Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes is a correspondent for Science magazine. His articles about science, medicine, and health have appeared in Discover, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He has won three Science-in-Society Journalism Awards given by the National Association of Science Writers—the only print journalist so recognized—as well as awards from the Pan American Health Organization, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society. His writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2002 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and 2003. He is the author of Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. He was educated at Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and their son.

ALSO BY GARY TAUBES

Bad Science:

The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

Nobel Dreams:

Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment

^*1 When the first American edition of The Physiology of Taste was published in 1865, it was entitled The Handbook of Dining, or Corpulence and Leanness Scientifically Considered, perhaps to capitalize on the Banting craze.

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^*2 Endocrinology is the study of the glands that secrete hormones and the hormones themselves.

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^*3 By 1973, there had been six major conferences or symposiums dedicated solely to research on obesity: at Harvard and at Iowa State University in the early 1950s; in Falsterbo, Sweden, in 1963, hosted by the Swedish Nutrition Foundation; at the University of San Francisco in 1967; the inaugural meeting of the British Obesity Association in London in 1968; and an international meeting in Paris in 1971. In all six, carbohydrate-restricted diets were portrayed as uniquely effective at inducing weight loss.

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^*4 Arteriosclerosis is the condition in which atheroma accumulates in arteries throughout the body. The term was often used interchangeably with “atherosclerosis.”

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^*5 Decreasing cholesterol consumption from four hundred milligrams a day, the average American intake in the 1990s, to the three hundred milligrams a day recommended by the National Cholesterol Education Program would be expected to reduce cholesterol levels by 1 to 2 mg/dl, or a decrease of perhaps 1 percent.

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^*6 It did include a half-page of “recent scientific references on dietary fat and atherosclerosis,” many of which contradicted the conclusions of the report.

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^*7 Another of the seven was a reanalysis of a 1964 study that had compared the health and diet of Dubliners with those of their siblings who had immigrated to Boston. The 1964 incarnation of the study concluded that the Boston Irish consumed six hundred calories a day less than their Dublin siblings and 10 percent less animal fat, but weighed more and had higher cholesterol. Heart-disease rates were similar, but the Irish brothers lived longer. This study was then reinterpreted twenty years later by Lawrence Kushi, who worked in Keys’s department at the University of Minnesota. Kushi concluded that those men who reportedly ate the most saturated fat and the least polyunsaturated fat in the early 1960s had slightly higher heart-disease rates in the years that followed. Though “The Cholesterol Facts” described the reanalysis as producing “particularly impressive results,” Kushi himself had been less impressed: “These results,” he wrote, “tend to support the hypothesis that diet is related, albeit weakly, to the development of coronary heart disease.”

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^*8 When Dayton and his colleagues autopsied the men who died, they found no difference in the amount of atherosclerosis between those on the two diets.

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^†9 Ordinary milk was replaced with an emulsion of soybean oil in skim milk, and butter and ordinary margarine were replaced with a margarine made of polyunsaturated fats. These changes alone supposedly increased the ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fats sixfold.

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^*10 The results were also presented at a conference of the American Heart Association in 1975. A small chart documenting the results, without explanation, was then published as an abstract in the journal Circulation, along with the other abstracts from the conference.

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