Good Calories, Bad Calories

It’s always dangerous, when challenging beliefs that are so passionately embraced, to acknowledge that you have paid attention to the skeptics who preceded you. This can be used as evidence that you are exceedingly gullible and will believe anything you read. Nonetheless, I concede that I indeed took seriously and am grateful for the efforts of those who trod portions of this path before me: in particular, Russell Smith, Uffe Ravnskov (and his International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics), Wolfgang Lutz, James Le Fanu, and Thomas Moore on the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease; Alfred Pennington, Herman Taller, and Robert Atkins on the subject of diet and weight; and Peter Cleave and John Yudkin, who came closest to putting it all together. I read the works of these authors with skepticism, but no more or less than that of other contributors to the literature. The book that may have been most influential in altering my perspective and yet never made it into this text, for reasons of narrative flow and length rather than relevance, was Weston Price’s 1939 classic Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects.

Drafts of this book were read in part or in whole and corrections suggested by Robert Bauchwitz, John Benditt, Kenneth Carpenter, Michael Eades, Richard Feinman, Mark Friedman, Richard Hanson, David Jacobs, Cynthia Kenyon, Ron Krauss, Mitch Lazar, Jamie Robins, Bruce Schechter, Jeremy Stone, Clifford Taubes, Nina Teicholz, and Eric Westman. I am deeply grateful to all these individuals for their time, their efforts, and their acumen. Any errors in either fact or form, however, remain mine alone. I would also like to thank the literally hundreds of researchers, clinicians, and public-health authorities who took the time to speak with me at length, many of whom did so repeatedly, even though they fundamentally disagreed with articles I had already written on this subject.

I am grateful to Colin Norman and Tim Appenzeller for their invaluable help and encouragement at Science on the series of investigations that took me ever more deeply into the questionable practices of preventive medicine and public health. I’m grateful to Hugo Lindgren and Adam Moss, both formerly of The New York Times Magazine, for taking the chance on the very controversial article—“What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”—that led directly to the work on this book.

I am deeply indebted to Jon Segal at Knopf for an extraordinary job of editing and for being, quite simply, everything I could ever hope for in an editor. I’d also like to thank Knopf editorial assistant Kyle McCarthy and copyeditor Terry Zaroff. I am grateful, as ever, to my agent at ICM, Kris Dahl, for two decades of unwavering support.

I would like to thank Alexis Bramos-Hantman, Jeanna Bryner, Jasmin Chua, Susan England, Emily Hager, Jeanne Lenzer, David Mahfouda, Tariq Malik, Chung Pak, Gaia Remerowski, Sandra Neufeldt, Rochelle Thomas, and Dori Zook for helping with the research and providing the legwork for this book. I can’t thank Richard Ahrens enough for his translation of Bahner’s 1955 discussion of lipophilia. I’m grateful to Stefan Hagen for his German connections. I’d like to thank Barry Glassner for his camaraderie, Charles Mann for his friendship and his guidance, and Marion Roach Smith, as ever, for her sisterly wisdom. I’m grateful to Ned Tanen, Kitty Hawks, and Lawrence Lederman for their unconditional support and encouragement. Finally, I’d like to thank the late, great Louie Vassilakis (1949–2004) for making one otherwise cold and cacophonous corner of Manhattan feel like home.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Chapter 4 Charts showing data from MRFIT trial. Reprinted from The Lancet, 328, Browner, Hulley, Kuller, Martin, and Wentworth. “Serum Cholesterol, Blood Pressure, and Mortality: Implications from a Cohort of 361,662 Men,” pages 933–936. Copyright October 1986, with permission from Elsevier.

Chapter 14 “Fat Louisa” photograph. Reprinted from The Pima Indians, Russell, page 67. Copyright 1908.

Chapter 14 Photographs from Nigeria. Reprinted from Obesity Symposium, Adadevoh. “Obesity in the African.” 60–73. 1974, with permission from Elsevier.

Chapter 21 Photographs of lipodystrophy with lower-body obesity. Die Krankheiten des Stoffwechsels und ihre Behandlung. Copyright 1931, page 186, Die Magersucht, Grafe, Figure 20 (Photograph of O. B. Meyer). With kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR