Martha Henry, program coordinator for the Knight Fellowships, interviews Gary Taubes about his controversial article.
The cover photo of the July 7, 2002 issue of the The New York Times Magazine showed a juicy steak with a pat of melting butter on top. The headline read, "What if Fat Doen't Make You Fat?" and in smaller letters, "Influential researchers are beginning to embrace the medical heresy that maybe Dr. Atkins was right." The article inside, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" written by Gary Taubes, questioned both the efficacy and health benefits of low-fat diets. Taubes suggested that science may better support high-fat low-carbohydrate diets as a means of weight loss and that these diets are not as detrimental to cholestrol levels as once believed.
Though I don't have the statistics to prove it, I'm sure that most people who read Gary Taubes' article that Sunday morning doubled their fat intake that day. (I know I threw an extra slice of cheese on my veggie burger.) Taubes' article caused a stir in the world of diet researchers, dieters, science journalists and lots of people who read and eat. I asked him about his experience of writing such a controversial piece.
HENRY: In your article "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat," which was published in Science in March of 2001, you made many of the same points that you made in your New York Times Magazine article, yet it was geared toward an audience of scientists and academics. What kind of reaction did your article in Science get compared to your later NYT Magazine article.
TAUBES: I saw the Science article as the prequel, in effect, to the NYT Magazine article. In the Science article, I was exploring the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease, and only touched peripherally, where necessary, on the weight issue. At the time, I wasn't that interested in the weight connection and didn't really see the story in it. By the time I got to the NYT Magazine assignment, my research for the Science article had convinced me that dietary fats—even saturated fats—could not be much of a player in heart disease. The NYT Magazine article was then the flipside of the Science article: it was dedicated to analyzing the relationship between dietary fat and weight, and touched on the heart disease issue only to make necessary points.
Needless to say, the Science article was considerably less controversial than the NYT Magazine article. First of all, it didn't mention the Atkins diet. And secondly, it wasn't on the cover of the NYT Magazine. It was well received by the community at large, although it also got its fair share of critical letters from long-time advocates of the health benefits of low-fat diets.
HENRY: Did the reaction to your NYT Magazine story surprise you?
TAUBES: Yes. Even though I knew the article would be the most controversial article the Times Magazine ran all year, it still shocked me. More than anything, it was the viciousness of some of the responses. One of my good friends in the science journalism business—someone who had written a book on obesity and concluded, as the establishment insists, that the culprits are over-consumption of fatty diets and inactivity—went from considering me one of the four or five best science writers in the country to accusing me of having had a brain transplant and making up the story to get a big book deal.
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| Gary Taubes |
HENRY: Did you have any control over the cover text, "What if Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?" or the headline to the article within the magazine, "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" What did you think of them?
TAUBES: I probably had control, but I didn't exercise it. I didn't really think about it at the time. By the time I saw the cover and the headlines, we were deep into the close of the article and I was going over and over the article, getting the facts and the wording right. Everything was a new experience at the time and I wasn't really paying attention.
In retrospect, a fair share of the vehemence the article prompted came from low-fat establishment types who were angered by the cover, or the idea that I was accusing them of a conspiracy. Along these lines, I had one scientist later apologize to me. I was interviewing him for my book, and I was particularly anxious to speak to him because a mutual acquaintance, a former head of the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association, had told me that he hated my article. It took us two weeks to set up an interview, and in the intervening time he re-read the article. When we got on the phone together, he told me that he actually agreed with everything I said, but that he was so blinded by his anger over the headlines when he first read it, he failed to pay close attention to what the article really said.
Of course, the Atkins connection was what really angered the establishment obesity and heart disease types. In the first draft of the article, I had Atkins buried at the end of the article, as the diet that would be tested in clinical trials and so would shed some data on the question of whether it was fat or carbs or simply excess calories of all types that caused obesity. The lede was a Harvard researcher/clinician who was the politically acceptable advocate of low-carbohydrate diets. The editors at the Times rightfully said that Atkins was the elephant in the living room and had to be in the lede. The managing editor also said, ironically but correctly, that there was nothing truly new in the article except the Atkins stuff. All the rest had been covered in various best-selling low-carb diet books going back forty years. So we moved Atkins up to the lede. Atkins showed up in the sub-hed on the cover, and the low-fat proponents went crazy.
I feel the editors effectively prompted me to write what I did believe and not to try to soft-sell it. I have to say that when I wrote the new lede, about an Atkins vindication being the medical establishment's worst nightmare, I read it to my wife and laughed, and said "they'll never run this in a million years." Of course, they didn't change a word. I also have to admit that the editors' desire to ratchet up the controversy with the "big fat lie" headline and the Atkins angle and the porterhouse steak on the cover, certainly achieved the controversy they wanted, and subsequently, I'm sure, considerably increased the size of my book deal, so it would be somewhat disingenuous for me to say that I actually regret it.
HENRY: I'm sure you're aware that what a writer writes in an article and what the average reader takes away from the article may be two very different things. Though the thrust of your NYT Magazine article may have been that there is scant evidence to support the hypothesis that a low-fat diet is the best and most healthy way to lose weight and that the evidence may fit the alternative hypothesis (low-carb diets are healthier, more effective for weight loss and do not raise cholesterol) better, what my Uncle Donald took away from the article is that he should eat bacon-double-cheese burgers for breakfast. As a science journalist, do you feel that you have a responsibility, or even the ability, to make what you say and what people take away from an article converge in any way?
TAUBES: You have to consider that when I wrote the article I already knew the results of five clinical trials—short term, admittedly—that compared Atkins-like low-carb diets to low-fat, low-calorie diets of the kind recommended by the American Heart Association. Since my article came out, those five studies have been published and they all showed that cholesterol profiles—specifically triglycerides—improved on low-carb diets compared to the AHA diets. So I knew that your uncle's bacon double cheeseburger for breakfast wouldn't kill him as long as he remembered to skip the bun.
I also knew that some 30% of Americans—40% over 60, which probably includes your uncle—have Syndrome X/Metabolic Syndrome and, for those people, low-fat diets will do more harm than good. I also knew that long-term studies of low-fat, low-calorie diets showed they were worthless and didn't lead to long-term weight loss. I also knew that if individuals could lose weight on Atkins or any diet, their cholesterol would drop with the weight, regardless of the diet. Knowing all that, I knew that anyone could try a low-carb diet and it wouldn't kill them and might actually help them. I had faith that if they somehow gained weight eating all the fat that Atkins recommends, they'd stop the diet. (I'm still mystified by nutritionists and other "experts", who feel they have to condemn a diet in advance because some individuals might allegedly gain weight. Don't they think that anyone smart enough to read what they write is also smart enough to stop a diet that doesn't work for them ?) And then the end paragraphs discussed at length my own anxieties about keeling over from a heart attack while I ate my eggs and sausage every morning, or ballooning up to 300 pounds from some odd rebound phenomena.
That said, of course I feel we have the responsibility to try to get readers to take away from our articles only that which we put into them. Isn't that at the heart of all good writing? I'm no longer confident, however, that it's entirely possible when discussing issues like diet, religion or maybe Middle Eastern politics. What truly amazed me here was the utter lack of regard that some of the critics had for what the article actually said, not that the public may have taken it the wrong way.
HENRY: Several of the researchers that you quoted in your article complained that because of the way you quoted them, they appeared to endorse the Atkins diet, which they do not. Were you aware of how their quotes would be construed? Do you think they're justified in asserting that you're misrepresenting their views?
