Gary Taubes is probably the most single-minded person I have ever met. In 2002, when he was a little-known science journalist and author of two books on scientific controversies, an article of his was published in the New York Times, headlined: What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? In it, he argued that the low-fat dietary advice of the previous couple of decades wasn’t only incorrect, but actively dangerous and the reason for, as he put it, the “rampaging epidemic of obesity in America”. For Taubes, dietary fat wasn’t a problem at all. Instead, the real danger was carbohydrate, he asserted, sparking a backlash, and fuelling the ongoing conversation about what constitutes a “healthy diet”. He wasn’t the first to assert that carbs were bad (Robert Atkins got there before him), but perhaps because of his serious and scientific background – he has a physics degree from Harvard and studied aerospace engineering at Stanford – he has been a polarising figure, with as many ardent followers as detractors.
Since 2007, Taubes has published five books on sugar, fat and carbohydrate, including his latest, Rethinking Diabetes, in which he posits that low-carb diets have been under-used as a way to manage blood glucose in type 1 and type 2 diabetes, in favour of drug-heavy treatment regimes which, he suspects, may do more harm than good.
