YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Taubes

lines on the record: 121
first: 2017-11-30
most recent: 2017-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Her whole career, theorists, or a different species entirely. But, you know, and from them and the history and the literature, I'm reading memoirs of scientists now and how you have to think and how you have to approach this. Because I think a lot of the problems with modern science, when people talk about the reproducibility crisis, I think we're kind of putting band-aids on the fundamental problem, which is that The research community really doesn't get the mentoring that they need to truly understand the nature of this scientific endeavor and what it takes to get the right answer and how you have to act and communicate. Steps along the way. So that's the book I want to write.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Live and facetious way to phrase it, but so a lot of it is about the kinds of learning to recognize or being aware of the kind of cognitive biases that your blog posts are happening discussing and how they manifest in science and scientific experiments. But that's, and when I did my first book, so I lived at CERN for 10 months back in 1984, 85, and I was embedded with these physicists who discovered non-existent elementary particles and then had to realize how they had screwed up. And that became my obsession, this question of how easy it is to get the wrong answer in science and how hard it is to do it right. And that's the book I want to write and interview experimental scientists who have thought about these issues.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My website gaubs at gmail.com. I don't look at, I don't understand Twitter enough to know when people tweet ad me. I don't see how people have time in their lives to pay attention to Twitter feeds or Facebook, even though I do tweet. I would like to write a book, and you and I have talked about this about how science should be done sort of functional, trench science. So there's a lot of books and a lot of courses on the philosophy of science over the millennia, literally, and they're fascinating, but all my books have been about this sort of idea that Richard Feynman encapsulized when he said the first principle of science, you must not fool yourself. You're the easiest person to fool. And I think we've got. Away from them the incentives of science today are about, hey, fool yourself if you can fool other people and get funding.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have to write, again, I'm interviewing practitioners around the world who have transitioned to using low-carb, high-fat or paleo diets to prescribe to their patients for obesity or diabetes or other disorders. So that's going to become a book, although I have no idea at the moment how I'm going to write it. It's been fascinating talking to these people. And I would also like to, if there are any listeners, I would like to talk to doctors who are prescribing vegan and vegetarian diets now or mediterranean diets to try and understand what they're seeing with their patients and the feedback they're getting and try to take care of the sort of selection bias of me interviewing people who follow my Twitter feed, kind of that kind of stuff.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it'll turn out that it's harder, you know, that people just get bored of doing it after a while. And if they get bored and go back to the way they used to eat, they're likely to go back to being obese and or diabetic. But there's no way to tell. I've actually been experimenting with it myself recently because just I've been talking to people about it so much. And it is remarkably easy. Yeah, I'm surprised at how easy it is to skip breakfast. And I was just going to say it's 12.40 here in California. I haven't eaten since dinner last night and clearly energized talking to you.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that when it does start dealing with food again, it's maybe restocked. Some of maybe you've given the beta cells its secrete insulin time to get their biological act together. There's a lot of things we don't know and a lot of things I would like to see clinical trials to document. But again, talking to these practitioners, clearly a lot of them are embracing intermittent fasting as a way to get people who go on low-carb diets and they tend to lose a lot of weight to begin with, but then they plateau. You can use intermittent fasting or longer fasting is a way to break through plateaus or to accelerate fat burning. I worry that it's a fad.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Skip breakfast the next morning, and your first meal is at noon, you lunch at noon or one, you might accelerate fat burning to use a cliche. And it might not be that hard to do because as long as your insulin is low, you're going to be mobilizing fat and burning it. And it does turn out to be relatively easy for people to do. And then some people, particularly Jason Feng, have realized that not only can people on low-carb diets pretty easily do 18-hour fast, it could actually pretty easily do three-day fast or even three week fast, and now we're, you know, whatever I mean by pretty easily is clearly relative. And this is a way to get diabetes under control, to sort of rest the pancreas.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you extend the periods in the morning before breakfast, when you're fasting, that's when your insulin levels are lowest. And the reason you don't get up to every three or four hours to eat during the night or every two hours is because your insulin levels have dropped and you're living off the fat you stored. You're burning fatty acids for fuel at night. So the idea is as long as you have an eaten in the morning, your insulin will stay low. You'll continue to burn fat. You can extend the period between meals and you'll burn more fat. And it'll be, it's got to be the fat that you've stored because you're not eating anything. So I don't know if that was the original logic. That's why I think it could work. But people found out that if they extend the period between meals from like 12 hours to, say, 18, so you have dinner at 7 o'clock at night. You don't have any snack that night.