Acknowledgments
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
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.”