, we'd go back to Heisenberg and Schrodinger and, you know, Bohr, and you'd know about them.
But this belief that you're fundamentally arguing is right, you don't understand where it comes from, and I can tell you that.
And I'm going to give you the documents.
I'm going to give you the papers where it out-competes the hormonal metabolic idea.
And I'm going to give you the competing hypothesis that you didn't even know existed until you and I talked.
The problem, of course, is that if he agrees to this, and then he agrees that you're correct, everything that he's been saying up until now has been bullshit, and he's been misleading people.
Actually, when I was growing up, the estimate was 5% of the scientific community actually does good science, and the other 95% are sort of the chaff out of which you've got to get the wheat.
Yeah, I mean, it's a problem.
I used to joke, imagine the American Heart Association writing the press release to say, like, we were wrong about putting everybody on a low-fat diet, and it was a mistake, and we're sorry, and we apologize, and maybe we killed some of your relatives prematurely, maybe the reason you're fat and diabetic now is because of our advice, but...
It's an untenable, I mean, I'll say the same thing.
If I'm wrong in my book, I used to have this argument with my co-founder of this nutrition science initiative, this not-for-profit, and I'd say, you know what I'm saying?
If I'm wrong in the major arguments in this book, I mean, clearly I'm going to be wrong in some of the minor ones and, you know, Chip away here and their bad scholarship that I should have triple checked.
But if I'm wrong in the major arguments, I need a new line of work because I can't trust my judgment.
And everything I do as an investigative journalist is dependent on me being able to trust my judgment.
And if I'm wrong about this, like if I'm wrong about energy balance, I got to go sell shoes.
Well, I was asking you, first of all, what is it like to have this understanding that all of what's being told to the American people is wrong, and then you having this conversation with this guy.
And again, I was the first person who ever did it.
It's just that simple.
No one had ever done before what I'd done.
It was the timing.
First of all, I'm an obsessive researcher.
As you know, the 145 people I interviewed for the fat story for one magazine article, I just keep asking questions and probing and probing until every...
I also don't like writing, so it's a great research.
It's a procrastination tool.
But when I started this in 2002 and I got the money to do the book, the internet had come along.
And the internet made it possible to find every single primary source going back to the 19th century.
Like now you can almost download them.
But back then I had researchers, young students in Boston, New York, LA, whose only job was they'd get an email from me with 50 citations.
And then they'd go to the library and have to find all 50 and Xerox them and then ship them back to me.
Sometimes entire books from like You know, a 1917 diabetes textbook that I couldn't find or I couldn't buy.
And used bookstores had put their catalogs online.
So you could find all the books and, you know, some 1947 obesity conference.
The library that has it doesn't see any purpose for that anymore, so they basically give it to the local bookstore and you can buy it for seven bucks.
So I was able to recreate the history of obesity research from conference proceedings Where the only people doing research in the field would show up and they would present their findings and then they would do a proceedings of the findings and I could recreate all the thinking in the field and nobody had ever bothered to do it before.
And it's kind of, if they were good scientists they would have.
Because they would have been obsessed with where their beliefs came from, and they would have been questioning them, and one of the things they would have done is gone back to do all this to see if some assumption they believe is true is really based on fact.
But again, they didn't really know what science was.
They weren't all that curious, is one way to put it.
Well, and you also rely on, I mean, so they read the review articles.
And the reviewers, the editors of the journals want to get influential review articles.
So they ask influential people in the field to do the review articles.
And those people are very busy, but they're going to do it.
And they're going to basically, they became influential by believing the conventional wisdom and propagating the conventional wisdom.
When you have committees do investigations, so every five years you get the dietary, the USDA puts together a committee to reassess the dietary guidelines that they give out.
So the way that committees are formed, the USDA picks a very influential person, the most influential they get to be the head of the committee, and that's somebody who's believed that conventional wisdom has propagated their whole life.
That's how they became influential.
And that person picks people they respect To be on the committee, and of course the people they respect are the people who believe what they believe, because they're the ones who seem smart.
They're not the heretics, they're the believers.
So you end up with a, you start out just with a natural quest.
We want to know if the guidelines are correct.
And through this completely natural human process, you end up staffing the guide, creating a committee that's going to recapitulate the Convention of Wisdom.
Almost a hundred percent.
And it's just the way things happen.
You need people like me to come across every once in a while, assuming I'm right.
It's better when the people like me are right than when they're wrong, but you're going to get both types.
And we've got to come along.
We have to have the persistence, you know, to basically just keep doing what we do.
I was lucky that I also had this podium.
The New York Times Magazine editors trusted me and liked my work.
The science editors trusted me and thought I was really good so I could get in influential publications.
I didn't have to You know, publish, do a blog, and try to win people over.
But from their perspective, I mean, it's just, what do you do with someone like me?
And I argue, look, I've done this research.
You haven't.
I mean, another way to think about it, I once said, look, you know, we've got these obesity and diabetes epidemics worldwide.
So, again, one of the things I did in the case against sugar is I went back To find the very beginnings of the epidemic in the United States.
Because if you've got an epidemic, like if we had a Zika epidemic, Ebola, what do you do?
You don't try to figure out what's causing Ebola by looking at the patients who are getting off the airplane in Houston or showing up in the hospital in New Jersey.
You go back to Africa where it's densest and where it started and you could follow it to whatever animal got bit by whatever insect in whatever cave.
And that's a natural process of understanding an epidemic.
So you go back here, and you go back to the 19th century, and there are hospitals in the United States that, you know, date to pre-1850 or 1864 in the case of Philadelphia Hospital in Pennsylvania, and that their records, anyway.
And you can ask the archivists to go back.
They still have their case records from the 19th century.
And you can have the archivist pull up the case records and they will tell you how many cases of diabetes were diagnosed in the hospitals.
Any year for me.
Like in Mass General Hospital in Boston, the records start in 1824. Today, one in 11 Americans are diabetic, okay?
And there are some populations, like Native American populations, where one in two adults are diabetic.
In Boston, in Mass General Hospital, the leading hospital in the country, in Massachusetts in the 19th century, there were year after year after year where they had zero cases of diabetes.
And this is a terrible disease without insulin.
It's not a pleasure with it, but before insulin was discovered, I mean, you go blind, kidney failure, gangrene, amputation.
It's not a difficult diagnosis.
Now, there are other reasons to explain the absence.
I mean, You know, the only people who showed up in hospitals back in the 19th century were poor people, and poor people ate a lot less sugar than rich people.
And rich people got their own private doctors, so they might not have shown up in the medical records.
So you've got to always be skeptical of what you think you're learning, because that's what science is.
But, you know, the point I'm making is I went through the effort to do this one way or the other.
And that gives me a certain advantage that they don't have.
And if they're good scientists, regardless of what they believe, they'll say to themselves, geez, you know, I never thought of this.
I never did that.
I could think of Ray's Taubes as wrong, but maybe I should look into it.
So in the U.S. it starts again in the second half of the 18th, 19th century.
And it starts coincidental with an explosion in sugar consumption, not just in how much sugar we're consuming, but who's consuming it, which is what's fascinating and scary.
Go back, say, 200 years, 1810, 1815, we were probably eating about five pounds of sugar per capita.
And the wealthy were the ones who would get diabetes and obesity and gout back then.
So sugar has this curve where it goes from being very rare and just sort of the luxury of royalty.
To, you know, the wealthy using it and then finally with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and late 18th century and then refining processes are improved and sugar starts to get cheaper and then during the Napoleonic Wars like 1812 when France is cut off from their sugar supply by the English blockades.
Napoleon says, look, we've got to figure out how to create our own sugar.
And this clever Frenchman figures out how to get sugar from sugar beets.
And the beet sugar industry takes off around 1850. And then with the beet sugar industry, you can grow sugar in the northern hemisphere in the temperate climates.
And you can also grow sugar cane only in tropical climates.
So now sugar prices start to plummet.
Meanwhile, you think about all the ways we consume sugar today, so candy, soft drinks, ice cream, chocolate, low-fat milk, low-fat yogurt, none of that existed until 1840. So 1840, you see the start of the candy industry, the start of the chocolate industry, the Lindt brothers in Switzerland figure out how to make chocolate bars.
You can still buy Lindt chocolate today, and it's pretty good actually.
Ice cream industry starts in the 1840s.
Soft drinks start in the 1870s with Dr. Pepper, then Coca-Cola, then PepsiCo.
Well, I didn't have the marketing brilliance of the Coca-Cola people.
So sugar starts becoming like women are targeted, because it's now cheap enough.
So the men get their alcohol and their cigarettes, and the women get sugar, and the kids get sugar.
So the first time in history suddenly we have all these industries created to basically target children as customers.
If you think about it, nobody's drinking cold drinks at home.
No refrigeration.
No refrigeration until the 1930s.
And no vending machines until the 1930s.
I love this because I'm a science guy, but in doing my books, you have to become a historian, and you just don't think about this stuff.
So with the vending machines and the refrigerators, suddenly Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and these start targeting, you know, you start getting six packs and cartons, cases of sodas and big bottles of soda that you could take home, put in your refrigerator and drink all day long.
Couldn't do it before that.
Couldn't get ice cubes easily before that.
You couldn't even, you know, cool it down in the summer.
Because that's one that people think is totally innocuous and actually healthy.
Yeah, because it's got all that vitamin C. Just explain to people right now that if you're drinking a big-ass glass of orange juice, you might as well be drinking a Pepsi.
They had all these extra oranges they couldn't sell.
You know, the oranges all come along in one season, so back then with that refrigeration and cars so you could keep fruits kind of alive for like a year by freezing them, you know, you had all these extra oranges you couldn't sell, so they said, let's get people to turn into orange juice.
And we'll advertise that the vitamin C is good for them.
The new nutrition of the 1920s and 1930s was all about vitamin deficiency diseases.
And so scurvy is caused by the absence of vitamin C and berry buried by vitamin B. And that was the big news.
So the orange growers started pushing orange juice on us because of its vitamin C content.
So now we're drinking fruit juices for breakfast every day.
And then post-World War II, concentrates are created.
That was actually a defense, you know, World War II program to try and figure out how to create foods that soldiers could take into battle and get their vitamins from it.
So that comes along.
And then the last one is sugary cereals.
So the cereal industry was created by Post and Kellogg, who were health nuts.
They ran sanatoriums in Minnesota, right?
And they knew their health nutritionists didn't want to put sugar in anything.
They had some huge fights over this.
But 1948 Post releases sugar crisps, and it's, you know, 30% sugar by calories or something.
It's the first sugar-coated cereal.
And for the next decade, you can watch the cereal industries have these internal battles where the marketing people are saying, we need a sugar sweetened cereal.
We've got to compete.
We're going to be run out of the business.
And the health people are saying, no, no, sugar is bad for you.
And in every case, the marketers won.
By the 1960s, not only do you have like all these, some of these cereals were 50% sugar by calories, still are.
But you've got all these iconic TV shows that were created just to sell sugar.
I mean, Rocky and Bowling, which was my favorite.
This was heartbreaking.
I mean, those guys were created to sell cereal to us.
To sell, so the cereal industry would hire, you know, these brilliant public relations men who would create these characters and then get, you know, Hollywood to create animated TV shows with these characters and then they would always sell the same sugar sweetened cereals.
And so now we're just, you know, think what happened to kids.
Okay, so the obese and diabetic people in the world are the ones who started, we all started as children, right?
You know, 1805, 1810, up to 1850, maybe they see sugar once a week.
You know, they steal into the country store, and when Uncle Ed is turned the wrong way, they, like, stick their hand in the sugar barrel and lick their fingers and run out.
By 1960, it's like orange juice, cereal, you know, sugary cereal, sugar on the sugary cereal for breakfast, you know, a Coke for a snack, a candy bar, the same kind of foods for lunch.
I mean, I bet most Americans didn't go more than three hours without a sugar dose, whereas 150 years earlier, they'd have gone a week between doses.
And as this happens, you see these explosions in obesity and diabetes that, you know, they're slow to build.
And I think that can be explained, too, by the fact that mothers pass this on to their kids when the kids are in the womb.
So people that think that type 1 diabetes, which is something that people I know have, and, well, it's just genetic, it's just something you were born with, that's not necessarily true?
So if these people with type 1 diabetes didn't have a poor diet, didn't consume sugar, didn't eat the average American diet, it probably would never manifest itself?
Two of the last three chapters before the epilogue are called the If-Then Problems.
So let me lay out what I'm proposing here.
The case against sugar.
So there's a crime.
Think of it as we're in a courtroom.
And there's a crime that's committed.
And the crime is epidemics of obesity and diabetes that happen whenever a population transitions from their traditional diet to a Western diet and lifestyle.
So it doesn't matter what the population is.
They could be the Inuit living on caribou and seal meat.
They could be Maasai living on the blood, milk, Meat from the cattle they herd, they could be agrarian populations, they could be South Pacific Islanders living on coconuts and, you know, pigs.
Aborigines in Australia, Middle Eastern populations, African populations, European populations, it does not matter.
Eventually, they transition.
You see these epidemics of obese and diabetes.
That's the crime.
So the argument I'm making is that sugar is always at the scene of the crime on a population-wide level.
So there's a lot of things that happen when you transition to Western diets.
For instance, a lot of populations eat more meat.
But some populations, like the Inuit, they don't eat more meat, because they're the Native Americans of the Plains Indians.
They don't eat more meat, because they were living on meat to begin with.
But they also get obesity and diabetes epidemic.
So I'm willing to rule out meat on that level.
And other people did as well.
You know, they become more sedentary when you westernize.
You get more labor-saving devices.
You drive places instead of walking places.
So maybe it's sedentary behavior.
But you can find populations that are incredibly physically active.
Cane cut it.
In the Natar region of South Africa, in the 18th century, they used to import Indians from India as indentured laborers, effectively slavery, but they call them indentured laborers to work in the sugar plantations.
And the cane cutters in the sugar plantations, that's one of the most energy intense jobs you can imagine.
One estimate was they burn 9,000 calories a day.
And yet these Natal Indians had among the highest rates of diabetes ever seen.
Ancestors, the population from which they were drawn in India had virtually no diabetes, and the primary difference in their diet was the sugar consumption.
So you could play this game where you isolate out populations, and what I found is there's no population where you get an obesity and diabetes epidemic where sugar, recent increases in sugar consumption haven't occurred.
And by recent, it could be 20 years ago, it could be 50 years ago.
So it's always at the scene of the crime.
Type 2 diabetes, the common form that associates with excess weight, is fundamentally a disorder of what's called insulin resistance.
So type 1, your pancreas doesn't secrete enough insulin.