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So somewhere along the line, and I have to read Jason Feng's work more closely or Michael Mosley, people start thinking, what if you actually do skip meals? So the idea behind the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis is that as long as you're keeping insulin levels low, you're mobilizing fat and using it for fuel. So you're actually getting fat out of your fat tissue, which is literally what you want to do when you want to lose weight. And you're burning that fat for fuel.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, to interest, so the idea used to be if you're obese, breakfast was the most important meal of the day. And the reason breakfast was the most important meal. The day was one of these typical sort of simplistic nutrition, obesity thinking. So obesity researchers noticed that obese individuals tended to skip breakfast and have most of their calories from early afternoon on into the evening. And they decided that if they skip breakfast and they're obese, maybe they're obese because they're skipping breakfast and therefore they should eat breakfast so we should all eat breakfast. Mistaking an association for a causality and never really testing it.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fasting is another. Way to approach metabolic disorder that's come on the scene in the last three or four years, driven by British clinician named Michael Mosley and then Jason Fung, a nephrologist in Toronto and Walter Longo, I think are the kind of UCLA.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're not having to worry about that one of the big problems with nutrition studies, if I want to study sugar, and I'm going to remove the 18% of our calories that come from sugar, I have to replace it with something. Do I replace it? I can't replace with diet soda because then I'm not getting the calories that the sugar has. I could replace with glucose. I could replace it with starch. I could replace it with fat. I could replace it with protein. All of those will have a different effect. And you won't know if any benefit or detriment you see is caused by the absence of the sugar or the presence of whatever you replaced it with. But gluten would be easy to do the study if anybody wanted to. At which point I would know more confidence that I know what to believe.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, basically you have to give up many processed foods It would be an easy experiment to do. That's the fascinating thing. And I know, um, Very high level self experiment or who did this who said he basically gave up wheat 400 calories a day of wheat and replaced it with 400 calories of rice and got healthier. And I believe in his case he did. So the question is what makes it a relatively easy experiment, nutrition experiment to do is you just have to replace gluten-free gluten-rich foods with gluten-free versions of them. So say 400, can one you take your thousand subjects and 500 get regular wheat bread? They're supposed to eat four slices a day, and the other get gluten-free bread, and they're supposed to eat four slices a day. And those are the only sources of gluten. And then you run it out for a few years and you see...”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And other starches can be problematic as they stimulate incense creation. So people who go gluten, clearly people get healthier, and they're clearly people who have gluten-related disorders, who, when they don't eat gluten, you know, don't have those disorders. It's that simple. And that's supposedly about 5% of the population. If I'm remembering correctly. These other people have these sort of general...”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I really don't know. It would be the way I think is, I mean, I know a lot of people have gotten gluten-free. People used to sort of make fun of my low carb lifestyle who are now gluten-free and proud of it and talk about it too much. But when they give up gluten, they end up giving up most carbs. And then you find out that even in the wheat belly were recommends in grain brain, I said, give up wheat because of gluten. That's the prime problem, but don't eat sugar either.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's hard to say, and I don't really know that there are people who would say wheat is clearly the worst grain because of the gluten and these other issues that Bill Davis describes in wheat belly and that starchy vegetables are fine or sweet potatoes are fine or if you only eat potatoes and nothing else you'll be healthy and lean and happy and I don't know if any of that is true.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After a couple of three years, you get to the point you can't imagine why you ever smoked. So, you can give up sugar, I believe, and I've gotten there where it's like I don't need sugar to make my life worth living. And I think that can be true for most people, but maybe I'm just lucky that I have a particularly challenging, interesting life. So that's the first thing. Second thing is high glycemic index grains and starchy vegetables.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With sweets, you probably have time to reverse it with these strict diets. But all that said, I would get rid of sugar, and because I'm an ex-smoker, I could say that when I was a smoker, I couldn't imagine life without cigarettes. And cigarettes, like I said, I live for my next cigarette on some fundamental level. And you smoked after everything, after a meal, after workout, after sex. Like most of us don't eat dessert or have a lollipop after sex, but smoking after sex was like, that's what you did. It just made your life worth living. And then you give it up for three months. You're miserable. For a year, you're unhappy. And you're hoping at the end of a year you haven't lost all your friends because you overreact to everything. So you don't have cigarettes to like moderate your emotional responses.