Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar and Scientific Discovery

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2011

⏱️ 83 minutes

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Summary

Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about what we know about the relationship between diet and disease. Taubes argues that for decades, doctors, the medical establishment, and government agencies encouraged Americans to reduce fat in their diet and increase carbohydrates in order to reduce heart disease. Taubes argues that the evidence for the connection between fat in the diet and heart disease was weak yet the consensus in favor of low-fat diets remained strong. Casual evidence (such as low heart disease rates among populations with little fat in their diet) ignores the possibilities that other factors such as low sugar consumption may explain the relationship. Underlying the conversation is a theme that causation can be difficult to establish in complex systems such as the human body and the economy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is November 7th, 2011, and my guest is Gary Taubes. He is the author of Good Calories,
0:45.2	Bad Calories, a quite extraordinary book that is our subject today. Gary, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:51.3	Thank you, Russ, for having me. Your book is about diet and health, heart disease, obesity,
0:57.0	but it's also a book about a topic that I've been thinking a lot about lately in economics,
1:00.6	which is the challenge of being a truth seeker when you have an ideology or a pet theory.
1:05.8	So we're going to talk about health, but underneath the discussion, and occasionally right out in
1:09.7	the open, we're going to be talking about economics. First, because the body, like the economy,
1:14.9	is a complex system where it's hard to assess and measure, cause and effect. And second,
1:19.7	because epidemiology, the study of what causes various disease and what might cure them,
1:24.1	is very much like macroeconomics. There's a lot of data, a lot of statistical techniques trying
1:29.4	to isolate the impact of one variable on another. So Gary, you'll talk about the health,
1:34.2	and from time to time, I'll interject a little economics.
1:38.9	Your book starts with the idea, which was very prominent and commonly believed by a large group of
1:43.8	people, that fat, eating fat, and fat your diet, particularly animal fat, isn't good for you,
1:50.6	and it leads to heart disease. How did that come to be accepted wisdom in the medical profession?
1:57.4	Okay, well, let me also say I think it's still commonly believed by most people,
2:01.5	and the latest dietary guidelines, once again, are trying to get us to limit our fat intake,
	...

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