Type 2, your body is resistant to the insulin that your pancreas secretes.
So you got to pump, you got to secrete more and more to keep your blood sugar under control and the idea is eventually your pancreas gets exhausted and it can't do it anymore and then you have a deficit of insulin and it looks like the results are pretty much similar to type 1. Insulin resistance is also very closely associated to obesity, and we could discuss that as well.
You could look at these epidemics, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, dementia, basically as manifestations of insulin resistance happening all around the world.
In different ways, in different people, but they're all related to insulin resistance and insulin.
And then you ask yourself, what causes insulin resistance?
So the best researchers in the world who study insulin resistance, the leading hypothesis is that it starts in the liver.
And it starts in the liver with the conversion, with the accumulation of fats in liver cells.
And in fact, we also have an epidemic of what's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in this country right now.
It used to be 20, 30 years ago, if you got fatty liver disease and you saw your doctor and you told them you didn't drink, they would just assume you're lying.
Because clearly alcoholics got fatty liver disease, but suddenly people started showing up who swore they didn't drink, and then kids started showing up with fatty liver disease who clearly didn't drink alcohol.
So we got this concept, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
It's basically indistinguishable from the alcoholic kind.
And the CDC estimates 40 million Americans have this.
And if it progresses, it could progress to what's called NASH, which is non-alcoholic stereohepatitis, and eventually to the need for liver transplant.
So, sugar.
What are we talking about when we're talking about sugar?
So sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar are technically sucrose.
It's a molecule of glucose bonded to a molecule of fructose.
Fructose makes it sweet.
High fructose corn syrup is 45% glucose, 55% fructose.
Same chemical constituents.
They're not bonded together.
I don't think that makes a damn bit of difference.
Some people do.
The fructose is metabolized in your liver.
So the glucose gets into your bloodstream just like any other glucose from any other carbohydrate.
The fructose goes to your liver.
And if your liver gets it in a high dose, like say from an apple juice or something...
It has trouble dealing with that much fructose.
It never evolved to see a glass of apple juice or a can of Coke's worth of fructose be delivered over the course of 5, 10 minutes, probably even 30 minutes, so it converts it into fat.
So we have a condition, insulin resistant, that's epidemic worldwide, that's The leading research in the country, I think, is caused by the accumulation of fat in liver cells.
And we've got a substance, sugar, that's been exploded in use worldwide in which half of it is metabolized in the liver and is converted into fat in liver cells.
So it's like it's at the scene of the crime in populations and it's at the scene of the crime in The body.
And it's got a mechanism.
It's got the gun.
Necessary.
You know, you can match the bullets almost, but we don't have a smoking gun.
That's where the research falls short.
And so this is the case I'm making.
And then if sugar causes insulin resistance, there are all kinds of downstream effects, including what mothers will do to their children if they are insulin resistant and have high blood sugar when they're pregnant.
I'm in the process of debating two of them online now.
Cato Unbound, it's called.
I wouldn't have, by the way, done this if...
I'm not a fan of debates in science because I don't think they settle things.
I'm a fan of people getting together and saying, look, you believe this, I believe this, what experiment can we do to find out who's right, not who's the better rhetorician.
Well, also, are they even aware of the causes of it?
I mean, if your work is so controversial, and there's so many people out there that are disputing it, or disputing this link between sugar and all these horrible diseases, and they're calling it empty calories, is this even something that, in the medical community, where they spend a ridiculously short amount of time in school learning about nutrition?
And even back then, they speculated that it was caused by sugar, although I think for the wrong reasons, because the diabetic urine, you're pissing out a lot of glucose, right?
Because your body can't handle it, so it's sweet and it'll attract flies.
And back then, even up until 17th century, part of classic medical practice was for the physician to have his assistant taste the urine.
He didn't have to do it himself.
And that could be, by the way, one reason why a lot of diabetes went undiagnosed.
Well, I am too, because I want to get this out, you know?
I mean, even if it's just for this one particular subject, which I think is probably the most important subject today, when in terms of health and wellness and just optimizing your existence, cutting out sugar and changing your diet, I think, is one of the most important factors in living a healthier, more productive life, and also mental clarity.
Yeah, I used to say, I don't take naps, they take me.
You know, like an hour after lunch, and I'd be interviewing some Nobel Prize winner, and I'd have to think of an excuse to get off, because I was falling asleep doing the interview.
So once we got into this diet, to this idea, so one of the things, and this was the second article I read, so is there evidence to support this idea we should be eating a low-fat diet?
I mean, the second article I wrote.
And I recreated the history of that and it was fascinating because once these people got this idea that fat caused heart disease...
So remember, science is determined by what you can measure.
So the technology you have tells you what you can measure and what you can measure is what you can ask questions about and then that gives you the answers.
And if you're a bad scientist, you forget that it's completely limited.
To the technology.
So there's this old joke in science called the drunk in the streetlight problem.
So a guy's walking down the street and he comes upon a drunk who's crawling around on his knees under a streetlight.
And he says to the guy, what are you doing?
And the guy says, I'm looking for my keys.
And the guy says, so is this where you lost them?
And the drunk goes, I don't know where I lost them, but this is where the light is.
Okay.
So in science, it's like what you could measure is where the light is.
And you got to remember that there's a universe out there that you can't see yet.
But most scientists don't realize that.
They're just not good scientists.
So in heart disease, the light was on cholesterol.
That was at 1950s, 60s.
That's what they could measure.
And they got this idea that it's caused by dietary fat.
And because of that...
We just, you know, again, they tested and tested, and this hypothesis kept being failed in the test, but they didn't care because they thought it had to be true.
And by the 1980s, we lock it in as a dogma.
And now we have this idea that the healthy way to eat is a low-fat diet, and you start making products where you take the fat out of it.
And once you take the fat out of something, it doesn't taste all that good.
Like yogurt's a classic example.
I mean, it is fat and some, you know, modest amount of lactose.
I don't even know if there's lactose in it.
I should know this stuff because then people say clearly you're not a nutritionist.
So the candy bars, instead of eating Snickers bars, which is a high-fat, high-sugar thing that we grew up on, you create Cliffs bars and Nature's Whey bars and all these low-fat health food bars that we think are healthy.
Because they're low in fat, they're loaded with carbs, and they fill them up with sugar.
And then to this day, I'm wondering, like, should I just let, you know, we have a drawer with these health food bars, and my wife, I'm not the only parent of the family, so my kids aren't tortured by my food beliefs.
Would they be healthier if they just ate Snickers bars like we did when we were kids?
A friend just sent me an article today on a European Journal of Clinical Nutrition where they were looking at sugar content of children's diets in Europe.
And at age one, they were 30% of their calories from sugar.
I actually gave up dairy, but for a different reason.
Not because I, for me, it has unfortunate gastrointestinal side effects that my whole family could live without.
If you go into a low-carb, high-fat diet, which I think is a, you know, certainly those of us should be eating who are predisposed to get fat or diabetic, cheese is a very valuable item of the diet.
And clearly, like the French and the Swiss and even the Greeks eat enormous amounts of cheese and they live...
My gut feeling, remember, I focus obsessively on one subject, and it's the carb content, and it's the sugars, and the refined grains, and what's the cause of obesity.
What I meant about it is just from the gastrointestinal issues, because a lot of people believe that raw milk with all the natural enzymes in it is easier for your body to process.
Yeah, I know a lot of people who are on the ketogenic diet that will actually drink heavy cream.
My friend Kyle, who actually was one of the first people that turned me on to it, Kyle Kingsbury, he carries around this little fucking pint of heavy cream, but he's a savage.
I might eat a little bit more protein than I'm supposed to, which unfortunately does convert back to sugar in your body, glucose, but much more easily processed, obviously, than high fructose corn syrup, right?
Very, very little pastas or grains or breads or anything.
I'm a premier research scientist that's devoted to a ketogenic diet, and I heard about him from Tim Ferriss' podcast, and I've read some of his work online and listened to some of his lectures and talks.
And I find it, first of all, as far as appetite suppressing, it's fantastic.
Once your body starts burning fat, you don't get that weird hunger thing.
When I was on a heavy carb diet, because I love pasta.
God, I love lasagna and linguine with clams.
I just love it.
It's fantastic.
Occasionally, I'll indulge as a rare treat now, but when I was eating it all the time, I would have this two or three hour post-eating thing where that stuff would be gone, it would all be digested, and then I'd be fucking starving in the next hour or so.
Well, that's the thing, because you're burning the sugar, so the carbs are converted to glucose, you're burning the glucose, you're secreting insulin, and the insulin's telling your fat to hold on to fat.
This is my theory, anyway, and it's backed up by the evidence.
So, as the blood sugar starts coming down, Your fat tissue is supposed to release the fat and allow it to come out and be oxidized by the same cells and the mitochondria in your cells in this famous Krebs cycle that we're all supposed to learn in like 11th grade biology and can never remember.
The Krebs cycle is just as happy to burn fat as carbs.
But if the insulin's high...
It's telling your mitochondria to burn carbs, not fat, and it's telling the fat cells to hold on to fat, and now you've just got a dearth of fuel.
It's actually telling your lean tissue to hold on to protein.
So now your blood sugar is coming down, but the insulin is still elevated, and there's no fuels replacing the blood sugar.
So then if you try a ketogenic diet or low-carb, high-fat diet, whatever you want to call it, you get rid of the carbs and you get enough fat, your insulin comes down, then you get in this natural thing where you eat, you store some of the fat, you're burning fat.
When you're done burning the fat in your bloodstream, the fat comes out of your cells.
There's this nice cycle that's supposed to happen.
You always have enough fuel available that you're not hungry.
That's one of the common phenomenons.
The idea that suddenly I have breakfast, the next thing I know it's 2, 3 in the afternoon, and I'm thinking, maybe I should eat lunch just because I should eat lunch.
Not because I'm hungry, not because I'm starving.
And then you eat lunch, you don't fall asleep afterwards.
Now, I should point out that some high-level athletes are having an issue with this.
Some people that are used to burning off massive amounts of calories through the day, like mixed martial artists and things along those lines, some of them adapt to it fine and are having a great time with it and find it easier to make weight and easier to train.
But other ones say that they have just a lack of that extra gear in training.
Now, I don't know if they're doing it Some of the earliest studies ever done on this was by a guy named Steve Finney, who's co-author of two books, Ardent Science of Low Carb.
Living in the art and science of low-carb performance.
And Steve, back in the late 70s, early 80s, he was at, I think it's Vermont, where there was a team of people studying, doing some interesting diet experiments.
And he put professional bike racers on ketogenic diets and measured their performance versus their sort of traditional high-carb diets.
And he keto-adapted them, so they were fully adapted to burning fat for fuel.
And from his studies, basically, he said they're more efficient until they have to push that last sort of 5% out, like up a mountain or a marathon or getting to Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon, and then they lose that extra push.
I mean, in MMA, it's all about exploding when you're tired.
It's all about being able to manage your endurance over the course of five minutes, but figure out these sprint times and being able to squeeze the most out of those to break your opponent.
Sort of perfected was developed in Scandinavia back in the 50s, I think it was, by the coaches of cross-country skiers, which is incredibly physically burdensome.
So they would train on low-carb diets, and the idea was they would eat the plate of pasta the day before the race, and they would maximize their glycogen stores in their liver and in their cells, and then when they needed it, it was there.
I mean, it was a great way for them, but again, the point is they were eating the low-carb diets the rest of the year.
Up until then, yeah.
And then once marathoners started doing it, everyone thought, well, marathoners should eat carbs the night before a marathon.
We should all eat carbs.
And then this idea that carbs are heart-healthy came in and they just took over the world.
But my area of expertise is by no means like high-performance athletes.
There are people out there who could talk to you for, you know, and I'll recommend some when we get off.
You know, it's interesting because even when you read the debates about this stuff, what the high-performance athletes, I see this in like Outside Magazine and Runner's World stuff, so there's this fundamental argument that, look, we don't get fat because we eat too much.
We get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet cause this hormonal metabolic dysregulation that makes us store calories of fat in our fat cells.
And that implies that the healthiest diet, for those of us who get fat, are diets absent easily digestible carbs and sugars.
But if athletes, very high-performing athletes, eat those diets and don't perform better than before, it's not a good diet and therefore all the rest of it is wrong.
And that's just crazy.
You know, it's sort of what Lance Armstrong needs to win the Tour de France, whatever it is, doesn't tell me a hell of a lot about why, you know, Shirley McClintock weighs 300 pounds and can't lose that weight unless she gives up carbohydrates.
Right.
You know, and all of that gets confounded in these discussions.
And one of the things I'm constantly doing when I talk about this stuff is saying, you've got to keep your eye on the question.
Because we were all given different answers to different questions.
So what's the best diet for winning the Tour de France or MMA fight?
Probably got a lot of the same themes that I'm talking about.
But even then, Funny, when sugar came in, beginning around the 1890s, and it was cheap and easily available, and beet sugar was available in Germany, the German army started testing sugar as a performance enhancer, and actually doing sort of trials where they would send troops out with or without sugar for, you know...
30-day marches and then they would see when they came back which ones had more energy and the ones who ate more sugar had more energy and some mountain climbers started using it.
Crew coaches started testing it on the crew.
Like rowing back then was among the most popular sports in the world and so they would give their We're good to go.
Well, also, if you start with populations that never consume sugar, so babies never consume it before, you give them a little sugar, like on day three, you can circumcise them, and they're just tripping.
They're fine.
Hey, cool.
Take it off.
I don't need to live with that.
What am I going to use that for?
I mean, when you're three days old, you've got no imagination.
It's that it could be a performance enhancing drug.
That would enhance the performance of athletes at the highest level doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term chronic effects just like any other performance enhancing drug.
So there's a big difference between people that are like say climbing K2 that needs something to push them forward versus the average person who likes to play racquetball and works a day job and you know and that kind of a diet.
Yeah, and think about, I mean, the athletic trainers who have been telling you, I mean, the guys you work out with, you know, the lean, muscular guys who never had an ounce of fat in their lives, and they're saying we should all eat carbs or we should all eat sugar because look how well I process it.
And my argument is like, if you think your body works the same way as your cousin who weighs 300 pounds and the only difference is you exercise more, Like, that's a serious delusion.
He couldn't get over 195, no matter how much he ate.
And he used to say, I'll never forget this.
I never get stuffed.
I just get bored of eating after a few hours.
And I was shorter, thicker.
You know, I put on weight relatively easily.
By the time I was in high school, I weighed 195. When I was playing Division II college football, I could get up to 237. No matter how much I ate, I could not get above 237, and I was three inches shorter than he was.
We just had different body types.