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Effects are too severe and they occur too quickly for most people, and they create behavior that's also dangerous, you've got to have something. And if it's not sugar, a lot of us self-medicate with sugar. I mean, I'm depressed. I'm going to go get it. I want a donut. Let's be serious. What do you do with that? And then the question is, you know, there are people who can tolerate it. There are people who are relatively healthy or are not pre-diabetic or diabetic or overweight or obese and aren't going to become going to get metabolic syndrome and can eat cupcakes twice a day their whole life and be absolutely fine and happy and I think that the luckiest people on earth problem is they don't know when they're eating the donuts like smokers don't know whether the cigarette's going to give lung cancer until it's too late”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human existence is not all that great. It's getting better because television is getting better. But for the most part and for most people, it's hard, it's laborious, it's tiresome, and there isn't a lot of pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so for the great bulk of humanity, intoxicants, something we can do to intoxicate us makes it worthwhile, gets us through the day. You know, that's what addictive substances do. That's why when I was a smoker, I looked forward to my next cigarette that literally carried me through the day with the caffeine addiction by about six o'clock at night. I'm thinking about the first cup of coffee in the morning and how good that's going to taste. We need intoxicants. The drugs of abuse, their side effects.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wine is the one area where, or alcohol where I talk about where I think moderation is meaningful So, you know, life, this is one of the lessons that came away from the sugar book. So in what I'm doing, particularly when I go after sugar, there's clearly a Grinch who stole Christmas aspect to it. I'm taking away people's joy, or I'm suggesting that their joy is killing them and they should get rid of it themselves. It was my wife who sees part of her job in life as a sort of squelch my Grinch-like tendencies. And she may be right. So in doing the book, one of the revelations was basically like,”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so, and it's interesting, this is what I've spent the last two months talking to researchers about. So, you know, I clearly think that of all the, so that the problem is the carbohydrate content of the diet. And I think the fat content for the most part is banign, if not healthful. So, and this is just what I would tell my family, and my kids would tell you that I would tell it to them too much. Worst of the carbohydrates is the sugars and the worst of the sugars is a liquid sugars because we consume them and digest them so quickly. So you get rid of sugary beverages and ideally switch to non-sweetened beverages, which means for the most part water or red wine. And if you're going to drink it all day long, water is probably the better choice. I'm in a caffeine addict, so I'm fine with coffee whether or not. I'm right or wrong.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rather than where all they had to do was argue that, hey, look, guys, we're harmless. The community says we're harmless. Don't blame us. So, but now again, there's been, you know, once you have epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and it's clearly not being caused by dietary fat consumption, then sugar is the likely cause, whether it's just because people consume too much of it, whatever that means, or because it's toxic. It's a different world. So now when they fight back, people point out how they're fighting back, even if they're fighting back as only a delaying tactic to give them time to diversify.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it's all about calories. And then the nutritionists and cardiologists were saying dietary fat causes heart disease. So the sugar industry paid nutritionists and cardiologists to write articles saying we believe dietary fat caused heart disease because they did. And then they had to remind people that the conventional wisdom is a calorie, is a calorie. You almost can blame them. And I don't really blame them because had the nutritionists and the obesity researchers gotten it right, the sugar, they would have put the sugar industry.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they see the writing on the wall. They know where it's going, and they're diversifying like mad. You could see him diversifying. And, you know, they're in a bad position. Because as I've argued in press, unlike the tobacco industry, so the tobacco industry's job was to somehow try to convince the world that the research community was wrong and to sow confusion about what the research community was saying. With the sugar industry had to do was remind the research community that what they believed in general was true of sugar in particular so that obesity researchers were saying a calorie is a calorie is a calorie when it comes to obesity. And if that's true, then sugar is harmless. You can't vilify a food for being too good to eat”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They know what they see the writing on the wall. The soft drink industry, the purveyors of sugar ridge foods. On one level, they know they have a product that's going to continue to sell. So they're not going to get rid of it because people are going to continue to consume. And just like some, I don't know, I think 17% of Americans still smoke. So the percentages come way down, but some people, kids are going to start doing it just like kids are going to continue consuming sugary beverages.