TAUBES: You could twist that question, which I'm going to, and ask whether journalists have an obligation to assure that everyone cited in an article agrees with the over-riding thesis. Let's take John Farquhar, for a case study. Farquhar is the Stanford researcher who apparently wrote a widely circulated and quoted e-mail saying that I tricked him into the end quote of the article: "Can we get the low-fat proponents to apologize?" Now this was, on one level, ludicrous. I had interviewed Farquhar over the telephone, but we never talked about Atkins's diet, only low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets in general. Then, maybe three weeks later, he offered up the quote in an on-the-record e-mail correspondence that he initiated. I actually wrote him back an e-mail asking him if he meant that line, and explaining how I wanted to use it. He then responded saying he did mean it, and explaining his position in more depth, which agreed with mine, to first approximation, on everything but, perhaps, the Atkins business, which we still hadn't discussed. So the quote was perfectly within the context of which it was used and it was obtained respectfully and honestly. I have the e-mails showing that I asked whether he was serious about that line and his response that he was. How many journalists in the country would extend that courtesy for an on-the-record quote offered up in unsolicited e-mail?
On the other hand, I could still understand his position. The article was construed by some as an Atkins advocacy piece; the sub-hed on the cover says influential researchers are embracing the possibility that Atkins is right, and here Farquhar's name is in the article, presumably because he's an influential researcher and he's even getting the last word. I assumed that Farquhar was dismayed because he fears the consequences of an entire nation eating a high-saturated-fat diet and so considered my article irresponsible. And, on top of that, he comes off looking like he's an advocate for it. In that context, he's absolutely justified to be irate. And, to Farquhar, it would appear that I tricked him if he thinks I knew exactly how I was going to write the article (ledes, headlines, subheds, etc., included) when I interviewed him, which I didn't. In fact, Faruqhar might have been quite comfortable with the first draft of the article, which still ended with his quote, but led with the Harvard researcher whose JAMA article Farquhar himself told me to read.
As for the other researchers, if you read their comments closely, they are all quoted quibbling about aspects of the article or about being left out entirely. Walt Willett of Harvard, for instance, is quoted in several venues saying only that I didn't listen to his concerns about red meat, which is pertinent because Atkins is a diet that can be heavy in red meat. Now Willett is involved in a clinical trial of the Atkins diet and has been pushing loud and long for a higher fat, lower carb food pyramid and says as much in his book, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy. Here's a quote from his book that could have come right out of my article: "The all-fat-is-bad message has started a huge national experiment, with us as the guinea pigs. As people cut back on fat, they usually eat more carbohydrates. In America today, that means more highly refined or easily digested foods like sugar, white bread, white rice, and potatoes. This switch usually fails to yield the hoped-for weight loss or lower cholesterol levels. Instead it often leads to weight gain and potentially dangerous changes in blood fat." The question is, if I quote him saying such a thing, which I did, do I have an obligation to explain that he still has anxieties about red meat and colon cancer and that saturated fat will also cause "potentially dangerous changes in blood fat". After all, readers might perceive that by being quoted saying what he did, that strongly implies he is an advocate of the Atkins diet? Space is limited. If I include the caveats with Willett, do I do it with everyone? It never crossed my mind that I would have to. Apparently it should have. I've decided to raise this issue in the introduction to my book, and make the point strongly that just because someone is quoted in the book, it does not mean that they endorse the thesis itself.
Curiously enough, those researchers who did speak directly to the Atkins low-carbohydrate issue—in particular, Albert Stunkard of Penn or Terry Maratos-Flier of the Joslin Diabetes Center or Sam Klein, who's now president of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity—never appeared in any of the articles that were critical of my article. They never disavowed the quotes or the context. I assume the people who wrote the critical articles also talked to those researchers, since their quotes were far and away the most salient. Stunkard, one of the grand old men in the obesity field, is the one you want to see refuting his quotes, and, to my knowledge, he never does. Maratos-Flier is quoted saying that maybe 40% of Americans get fat on low-fat/high-carb diets. Maratos-Flier later told me she was contacted by at least one journalist and she said that she stood by the quotes, but none of those reporters chose to put that piece of positive information in their articles. To me it was a lesson in how to take down any piece of journalism. You simply re-interview the sources, faithfully report anything negative any of them might say and faithfully leave out anything positive.