I built muscle easier than he did, and I put on fat easier than he did.
It had nothing to do with how much.
We both ate as much as we could.
In fact, dinners in our family lasted like 18 minutes because it was, you know, my mother put down like, you know, enough for four, eight people and if I didn't eat it fast, my brother, yeah, exactly.
Start at seven over at 718, no matter what she served.
When you're looking at all this data and you're putting together this book and you realize that you're going to drop this mind blower on people that We've been essentially misled by almost every established organization when it comes to health and diet.
How are you feeling when you're about to release this?
Are you hesitant?
Is this like one thing where you're like, Jesus Christ, am I just...
I mean, did you have this incredible desire to double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check?
So the articles in science, for whatever reason, didn't create all that much controversy.
I mean, they won awards and reporting awards, and they were in books about the best science writing, but nobody really cared.
I mean, there was enough controversy about whether this low-fat diet, for instance, was the right thing.
Then I do this New York Times Magazine article where The idea was to go out and find out that this was pitched in 2001 and our awareness of the obesity epidemic was only about three years old.
And you could pinpoint it in time, from between the late 1970s to the early 1990s, two surveys that were done.
And during those two surveys, the prevalence of obesity almost doubled the United States, the percentage of Americans.
So you'd ask the question, what caused it?
And I had two hypotheses.
One was we had shifted.
In the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that Carbohydrates are uniquely fattening.
One line I quote in two of my books was the first sentence of a British Journal of Nutrition article in 1963, written by one of the two leading British dieticians, was, every woman knows carbohydrates are fattening.
And every woman knew this car, you know, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beer, sweets, you know, they'd go right to your hips.
That was a lot.
And then we turned them into heart-healthy diet foods by the 1980s.
And that happened between, was institutionalized between 1977 and 1984. And by 84, like the New York Times health reporters writing her best-selling Diet, you know, health cooking book called the Good Food Book, and she's saying, yeah, we used to think carbs are fattening, but now we should eat pasta and bread all the time.
So that was one hypothesis.
The other was high fructose corn syrup, which came in in 1977 and had sort of replaced sugar and Pepsi and Coke by 1984. Anyway, as I'm doing that piece, I realize I stumbled upon five studies of the Atkins diet.
The Atkins diet is what scientists call the anomalous observation.
What you're always looking for in science is the anomalous observation.
That's the thing that doesn't fit with any of your beliefs.
You've got a theory that says this and then you find that.
And now you've got a way to come up with a better theory because you've got something else you have to explain that your present theory doesn't.
And it's the anomalous observations that move science forward.
It's the thing that just doesn't fit with your belief.
So here's the diet trials where you've got the Atkins diet, high in fat, high in saturated fat, so it should give you heart disease.
You know, double quarter pounder with cheese, no bun, lobster, Newberg, you know, eggs, bacon, sausage.
And you're allowed to eat as much as you want.
Okay, so it's not a calorie-restricted diet.
It's ad libitum.
As long as you don't eat carbs, you could have eight eggs for breakfast and a rash for bacon and, you know, whole chicken for lunch.
So the other theory, one theory is that fat is going to cause heart disease and the other theory is that the eat as much as you want, you tell a fat person to eat as much as they want, they're going to get fatter, right?
Because we think they got fat to begin with because they ate too much.
And then you compare those people to people you put on an American Heart Association low-fat diet and you tell them to calorie restrict.
Am I repeating myself?
No, go ahead.
You know, the ice cream scoop size of tuna salad on the lettuce patty thing that we all went through at some point in our life.
Maybe not you if you were naturally lean.
Anyway, in all five of these trials, and they'd been done but not published yet, and they'd been presented at conferences, the people on the Atkins diet not only lost more weight than the ones on the calorie-restricted American Heart Association low-fat diet that all American people were supposed to eat, so that refutes the eating too much hypothesis, because these guys on the Atkins diet can eat as much as they want, but their heart disease risk factors are better.
Okay, so they're supposed to die of heart disease.
You know, you eat the bacon, it clogs your arteries, you fall over dead, but they were healthier.
So it refutes the heart disease thing too.
So there's the anomalous observation.
How do you explain that?
If dietary fat causes heart disease and eating too much causes obesity.
So I write this article.
I lead it with this young Harvard endocrinologist, pediatrician who's feeding low-carb diets to his patients at Boston Children's Hospital.
He's like politically acceptable.
He's sincere.
He's at Harvard.
I want to ease people into it.
And then I talk about the Atkins thing down below and how Atkins had gotten pilloried back in the late 60s, early 70s for telling people they could eat these high-fat diets because we thought, you know, and what these studies showed.
And the editors of the New York Times Magazine said Atkins is the elephant in the living room.
Like, get rid of this Harvard guy.
Put him down below.
Lead with Atkins, okay?
I mean, they know how to get people to read an article.
So I write this lead.
I read it to my wife, and it's, you know, if the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, have a find yourself standing naked nightmare in Times Square, excuse me, find yourself standing naked in Times Square nightmare, It's that all the advice they've been giving to the American people about a healthy diet for the last 50 years is wrong, and maybe Atkins was right all along, and maybe both.
And I read it to my wife and I say, they will never run this in a million years.
And I email it to the editors and they don't change a word.
And that's the lead of the magazine article.
And then they put this picture on the cover of the magazine, which is this kind of cheap-looking porterhouse steak.
They didn't go to, you know, the photographer to make a delicious, you know, and it's got a pat of butter.
And the headline is, What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
And I didn't stop them from doing it.
But I didn't know what to expect.
I knew it was going to be controversial.
Getting back to your question, I tend to answer long-winded.
I knew it was going to be controversial.
I knew it was going to be the most controversial article they'd run since a friend of mine ten years earlier had written an article about how recycling is a complete waste of time and money.
I had no idea what was going to happen.
No idea.
And I compare it to my boxing career.
When I was younger, when I was at Harvard, my best friend was a boxer.
He was a street fighter from Manhattan, a Puerto Rican kid, and a wonderful guy.
I mean, everyone in school loved him.
And then he taught me how to box, and we used to, you know, box in the gym, and I would do this sort of Muhammad Ali imitation, because that's what I thought boxing was in 1977. Then he actually had an amateur fight in Lomas in March 1977, and got killed in the fight.
And of course, me being young and stupid, it's not enough to prevent me from Continuing, so when I moved to New York...
And some really, like, Ryan O'Neal's buddies with Norman would show up once every three months, and there was a guy who ran, I forget, it was a porn magazine that was sold in a brown paper bag.
He would show up, and then, you know, a half dozen other people, I had this friend, Steve Chow, went on to I'd become Barry Diller's right-hand man, and yeah, Hollywood, who had actually been the valedictorian of our class at Harvard.
And we would spar, and I enjoyed it, and I got into it, and it was getting the crap beat out of me first.
But eventually, I kept doing it, and then I decided to fight in the New York Golden Gloves and write about it for Playboy.
So the piece was called Life is a Standing Eight Count.
So, anyway, the point is, kind of like going from sparring to your first match.
Now, you had a much more successful career than I did.
I had two fights.
Wow.
I won the first one because the Irish cop I was fighting got tired of punching me, and I finally thought if I hit him back, maybe that'll slow him down.
It worked.
But that transition from sparring to being in the ring and having someone want to beat the crap out of you is like you just can't.
You cannot conceive of what it's going to be like until you do it, right?
I knocked out this cop from Staten Island, and I was done.
I didn't want to do it again.
I didn't enjoy winning.
I did not enjoy knocking him out.
I didn't like anything about it.
This nose was not built for getting pummeled, and I was not a very good defensive fighter.
And then the second fight, I went up against the guy who won it.
This was not the open category, the 10 fights or less category, and he knocked me out in a minute and 37 seconds.
I had a friend who, a photographer for life, who came.
Norman Mailer was at the fight, too.
Like, Norman's sitting there watching me get the crap beat out of me.
And my friend, who was a photographer, didn't have time to get her lens cap off, basically.
So I have a photo that ran in Playboy with the article, which was, you know, you could see ring level and you see these two big feet sticking up and this body prone on the ring, you know.
Yeah, and you know, if my career had lasted past that fight, my very good coach would have broken it out and he would have said, don't ever do that again.
Anyway, my memory is I'm sitting outside the ring and a doctor is saying to me, do you know what your name is?
So there's a period in my life where I was clearly conscious, but I have no memory of it.
Um, then they, they make you go to the hospital afterwards to make sure you're not going to die overnight.
And I was in the emergency room and there was a guy next to me who had had a motorcycle accident and a cab had cut him off.
And he had the same, we were talking, he was about my age, Hispanic.
And he, um, you know, this thing where there's You know, the way you say the next thing I remember.
So, you know, friends are writing articles about me.
You know, one woman journalist in Boston who used to be a good friend who thought I was one of the five best...
Writers in the country, science journalists in the country, until I wrote a piece that came to a different conclusion than a book she had written on obesity.
And the headline in Newsweek was, it's not the carbs, stupid.
The Center for Science and the Public Interest did a piece called Big Fat Lies, cover of their newspaper, basically explaining how I had screwed up on everything I had screwed up.
A journalist who had written a book on obesity did a piece for Reason magazine about all the ways I had screwed up.
Luckily, I hadn't screwed up in any of them, so I could get back at them and take them down.
The Center for Science and the Public Interest piece, they wouldn't even let me respond.
Reason Magazine was interesting.
I called up the editors and I said, look, this is just complete bullshit and you've got to let me respond.
And they said, okay.
They didn't care because they put it online.
So if Albus is going to write for him for free, let him write for him for free.
And more controversy brings more readers.
So I... I spent the weekend, I remember I wrote like a 9,000 word response and there's still some great stuff in there where, you know, even the very end of this thing, I was pointing out every way this guy had screwed up, like taken down my article by saying I made mistakes when he was the one making mistakes and the last line was something like, he had called my editor and Who had now bought this book for a lot of money.
He had called my editor, I think he used the last name, he called him Richard Siegel or something.
So the last line of the book was in just the final word.
My editor's name is not Richard Siegel, it's John, period.
9,000 word takedown.
This guy ended up never writing for Reason Magazine again.
Clearly, the editors at the New York Times Magazine are really smart people, thought this was interesting.
The fact-checkers fact-checked it.
There's no mistakes.
That's why at least I was safe there, because they're really good fact-checkers.
It didn't rely on me.
Why don't we...
And it just doesn't happen.
I mean, it was funny, even...
Afterwards, I start doing this book, and now I'm going to interview hundreds more people, and you would expect that a lot of the scientists aren't going to talk to me, because they're going to be so mad at me about this article, but most of them actually were good.
There was one scientist I wanted to talk to specifically, because a guy I was talking to said he hated your article.
He thought it was total crap.
So I sent him an email, and I said, you know, I'd like to interview you.
He thought the article was total crap, and I'd like to know why, because if it was, I want to make sure I don't make those mistakes again.
And he said, sure, as long as you make sure you check on my quotes, because I don't trust you to get my quotes right, because that was another story that was going around at the time.
And two weeks later, we get on the phone, and he says, you know, I've got to apologize.
When I read your article, I was so pissed off by the title, what if it's all been a big fat lie and you're holier than thou, smarter than we are attitude, that I never actually thought deeply about what you were saying.
Now that I've read it again, and context is everything in these things.
And I notice that when I lecture, so I give a lot of lectures.
I talk grand rounds in medical schools.
If somebody introduces me to a room full of doctors, as this is a very well-respected journalist, he's won all these awards, including these influential public health awards, he's written this incredibly thoughtful, provoking book.
And we managed to get them here to give you the arguments.
Doctors will be completely receptive to everything I say.
I've also had people introduce me as, yeah, here's this guy Taubes.
He wrote this big book.
He says everything we say is wrong and he's going to give a lecture.
And now it's like they're tuned out from day one.
From the moment I opened my mouth, they're looking for reasons not to believe a word I said.
And then they're looking at the phones five minutes later and checking their email.
It's sort of, so context is everything.
And by making this article as controversial as it could with putting Atkins in the lead and the porterhouse steak on the cover and what if it's all been a big fat lion, And I actually wasn't calling it a lie.
There's a lot of mistaken assumptions, a lot of bad science, but nobody lied.
It made it exceedingly controversial, but it turned a lot of people off because they were being accused of things they didn't want to think of themselves, especially the lie.
Two things that, you know, when I talk to my colleagues about this, I say it's like you're playing in a poker game with a thousand people in the establishment, and they cheat because they all talk to each other, and they share cards, and they show each other what they get, and they tell them what they're going to bet.
But God keeps dealing you four aces.
You've got the best hand.
And the best hand is you shift your diet, you get rid of the carbs and you replace them with fat and it does remarkable things to most people, not all.
Diet book author, I think one of the smartest doctors out there.
Whatever he says, it's always worth listening to.
He believes that when people fail on the diet, it doesn't matter what age they are, what sex they are, when the diet doesn't return them to a relatively healthy weight, he believes it's because they're not conforming to the diet.
So, you know, maybe they're eating too many nuts and there's carbs in nuts, or maybe they're lying to him about what they're doing, or they're still having the occasional sweet, and clearly there are people...
Who try to compromise on these diets.
By compromise, I mean, you've been hearing so long that fat is bad for you.
I'm sure I'm going to restrict sugar and grain and starches, but I'm also going to restrict fat.
Now you're eating skinless chicken breasts with green vegetables, and you're not even putting butter on it, and it tastes awful, and nobody's going to stick to that diet anyway.
And in order to give the skinless chicken breasts some flavor, you've got to marinate it in some sugar marinade.
So, and the protein, you don't want to eat a high protein diet because you're going to convert the protein to glucose, some of those amino acids, and that's going to raise blood sugar and that could be a problem.
So, maybe they're just doing it wrong.
But there are a lot of hormones that influence fat accumulation.
So this is, remember I said the Germans and Austrians had concluded, maybe I didn't say this, I can't even remember what I, you know, I've been doing this book tour.
Germans and Austrian research said, look, this has got to be a hormonal metabolic issue.
The whole idea that it's just calories in, calories out is...
It's an explanation.
It's like somebody gets heavier, they take in more calories than they expend.
We know that.
It's like somebody accumulates energy in their fat tissue, they're accumulating energy in their body, which means they're taking in energy more than they expend.
That's just a description of what happens.
It says nothing about why.
Clearly hormones play a huge role in fat accumulation or men and women would look identical.
Boys go through puberty, they lose fat and gain muscle.
Girls go through puberty, they gain fat in very specific places.
Not everywhere.
Places designed to drive the boys crazy and get some procreation going.
And that's all hormonal.
It's all estrogen in the girls, testosterone in the boys, you know, little mix going on.
It doesn't matter how many calories they're consuming.
So these Germans and Austrians would say it's, you know, it's clearly a hormonal thing.
I mean, the only way you could explain obesity is a hormonal dysregulation.
And then in the 60s, we learned that insulin controls fat accumulation, dominant hormone.
But these other hormones play a role as well.
So stress hormones...
So estrogen and testosterone both inhibit an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase that, when it's on your fat cells, basically pulls fat out of the circulation and into the cell.
That's a simplistic way to put it.
So when you're pumping out estrogen and testosterone, you're inhibiting this enzyme, which inhibits fat accumulation.
Then you get older.
You secrete less that these Hormones, women go through menopause, they secrete less estrogen, the lipoprotein lipase is upregulated on their fat cells, so you get more of it, so it just starts accumulating fat, no matter how much the woman wants to eat or exercise.
And this is why they put on fat when they get older.
I think women are programmed to put on fat when they're pregnant.
Men are never really programmed to put on fat, but women have a fat accumulation program when they're pregnant, and it sort of kicks in a little bit.
As they go through menopause.
And so I think historically, when you look at the anecdotal evidence, you know, older women have a much harder time losing excess body fat, even on very calorie, carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diets.
And it would be completely understandable.
And the argument I make is that this would still be the best diet, still be the leanest they could be.
You know, for all intents and purposes by getting rid of carbs, but it does not mean that it's going to work or it's going to work as much as they want it to because of these other sex hormones and the influence on, you know, body fat as well.
So he said you can starve an ectomorph and you don't turn him into an ectomorph, you don't turn him into an ectomorph, you turn him into an emaciated endomorph.
I don't know if it was his metaphor or mine, I forget now, you can't starve a basset hound and turn it into a greyhound, you just end up with an emaciated basset hound.
So part of this alternative hypothesis, which I find...
So, you know, we believe today is, you know, the conventional thinking is...
How much you eat and exercise drives how much fat you accumulate.
And the alternative hypothesis is that how much fat you accumulate is very well regulated by the human body, although you can change that regulation by changing the macronutrients.
So, people who fat tissue doesn't want to accumulate fat, who are constitutionally lean, like your buddy, When they eat a meal, they can't store it as fat temporarily.
They've got to burn all those calories.
The way they'd burn it, prior to the 1950s, a clinician studying obesity used to talk about the impulse to physical activity.
Lance Armstrong eats 1,000 calories of pasta, and his body doesn't want to store it as fat.
It wants to burn it, so he goes for a three-hour bike ride after lunch.
Because his body's trying desperately to get rid of those calories and it doesn't want to store him as fat.
I have the thousand calories of pasta.
My body's happy storing it as fat and I'm asleep an hour later.
But I'm not thicker and fatter than Armstrong because I'm asleep.
I'm asleep because that's the way my body processes the carbs by storing calories.
No, it's not because the nurture part is how the diet influences.
So if I have exclusively fat and protein, if I'm eating a ketogenic diet, then I'm minimizing fat accumulation and my body wants to burn more of those calories.
So I am closer to being a Lance Armstrong.
So Lance Armstrong can be lean on his high-carb diet.
I am closer to being Lance Armstrong-like, closest on a diet to absent all carbohydrates.
But I'm still, you know, now I'm just a bigger individual.
I mean, it's interesting.
We were talking about, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was the freshman manager of my college football team.
So this was Harvard, okay?
It was Division II football.
It was a lot of smart people.
You know, guys who couldn't make it in Division I. We had kids who went to Harvard because they didn't get scholarships at Holy Cross, so they went, okay, I'll play football for Harvard.
They were local.
1976, my senior year, the biggest kid on our team, Danny Jiggetts, weighed 265 pounds, 6'5".
From our standards, he was enormous.
He went off to play for the Chicago Bears for five or six years.
I think we had one other offensive lineman who was 265, also 6'4", 6'5", maybe two.
This year, Harvard football team, smart kids, same socioeconomic status.
The entire offensive, they got, I think, 12 players over 300 pounds.
Jesus Christ.
And these guys are enormous.
I mean, they're 6'7", 300 pounds.
They didn't grow people that big when I was growing up.
I mean, I could say maybe I didn't see them.
Maybe they weren't around.
Maybe they were 6'7", and they only weighed 230 because they weren't being bulked up, so they were playing basketball instead of football.
I mean, I could imagine ways that that's confusing, but from our perception, if you look just what happened, when I was a kid, In the early 1960s, as far as I know, there was one 300-pounder in the NFL and AFL, two different leagues back then, Bob D. I remember his name.
He played for the Boston Patriots, and his head was small compared to his body, and he was a big, fat guy.
Okay, so one of the things that happens when you increase insulin, so sugar, the idea is sugar causes insulin resistance, that results in chronic increases in insulin levels.
So insulin stimulates fat accumulation, but it also stimulates secretion of what's called insulin-like growth hormone, which is similar to growth hormone.
So the reason we grow is not because growth hormone drives tissues and skeletal muscle to grow, but it drives insulin-like growth factor, which then works on a local level.
So if you have more insulin in your system, you're going to have more insulin-like growth factor, and it's going to be more bioavailable.
There's these proteins called binding proteins that float around the bloodstream, and they'll bind to IGF, insulin-like growth factor, and make it so it can't get into cells or can't bind to the receptors.
So you would expect...
As populations become more insulin resistant, you would expect them to grow, to be taller as well as thicker and fatter and more diabetic.
One of the classic observations, as populations become westernized, they get taller.
You look at medical records or army records from the Civil War and all the men were like 5'6".
You know, now clearly the average height has gone up and it's kind of leveled off a bit in the United States, but there's still countries in Europe where it's gotten higher.
And one of the things that freaks me out is when I go to Europe nowadays and walk around a lot of Scandinavians and I feel petite.
Yeah, when I was growing up, I was definitively tall and now I haven't shrunk, I don't think.
I might be getting there.
And now it's just like everyone seems 6'4", 6'5".
The conventional thinking is they get more calories, they get more protein, you need the protein for the growth and the calories, and that's kind of the explanation.
But it could be that they get more sugar, and that drives vertical growth as well as horizontal growth.
We were in a debate in England that it was about...
I don't quite understand what he was denying.
That was the interesting thing.
He basically was denying that...
It was about that obesity was a hormonal metabolic disorder.
He had to deny that a journalist knows something that he doesn't and that the advice he's been giving and what he's been voicing over the years is right.
The point is I was looking for ways to debate him, so I found a clip on the internet, one of his lectures, where he was talking about how there was one particular athlete he was training, a bodybuilder, he had to get, you know, maximum cut for the competition, so he cut his carbs down.
And if you cut the carbs preferentially, you do that because you're going to reduce insulin and you're going to mobilize maximum amount of fat and you're going to get the most possible fat out of the fat tissue by doing it.
It clearly meant he believes what I believe.
But some people just, you know, you've got to establish that.
We did not say this in the debate, and I would hate to get Alan's position wrong, but if he's implying that obesity is an energy balance problem, it's calories in, calories out, that seemed to be the argument he was defending vociferously when we debated.
That, in turn, means that the only way that foods can influence your body weight is through their Caloric content.
And that means sugar is, you know, an empty calorie.
I may have blocked it out of my head, but we were debating.
Again, my argument, obesity, what I thought we were supposed to be debating.
Was whether or not obesity is caused by consuming too many calories or the macronutrient contents influencing this sort of hormonal metabolic regulation of fat accumulation.
What we ended up debating was whether or not the people in the audience would rather be trained by Alan Aragon, the physical trainer, exercise physiologist, or Gary Taubes, the journalist.
I've had those conversations with people before, and the problem with those conversations is you're taking a very simplistic approach to a very complex scenario.
If you did work out more and if you did do all these different things, you're going to affect your body and your hormone levels.
If you start doing deep squats with heavy weights, you start doing deadlifts, you start putting a weight vest on and hiking up hills, you're going to massively affect the way your body produces hormones.
I did give a talk to the Calorie Restriction Society.
I'm digressing again.
This is in Novato, north of San Francisco.
And I got one of the guys in the email afterwards said, and I was explaining that I thought all the benefits of calorie restriction come from carbohydrate restriction because there's a lot of evidence suggesting that what makes it, if it is beneficial, it's because these guys minimize insulin and IGF secretion.
And you can minimize insulin and IGF by just not eating the carbs, and then you get to fuel the rest of your body, so you get the calories you need, you get the protein you need, you get the fat you need, you just don't eat the thing that stimulates insulin and IGF. And after the lecture, I got an email from a guy in the audience who was part of this society who said, you know, I'm going to experiment.
I should get back with him to see what happens.
It was like four years ago.
He said, you look so much healthier than all of us.
And your argument was compelling.
And I'm going to experiment to see if maybe there's something to what you say.
And I'm going to shift over from eating 1,800 calories of like 50% carbs to 1,800 or maybe 2,500 or who knows how many of protein and fat.
I had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the other day, and she was discussing some pretty compelling evidence about the amount of time that you eat during a day, and intermittent fasting, and the importance of only eating within a 10-hour period, from the morning you wake up to the time you stop eating, no more than 10 hours, and then the rest of your day, the remaining 14 hours, no food.
But she was talking about the massive benefits of that in terms of gaining and lean muscle mass just from doing that, losing body fat just from doing that.
I know people who had trouble losing significant weight on low-carb diets and then switched intermittent fasting and broke through their plateaus.
There's some people I know in the field who I like who think that you might get excessive stress hormone stimulation from the fasting so that the long-term effects may not be as beneficial as a ketogenic diet where you're not...
But not necessarily when you're saying eating fewer calories because that's not necessarily what they're talking about.
What they're talking about is taking time, allowing your body to process all those nutrients and not using the resources that could be developing muscle and building your body up.
So that would account for the increase in lean muscle mass simply by following this intermittent fasting program.
I don't know if you had this experience when you went on the ketogenic diet.
Because you often read, people say, well, you lose.
I was looking at a study today that was done, a one-week study done in like 1967, where they lost more protein on the ketogenic diet than a calorie-restricted diet.
They were all calorie-restricted.
But when I went on this diet, it was interesting.
My waist size went down and my jacket size went up.
And I'm probably, my upper body, I mean, my lower body doesn't work because of, you know, cartilage and the knees and You know, the other wonderful things football left me with.
But, you know, I'm stronger now than I was when I was in college.
You know, by changing the time of what you're eating.
And I believe you could probably eat just many calories.
Maybe you could eat more calories by doing it.
It's not a calorie thing.
It's a how does your body respond to having more time at low insulin levels, basically, and more time at low IGF levels.
And I could imagine, even in the low-carb diets when people were prescribing them, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, they used to prescribe a walk before breakfast, which is interesting because that's the time when your insulin levels are lower, so that's the time when you're really mobilizing the most fat from your fat tissue.
So, in that sense, skipping breakfast, prolonging the amount of time before your first meal in the day, Would actually maximize his time when you're mobilizing fat.
I got two boys, 11 and 8, and I feed them breakfast in the morning and I cook them dinner maybe three times a week.
My wife's kind of a vegetarian, so I gotta cook the meat if I want them to eat animals.
They have, their body clocks are entirely different.
They have very different body types.
My youngest is not hungry in the morning, and my oldest is, and my youngest at night, like if you put pasta in front of him, he would just keep eating it and eating it and eating it until you finally just say no more, you're going to blow up.
My oldest in the evening doesn't care.
He's not interested.
You know, he'll eat a little bit.
He could skip dinner even.
Like entirely, not just body types, but timing of their hunger, which has got to be related to insulin secretion, other hormones, you know, biorhythms.
Yeah, biodiversity is a very important consideration when you're talking about any kind of diet, whether it's a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, ketogenic diet.
Everybody's body responds differently to different things.
Don't you think though that a lot of people, when you start concentrating on losing weight and concentrating on being healthy and concentrating on your diet, you make a concerted effort sort of across the board.
So if you just go, I'm only going to eat sweet potatoes and, you know, I'm going to...
Like, just the very act of considering your diet and being conscientious has an effect.
One of them is you do consistent things that you don't do.
So, like, McDougall puts people on a starch diet, and Atkins puts them on a ketogenic diet, and Ornish puts them on a 10% fat, mostly vegetarian diet, and Esaltine is, you know, a low-carb diet, and none of them All of them say don't eat sugar, don't drink sodas, don't drink fruit juices, don't eat white bread.
And they all do it for the same reason because it's going to stimulate insulin.
And then when they benefit, you don't know if they benefited because they didn't eat meat or they didn't eat...
You know, gluten or they didn't eat sugar and white bread and, you know.
So the question then would become, and even if the ones who benefited, like on the McDougal diet, the thing that makes me suspicious is the people always say, I tried Atkins and it didn't work for me.
Did they really try it?
Did they try it, lost 60 pounds, and then went back to eating carbs and gained it back and said the diet failed?
Did they just find it too hard to live without their pastries?
But once McDougall came along and put them on a potato diet, or did he just tell them to say that because he wants to point out that this works for people that low-carb doesn't?
No, it's interesting because I'm doing this talk with you.
I've never done a, like, two-, three-hour podcast before, and you're, like, still laser-focused.
And I could imagine.
I think, I wouldn't want to get in the ring with you.
I could see it happening, that exact thing that we discussed earlier about that, you know, you're needing that, like, five minutes of energy to overwhelm your opponent.
And I could see it happening here.
And I'm thinking, okay, if I didn't have a cold and I could breathe through my nose, I could take Joe.
We could go for seven hours.
I could wear him out.
And if it gets bad, we'll take out the drugs and the tequila and we'll see, you know.
Although he's probably got, you know, I've got to get back in shape there.
This is a really important subject, and let's just wrap this up here because I just want to thank you very much for writing that book and taking the time To put in that research against probably a lot of people's advice.
The fact is you go on these diets, it helps people and it helps them a lot.
Not everyone.
And we got distracted and some people, I don't know, maybe some people just have bad reactions to cutting out all the carbs.
But for most people, some significant proportion, they give up the carbs, they're healthier.
And then they can talk about it on the internet and they can share with people and they don't have to live in the same town or go to the same school.
And so the word gets out and then other people want to be And, you know, even with physicians, it's like I got these doctors saying, you made medicine fun for me again because I can help people.
And that, too, gets spread around the Internet.
And, you know, you create clusters and Facebook groups.
I mean, maybe with what's going on right now and the understanding that people have today versus what they had only five or six years ago, I mean, I think there's probably going to be a market for high-fat meat.
I mean, you could scramble four eggs in the morning in almost as much time as it takes to pour cereal into a bowl and get the milk out of the refrigerator.