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On some level that's already happening much to the sugar industry's dismay. It's funny I did a NPR thing a few weeks ago with Michael Moss, the author of Sugar Salt, Fat or Fat Salt Sugar, whatever it's called, and the president of the sugar association, the young woman, former college basketball player named Courtney, Peterson. No Courtney, I forget her last name. And anyway, afterwards, I just yesterday got a nice card from Courtney thanking me for being on the show with her and discussing it. So we're actually really nice to do, but it's sort of like getting a nice card from the president of Tobacco Foundation. They are being nullified.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Low carb, high fat, and it's an easy diet because he's not hungry. True, he's not getting eat donuts and french fries and cereal anymore, but he's replacing it with some pretty. So that kind of clinical observation, there's a startup in San Francisco called Verta Health that's doing this on a sort of scale with smartphones and health coaches and doctors. You know, until recently people believe that even type 2 diabetes was irreversible A one ton insulin, always on insulin, basically until you get taken down by the side effects. And now people are showing that on these diets and maybe others as well, but they're showing that this is a reversible disease, a disease that can be controlled without drugs. So that alone is going to change the discussion. And I could see it already happening.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was talking to a South African physician who's now working in the British Columbia, who's just incredibly passionate about these low-carb, high-fat diets, and he communicates this to all his patients. And I said, why are you so passionate about it? And he said, it's because I can't unsee what I've seen. You know, I put the diabetic patient on this diet. I get him to follow. And this is a person who's on insulin and he's overweight and obese. The rest of his life, if he eats the way he does or the way he diabetes associations want him to eat, all we're doing is basically, you know, adding drugs and modulating his insulin injections. And you put him on this diet and he becomes healthy.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you've got this movement that people would like to talk about as a fuel, but it's basically a fad, but it's fueled by this very profound clinical phenomena, the clinical efficacy of these diets to reverse diabetes or reverse obesity. That's hard to stop. I was just, I'm interviewing these practitioners for my next book, kind of solipsistic exercise, but it's fascinating.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People with neurological disorders who go on these diets and they get healthy in the short, you know, maybe they're raising their LDL cholesterol and they're going to die earlier of heart disease, but this one woman put it in an Instagram post. I lost 100 pounds and you're telling me that bacon is going to kill me? Like being 100 pounds lighter and eating bacon is worse than being the way I used to be. So there's this sort of growing movement and the physicians do this as well because they have the same health problems and issues as the rest of us. So if they do it and it works, they become passionate about it and they put their patience on it and their patients become passionate about it. If it works, if it doesn't, you just lose them. And unfortunately, that's the sort of cognitive bias with what I'm describing.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It botched it. You did lousy science. Who's going to accept that? I mean, And I do have one advantage that they don't have. So, you know, the implications are these chronic diseases are caused by the carbohydrates and the diet. And that's the context. And if you remove the carbs and replace them with fat, the chronic diseases will go away. Not for everybody, but for most people. So this is an effect, this argument that if people eat very low-carb, high-fat diets, the lowest carb, highest fat would be ketogenic. That's the extreme example. They'll get healthier. And the world is now full of people who have done that and gotten healthier. And if there's one thing, and I and others like Nina Teischoltz have been able to accomplish, as we've broken down the resistance to these diets as on some level fads, but also as deadly. So the medical community thought they were deadly. So now you've got a whole world of people, diabetic, obese, and”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, I don't find it's brilliant, and here are all the reasons why. And he responded with, well, you're cherry-picking your data. You're being intellectually dishonest. And it's an easy accusation to make. And if I have time, I will respond saying I'm not actually cherry picking my data. Look at the study you sent me. It doesn't actually make the point that you're using it to make and I'm asking for evidence that does. So it's sort of that kind of accusation is very easy to make. When you do what I do, I mean, it's a problem. You've got a journalist coming along and condemning an entire field, several entire fields of research that are staffed by very smart people who have done very well in their careers, who have got an enormous amount of positive feedback, who believe they're doing good for the world. Any one of them could have gone into the commercial sector and made more money. I mean, these are really well-meaning people, and some journalists comes along and says you just diminish.