HENRY: Has the perception that you're an advocate for the Atkins diet changed the way researchers talk to you? Have people refused to talk to you since the publication of the NYT Magazine article for fear that you'll make them appear to endorse the Atkins diet?
TAUBES: I think the better scientists in the obesity field never saw me as an advocate for Atkins. They read the article and took out of it what I put into it. It's the more zealous journalists/advocates of the low-fat diet dogma—Sally Squires of The Washington Post, for instance, or Bonnie Liebman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest—more than any one who tried to spin the article into saying something that I couldn't or wouldn't want to defend.
Since the article came out, I've interviewed some 200 more researchers in the relevant disciplines—obesity, heart disease, nutritional anthropology, etc. I've had maybe five people refuse to speak to me—either because they're long-time low-fat proponents who, I guess, see me as some kind of junior-rank devil incarnate or unlicensed hack diet doctor, or because they are good friends with people who feel they were mistreated in the article.
There's another handful of researchers who never returned my requests for interviews, and I can only guess whether I should take that personally. A couple of researchers I've called have been very up-front about their anxieties that I will quote them out of context—again based on reading the CSPI or Washington Post articles—and with those I have assured them that I will show them the relevant sections in advance of the publication. I've also explained that if they didn't like the premise of the article, they wouldn't like the premise of the book and, in both cases, they were fine with that.
A surprising number of researchers (to be distinguished from health care workers or advocates), even in the obesity field, felt that I finally said publicly what had needed to be said for years, and they have been more than willing to help and to give me their time. My favorite comment to date was from one of the best scientists in the field who said, "You stepped on a lot of toes, but Lord knows, they needed to be stepped on."
HENRY: On July 14, 2002, one week after your controversial article, the New York Times ran an editorial titled, "Challenging the Accepted Wisdom," which referenced your article and said, "But surely one lesson that emerges from the endless arguments over which dietary recommendations or best-selling diet plans work best is the need for some rigorously controlled clinical trials to sort out the differences. The National Institutes of Health has already started to finance some comparative studies of popular diets and could clearly do lots more." A year after your story ran, what affect do you think it's had on the public and on the funding of diet research?
TAUBES: Well, many of the clinical trials that are in the works, were in the works before the article came out. The tide had started to shift, as I said in the article, because of the strength of the anecdotal evidence. (Whether the data will be compelling enough to actually erode the dogma—and will be reported honestly enough, if it is—remains to be seen.)
I did want to make public some of the crucial issues so that it would shift the discussion and the interpretation of the trials, from what's the best diet to what's the cause of obesity and perhaps other chronic diseases as well. In this, I probably failed. As you pointed out, people came away from the article arguing about the Atkins diet and reporters have written up the clinical trials ignoring the greater context and focusing in on how many pounds were lost in how many weeks. I hope to do a better job with this in the book.
So I don't think it's had a great deal of impact on funding, but I could be wrong. It certainly changed the way a lot of people ate in New York and certainly gave a lot of people the courage to try a low-carbohydrate diet, even if their physicians were not big fans. I was sitting at breakfast two days ago at my local diner (yes, eggs and sausage), and a 60-ish man sat in the booth in front of me and complained to the waiter that his doctor wouldn't let him eat anything anymore. Then he ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, hold the toast and potatoes. I felt like I had been transported to an alternative universe. Five years ago, you would have heard the same complaint because his doctor put him on a low-fat diet and said he couldn't have the eggs and bacon but could eat the toast and potatoes. Very weird.
HENRY: Does your article and the controversy that it caused signal a shift in the dietary advice paradigm? Were you the right guy at the right time? Was the pendulum ready to swing, or did you push it?
TAUBES: I was the right guy at the right time. Reporters had been writing pieces of the story. Health reporters at Newsday and USA Today, for instance, had been writing about Atkins trials without the usual anti-fat bias, and Time had done a cover story on low-carb diets. I may have had three advantages, however, working in my favor: first, I had done extensive, if not obsessive-compulsive research for the Science article, and so I was no longer excessively burdened by a knee-jerk belief that fat or even saturated fat will kill you. To accept that a low-carb diet might be healthy, you have to accept, first, that a low-fat diet might not be and, second, that a high-fat diet might not be deadly. Along those lines, I am willing to spend an entire year reporting a single magazine article, which is not the case with most reporters—particularly those who have real jobs, deadlines or families.
Second, I had spent my career writing about good and bad science and the difficulties of establishing reliable knowledge, so I think I am considerably more open to the possibility that academic "experts" with impressive credentials can be misguided, if not dead wrong. I think the criteria by which I judge science and scientists is very different than many, if not most journalists, and those criteria were passed on to me by some very, very good scientists in the course of some long and arduous investigations, both scientific and journalistic.
Third, I stumbled on the reports of three of the five Atkins/low-fat trials. These had not been published, but they had been reported at conferences. In fact, one of those conferences was a huge national nutrition conference, and when I went through the list of talks and found the Atkins trials (this was three months before my article was due) I was anxious that I would be beaten to the story.
All that said, the wave was definitely breaking and I was lucky enough to ride it.
HENRY: In your September 24th response to Sally Squires August 27th Washington Post article criticizing your July 7th article in the NYT Magazine you said, "My NYT article noted that copious evidence exists in contradiction to the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis, while the alternative hypothesis may fit the data better but has never been adequately tested." Given sufficient funding, how long do you think it would take for the alternative hypothesis to be adequately tested? What would constitute convincing proof? Care to make any predictions?
TAUBES: This is a tough one. The fat/cholesterol dogma is so well established that it's hard to imagine it ever going away. One thing dogmas do very well is perpetuate themselves, not through any explicit conspiracies, but because so many people are so invested in one point of view that they will always, when given the chance, act in a way that supports that view.
Consider just one fact: the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins now have a market of around $20 billion a year and every week they're in the newspapers being touted as a miracle treatment for a new disease. Now, on the one hand they do many things other than lower LDL cholesterol, so their ability to reduce heart disease and apparently stroke may actually be due to these other factors. On the other, and this is what the Science article was about, just because a cholesterol-lowering drug may reduce heart disease risk, doesn't mean that a low-fat diet that reduces LDL cholesterol (but also does many other things) will make you live longer. But the saturated-fat-raises-LDL-cholesterol-causes-chronic-disease dogma is so deeply ingrained in our culture and our economy and our health care system that I find it hard to believe it will ever go away, even though it's almost assuredly wrong or at most of trivial importance.
In that sense, 'fat', or 'fatty' or 'fat-laden' have become synonymous with "unhealthy" in discussions on diet. The one possibility is that people will slowly realize that if they eat less sugar, refined carbohydrates and starches, they will weigh less and maybe feel better, and their cholesterol profiles and blood pressure may improve as well. If that happens (it may not), the weight of personal experience and better health may turn the tide. As I said in my article, and I'll go into in depth in the book, for at least 150 years preceding the 1970s, the orthodox wisdom had it that carbohydrates cause overweight. Remember the days when potatoes, pasta, bread, sweets, soft drinks and beer were all considered "fattening". That may indeed have been the case, for very good biological reasons that have nothing to do with their calorie content. If so, then maybe people will stop listening to the "experts," the doctors and the representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, and instead pay attention to their bodies. Hard to imagine, but you never know.
HENRY: After the uproar over your NYT Magazine article, you signed a $700,000 book deal with Knopf. Were you intending to write a book before the story ran? What is your book about? Will you make specific diet recommendations in your book? Should we be looking forward to the Taubes Diet?
TAUBES: I wanted to write a book after the Science story, but I knew that any advance I got would lead me into bankruptcy. I ended up $40,000 in debt after my second book, and now I was a decade older and not anxious to repeat the experience. I also know that I am an obsessive-compulsive reporter and that would mean a time-consuming book. My agent shopped the Science article around to editors and we had offers, but they would not have paid for two years of my life, and if the book took me three, I would not have been able to afford children. I knew if I could get the fat article on the cover of the NYT Magazine it would raise the ante. One interesting phenomena in the book world is that editors read the NYT Magazine and The New Yorker the week they come out. If there's a controversial story, they all come into the office on Monday chattering about it, and it builds the interest.
When I realized what the story was that I was researching, and when I realized that I'd be able to get it down on paper in a way the NYT Magazine editors would like, that's when I knew I would finally be able to get the funding to write the book I wanted. Nonetheless, I was still shocked by how much money I got. I was expecting considerably less.
As for what the book's about, it's about good and bad science (like my previous books), but it's based in a subject people actually care about (unlike my previous books). What interests me is this problem of establishing reliable knowledge about the universe and how easy it is to get the wrong answer. That's what I'm writing about. So the book will be a revisionist history of the science and politics of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease. It will explain how a half-century of politically attuned, bad scientists foisted the dietary-fat-leads-to-heart-disease dogma on us without the data to back it up, and it will then explain how some very good science and some fairly compelling data supporting the alternative hypothesis got buried along the way. It will also explain why we get obese and what can be done about it, but it will not put the primary blame, curiously enough, on either gluttony or sloth. It's an amazing story. I hope my writing does it justice.
I doubt you'll be able to read the book without changing your diet, but it will not be a diet book. There will be no recipes. One reason I went with Knopf, which was not the highest bidder, is because the editor who wanted the book, and who had edited more than half-a-dozen Pulitzer-winning non-fiction books, made it clear that he wanted to publish the book that I wanted to write and not the Big Fat Lie diet plan.
HENRY: What did you have for lunch?
TAUBES: Rack of lamb salad. (Small chops, much arugula.)
Gary Taubes was a 1996-97 Knight Science Journalism Fellow. He is a contributing correspondent to Science and author of Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion and Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. He has won the National Association of Science Writers Science In Society Award three times (the maximum allowed).
Gary Taubes' article, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie," was published in the New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002.
Gary Taubes' article, "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat," was published in Science magazine, March 30, 2001.
Ellen Ruppel Shell (84-85) writes a NEWSWEEK article in response to Gary Taubes' NYT Magazine piece.
"Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts," Sally Squires' critque of Taubes' NYT story, appeared in The Washington Post on August 27, 2002. Taubes' Response to Squires' article ran in the Post on September 24, 2002.
In "Fat City," published in the American Journalism Review's November 2002 issue, Rachel Smolkin examines how Gary Taubes in the New York Times Magazine and Sally Squires in The Washington Post reach opposite conclusions about dietary fat.
"Interviewing: Was This Food Fight Fair?" appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Nov/Dec 2002 issue. Liz Cox examines the controversy that erupted when Sally Squires of The Washington Post interviewed Gary Taubes about his NYT Magazine article. Though the two experienced reporters thought they had agreed on the terms of the interview, they clearly had different interpretations of what those terms meant.
"The Truth About the Atkins Diet," a critique of Taubes' article by Bonnie Liebman, appeared in the November 2002 issue of the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
"Big Fat Fake: The Atkins Diet Controversy and the Sorry State of Science Journalism," Michael Fumento's lengthy critique of Gary Taubes' NYT Magazine article, was published in Reason in March 2003.
Gary Taubes' even lengthier Reponse to Michael Fumento's Critique in Reason, was published in Reason online, March 4, 2003.
Michael Fumento's Reply to Gary Taubes' Response, was published in Reason online, March 4, 2003.
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