Gary Taubes on Why We Get Fat

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2012

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why we get fat and the nature of evidence in a complex system. The current mainstream view is that we get fat because we eat too much and don't exercise enough. Taubes challenges this seemingly uncontroversial argument with a number of empirical observations, arguing instead that excessive carbohydrate consumption causes obesity. In this conversation he explains how your body reacts to carbohydrates and explains why the mainstream argument of "calories in/calories out" is inadequate for explaining obesity. He also discusses the history of the idea of carbohydrates' importance tracing it back to German and Austrian nutritionists whose work was ignored after WWII. Roberts ties the discussion to other emergent, complex phenomena such as the economy. The conversation closes with a discussion of the risks of confirmation bias and cherry-picking data to suit one's pet hypotheses.

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. Today is July 11, 2012, and my guest is Gary Taubes. His latest
0:43.2	book is Why We Get Fat. Gary, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thank you, Russ. Now you were
0:49.6	guest on this program back in 2011 in November, and we talked about your first book, your
0:56.3	earlier book, on a similar topic, which was Good Calories, Bad Calories. This latest
1:02.2	book covers some of the same ground, but in a more accessible way. When we talked about
1:06.2	that first book, we focused on how public opinion and public policy is shaped by research
1:13.1	that you argued was mistaken. I saw a lot of parallels between that research and the
1:19.1	evolution of policy in the area of nutrition and health to research and policy and economics,
1:24.3	problems of groupthink, confirmation bias. In this conversation, I want to focus as the
1:30.0	second book on the topic does on what we know about weight loss, and in what you might
1:36.5	think of as the microsite of the weight loss equation and diet and nutrition question.
1:44.8	The economics analogy here is the challenge of understanding a complex system, or it's
1:50.1	difficult if not impossible to hold one factor constant and isolate the impact of other
1:53.9	factors, both in practice and in research. So let's start by asking the fundamental
2:01.9	question. It would seem that all we need to know about weight loss and the human body
2:07.0	is captured by the slogan, eat less and exercise more. That would seem to be undeniably
2:13.5	true, and then the end of the discussion that if we want to lose weight, we could do
2:19.1	one or the other, both ideally, and I think that's what most people try to do when they
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