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it's possible to fix these problems. So, you know, but I do have, for instance, I have an email, I'm having an email exchange with the head of the Department of Nutrition at Tufts, and he sent me an article that was written by Tom Frieden of the former head of the CDC that was in the New Orleans Journal of Medicine arguing that observational epidemiologic studies often have to be the base of decisions about public health and medical public health recommendations and medical treatments, and we can hold clinical trials on this pedestal we do because the observational studies are clearly good enough in some cases. And he sent me that just to say that this sort of brilliant article put his position in words better than he could. And so I read the article and I said, well, needless to say.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so sort of, you know, I mean, the blogosphere just selects for people who, and the more I mean, there are websites that exist in part to argue that I'm an idiot. And the more fiercely they argue that, the more hits they get. In the community at large, I'm still fighting this tendency to just, you know, it's easier to just ignore me or where you see shifts to pay. You don't really have to pay attention to my work because it's published in books and it's only a few peer-reviewed articles in the literature. So it's easy to just ignore me than to confront the arguments. And again, one of the problems I feel with these field nutrition, epidemiology, public health for 50 years is they found it easier to just ignore skeptics and to confront the issues and see if the skeptics are right and the critics are right and what they have to do.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we have to be willing to do it. We have to decide as a society that it's worth it, that epidemiologists and the public health people have to stop arguing that it's just too impractical and it'll never get done and instead argue to do it. And if people decide it's all doable, you could even do these studies in a way if they actually tried. They know how studies have screwed up in the past. You could figure out ways to do it that'll give you the answers. And then you have to have patience to get the answers.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do it, we spend the money because we think it's important to our species and the survival of our species. So, my counter argument is, I mean, these destroyers that ran into ships in the Sea of Japan and two of them in the past six months, those are billion dollar ships. If we spend a billion dollars, obesity and diabetes cost the healthcare system in the US, the estimate is a billion dollars in direct medical costs a day. If we spend one day's worth of medical costs, I think we could probably answer every one of these studies.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's what you do because you want to know the answer, you know, in nuclear fusion. So we think as a society we're going to run into some serious energy problems with or without climate change involved, but we're just going to have to fuel the lives of 10 billion people by 2050. That's going to take an enormous amount of energy. Our fossil fuel reserves are going to run dry. Can't do it with renewables. It's just not practical. We need nuclear power and ideally nuclear fusion as opposed to nuclear fission. And fusion power is hard to achieve in so far we spend $50 billion on nuclear fusion research worldwide. It'll probably cost another $50 billion before we find out, either get to a working fusion reaction, react, or find out it's not possible.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it costs a billion dollars a year to run. So they did that. And society funded, we funded that because society thinks that's an important question and we're a better society if we spend money trying to answer that than if we don't. And then they have collaborations of 1500 scientists on four detectors on this huge atom smasher, 1,500 scientists on each detector. The papers have lists of names that are longer than the papers itself.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we'll find out as we have in the past, and we've spent half a billion dollars, and we either don't know the answer or we don't like the answer. And so we should go with what we have. And the broken system. So let me just give you my counter to the counter, which is in physics, the physicists have decided en masse that they want to know, they wanted to know whether the Higgs boson existed, and they want to know if there's science behind the standard model. And the best way they know how to do that is to build a huge accelerator, which costs $10 billion.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More cancers, more diabetes. Are they heavier? Do they have better or worse cognitive function? I mean, there's a whole slew of things that could happen if you feed people a completely new food. And they're arguing because they can't be done, we have to go with the evidence we have. It's just too hard to do this trial. It's too expensive and the people aren't going to follow our advice and the people we put on canola oil are going to get bored and switch to butter and the people we put on butter are going to get health conscious. The canola, and it's just gonna.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I need to know you have better evidence than you do before I accept that because canola oil scares me. Olive oil maybe I'll give in. Canola oil, corn oil, soy oil brand new foods to the human population. So their response, the Harvard response is we'll never get these studies done. What you're asking for are virtually impossible. They're very expensive, maybe half a billion dollars or $100 million. You're asking what you need to test these is maybe 40,000 people that you can randomize to eat either canola oil or butter. Soy oil or coconut fat. Pick your, and they're going to have to keep doing it for 10 years. And they're going to have to comply pretty well.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At 30 of the population gets diabetes because the other 29 might live longer. So these are two entirely different scenarios. And if the vegetable oils are supposed to be beneficial, We should have to do those kinds of tests. We just have to do them. And what I wrote in an email to the lead author is, you know, you're telling me that if I cook my son's 11-year-old son's salmon in canola oil instead of butter, they will live longer. My eleven-year-old son will live longer and there will be no negative consequences.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We give vegetable oils to everyone, they will be healthier if they consume these things. And this is an idea that if it was a drug, you would never be able to do without long-term clinical trials to establish that you're not going to do more harm than good. Or in fact, that you're not going to do any harm at all. It's not good enough to say 80% of the people are going to live longer if we find out that 20% are going to be killed or get diabetes. You know, it's one thing for a doctor to say, I think you should be on a statin. Here's the pro side is I think we'll get your LDL down and your inflammation down and we're going to reduce your risk of heart disease. There is a small chance you'll become diabetic or have muscle aches, in which case we'll discontinue the statin or switch to a different drug. It's another thing for a public health organizations and governments to say the whole nation should be on statins and not care if one”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lay population were to replace the saturated fats we eat with polyunsaturated fats will live longer and be healthier or have less heart disease, less diabetes, maybe less obesity, less insulin resistance. So this means in effect replacing, I don't know if they think this far into advance, but it means in effect replacing foods we've been consuming for millions of years as a species, and mostly animal fats with vegetable oils that are relatively new to the human diet, particularly like soy oil and canola oil and corn oil. And the argument I've been making in emails not successfully is that if you're assuming is that these vegetable oils are inherently healthy, that they're beneficial. They're the equivalent of statins.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's the question. I'm involved now, I'm supposed to be co authoring an article with the British Medical Journal on Nutrition Policy. They're running a series on nutrition policy. So one of the articles on dietary fat, and I'm honored that they think enough of my work that they've asked me to be a co-author, with two epidemiologists. One of them is at Harvard and has not liked my work for 10 years since I wrote a New York Times magazine cover article about the science of epidemiology using the Harvard cohort study as a case study of a pseudoscience. So I can understand why he might be angry at me and disagree with my way of thinking. So the conflict in this article is that the nutrition community, driven by these epidemiologists, think in the context of saturated fat that if all of us out there in the”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I'm going to pretend that it is, and the only way I can pretend that it is by not mentioning all the ways that it isn't. And you're supposed to publish negative data, but the truth is it's very hard to get it published and nobody wants to put in the time to finally get an article published in some fourth rate journal because it's negative. So a lot of issues came up actually getting to be involved that I'm wondering, how naive was I and will we ever solve these problems?”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's difficult. And so, same kind of problems come up. It's not like the physicists are any better at this than the nutritionists because if you're doing something new, it's never been done before. You have no idea how your equipment or your subjects or the purveyors of your diets or whatever are going to screw it up. You can plan for everything. Part of my revelation was on this micro level, how not just how easily the science could be derailed by just bad luck or unforeseen, what was it, you know, unknown unknowns. But the tendency among the researchers to pretend it didn't happen or to ignore it because if they actually confront it, they basically saying, here's a paper I've just written that isn't worth reading.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are unintended phenomena will appear that will make the interpretation of your experiment almost impossible. And again, if you're working in a world where you could do your cyclotron experiment on Monday, have results on Wednesday, and have your colleagues explain what you screwed up on on Friday, and then you could repeat it on Monday. This isn't a huge problem. History of science is full of those kinds of examples and discussions. But if you're working in a world where the experiment costs you $5 million. And you're never going to get $5 million to do it again.”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parenting of her child looked like child's play in comparison. They're supposed to be sort of Francis Crick set a functioning collaboration doesn't work unless you can be rude to each other. You have to critically attack. And what I've seen in these nutrition public health communities are it's too easy to attack each other's work so they don't do it. And then they just allow this substandard work to go by. So I discussed that in the epilogue of good calories, bad calories. The one place where my editor really let me sort of express my dismay. But it was on a macro level. I had no idea how hard it was to do these experiments on a micro level. In fact, because I am not a scientist or an experimental scientist and my only experience was with my first two books being sort of mentored by some of the great physicists in the world and seeing how they did their work. I wasn't aware of how easy it is to screw up an experiment and how unintended consequences”
2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT