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Gary Taubes

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121
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2017-11-30
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2017-11-30
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  1. “Lack of a bet, you know, so we're drinking fruit juices, we're eating sugar-coated cereals. And then when the low fat movement comes in in the 1960s, you're adding sort of low fat or no-fat yogurt with sugar and skim milk. It's sugar from beginning to end. So the people, while this was happening, are arguing, look, obesity and diabetes is exploding, sugar consumption's exploding. Clearly that's the prime suspect. And then there's a, as we began to understand the physiology of how sugar is metabolized, that clearly made sugar a prime suspect as well in actually causing type 2 diabetes in a condition called insulin resistance. We should probably talk about.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And Minnesota for dyspeptic, wealthy people, and they were, for the most part, anti-sugar. So cereal was a way to get fiber into the diet, and they didn't really want sugar in their products, and they had nutritionists working for these companies. They didn't want people eating sugar. Post-World War II, right around 1948, Post was, I think it was Sugar Crisp, finally breaks down the barrier and starts selling a sugar coated cereal, and suddenly every other cereal producer has to give in or go out of business. And you could see these struggles between their nutritionists and their marketing people. And in every case, the marketing people won. By the 1960s, the American breakfast had been transformed into basically a dead dessert with fiber.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So, and the goal of Coke, which Coca-Cola always was basically to make sure that everyone in the world, I mean, everyone in the world has easy access to Coca-Cola and is drinking it regularly. And at one point, the CEO of Coca-Cola even complains that the human body needs so many ounces of water, liquid a day, and only like 20% of it is coming from Coca-Cola and that's just completely unacceptable. Anyway, you see these explorers. The one industry that's now a major, well, there's a few industries that are major purveyors of sugar that took a while longer to come about so that fruit juice industry doesn't really show up until the 1930s and then explodes post-World War II. And the cereal industry, cereal was basically Kellogg and post and those folks were health fanatics and they were running sanity.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “and selling nationally and marketing nationally and pioneering their marketing approaches. At one point in around 1905, a congressman asked the brother of, I think it was one of the founders, one of the main players in Coca-Cola. If he could describe the items on which Coca-Cola was advertised and he said the everyday items, and he said it would be easier to describe the items on which it's not.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Probably less. By the end of the 19th century, consuming the neighborhood of 80 or 90 pounds per person per year. So, you know, the neighborhood of a 20-fold increase in all the ways that we consume sugar today were virtually non-existent as industries in the early 19th century. So in the 1840s, you've got the candy industry is created, the chocolate industry is created, and the ice cream industry are all created. And then in the 1870s and 80s, you see the soft drink industry with Dr. Pepper first and then Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And by the early 20th century, that these foods have just exploded and they're everywhere and all the major food producers that we deal with today, that sugar purveyors that we deal with today are already sort of in place.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Go to one to two to three a year to five a year to ten, and then by the early years of the 20th century, you're in double digits, and then they just shoot up from there. And you could find experts back then, the head of the New York City Department of Public Health saying it just attracts so closely with sugar consumption from population to population that we seriously have to consider that sugar is the cause. And you look at the industries that evolved in that period and sugar over the course of the 19th century went from being a sort of expensive luxury in the beginning of the 19th century when Americans, for instance, probably consumed less in the neighborhood of five pounds per person per year. So that's the equivalent of maybe, I don't know, four ounces of sugary beverage per day.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Sign of the crime. And so you could do this using hospital records and the medical literature. And you find out, for instance, in the US, that diabetes rates were virtually non-existent, even though it was a very relatively easy disease to diagnose. You saw very little sign of it pre-1850 and even for the most part pre-1870s. And then the numbers in hospitals. And you can see this in hospital records and in Boston and in mass general or in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital, the diabetes diagnoses in hospitals go from literally zero a year. Remember today, one in 11 Americans are considered to have diabetes in their major, the major city hospitals would see in some years zero cases. And then you could see the number.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Okay, so again, if you think of it as a criminal case, the first question is what's the crime being committed? And in this case, it's, like I said, it's obesity and diabetes epidemics showing up everywhere in the world after they transition to a Western diet. So that's the crime. That's what we want. We want to find out who the perpetrator is. We know what the vector is. The vector is the Western diet and lifestyle. You know, it's commercialism and urbanism, and maybe it's processed foods. These are all sort of vectors of the disease. But what's the agent and the vector? And the point I make in my book is you can chart these, go back in time and actually, which you would do if again, if it was a criminal case, you would want to know when the crime was committed, when the earliest.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So you've got these slow motion disasters worldwide, you've got the head of the greatest public health organization in the world predicting that they will fail to control them. And so the question you want to ask is what's the cause, not whether we should be eating a Mediterranean diet or a French diet. And then you can further ask the question, is there something about the Mediterranean diet or about the French diet or about these blue zone diets that happens to shed light on this question of what's causing obesity and diabetes and then the conditions that associate with it?”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Or should we be eating oranges diet to reduce risk of heart disease when the very first thing you want to know is like what's causing these epidemics, man? Because this is crazy. Director General of the UN, a woman named Margaret Chand a year ago referred to them as slow motion disasters. And she predicted, this was fascinating, this was at a keynote address of the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, and she gave a number, a prediction for the likelihood that public health organizations will prevent the slow-motion disasters from getting worse. And the likelihood of even preventing them from getting worse, she said, was virtually zero.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Okay, so one in 11 Americans now had diabetes when the number might have been closer to one in a thousand or one in 3,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. That's almost incomprehensible. And nobody really, I mean, the fact that there aren't sort of teams of investigative scientists and task force on every street corner walking around with, I don't know, detectors of some sort trying to figure out what the cause of this disorder is, why we have this out of control epidemic is another question. But that's the question you have to keep on asking yourself, what's causing these epidemics? Because we're not going to be able to reverse or prevent them until we identify the fundamental cause. And it gets confused with issues of, well, should we be eating the Mediterranean diet to prevent heart disease or should we be eating the dash diet to lower blood pressure?”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “The Mediterranean diet may or may not be healthier than, for instance, an Inuit diet. Like, if you took the Inuits and gave him a Mediterranean diet, they may do just as well as the Greeks do, or they may do more poorly because they haven't had time to adapt to, I don't know, olive oil or a lot of green vegetables or whatever the grains they're consuming in this diet. It's sort of one of the ways people tend to confuse the fundamental issue. So to me, the really important issue, the critical issue is these epidemics. And the numbers are just out of, I mean, almost unimaginable. In the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. since the late 1950s, diabetes prevalence has increased 700%.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “The population, so Inuits near the Arctic Circle or Native Americans or First Nations. And they manifest these epidemics pretty similarly. So clearly, the underlying genetics are not the key factor there. It doesn't matter what type of human, you know, where your ancestors came from. get dumped in a modern lifestyle, you're likely to become obese and diabetics. And so the question I was asking in my book is, what is it about the Western diet and lifestyle that is the agent of these diseases?”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Obesity and diabetes epidemics or an obese. I think clearly genetics Well, we know that obesity runs in families, and that's been known for hundreds of years. Body type runs in families, identical twins don't just have the same facial features, they have the same body types. Clearly, genetics plays a huge role in whether someone's going to be tall and thin or short and squat or some combination of the two. And if it's playing a Roman obesity, it's going to play a role in diabetes as well. And I don't actually know the data for diabetes, but I'm sure there's a strong genetic component there as well. But then the question is, and this is the question I addressed in my last book, The Case Against Sugar. We have these diabetes and obesity epidemics that manifest themselves pretty similarly worldwide independent of the genetic, the genotype, the genetic ancestry.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Everyone insists that the science is good enough to answer these questions, and yet clearly, if it was good enough to answer these questions, we never would have gotten into this situation.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And this just became sort of inculcated throughout the entire community such that these people almost, to me, I feel like they almost forget what it takes to do reliable knowledge. And they justify it by, they say, the issues are so important. People are dying out there, therefore we don't have time to dot the I's and cross the T's and make sure that we're right about our hypotheses. To me, the really scientific response is, well, if you don't have time to dot the I's and cross the T's, you have no idea whether you're right. And we end up in a situation today where we have these massive unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Subatomic particles or every particle for all intents and purposes is alike. And you can do these experiments in days. You're now dealing with these messy humans who think for themselves and chronic diseases that take decades to manifest themselves. And you can no longer, even if you could do the testing of the hypotheses, it takes a long time to do. It's very expensive and it's very difficult, if not impossible, to do right. And so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Science being done in fields like physics, and you could do it in fields like physics because if you think of science as hypothesis and tests, the tests were relatively simple, relatively simple to do. You could come up with an idea. You could build a small cyclotron like Lawrence did here at Berkeley. You could then test the ideas and other people are going to do the same all around the world. And if you're wrong, it's going to be very embarrassing. So there was also sort of a relatively quick feedback between hypothesis and test. And in fields like nutrition and public health, not only did we not embrace these European ⁇ migr ⁇ s and in fact, in many cases, we wanted nothing to do with these people. The hypothesis and test by definition was much harder to do, or the testing aspect of the hypothesis much harder to do. So now instead of dealing with”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Really understood the rigor necessary to do good science, the skepticism necessary, this idea that Richard Feynman later encapsulated by saying the first principles of science is you must not fool yourself. You're the easiest person to fool. And this culture of science began to evaporate with World War II and it crossed the Atlantic in fields like physics because we embraced these European researchers, many of whom were Jews and the leading scientists in the world, the leading physicists in the world post-World War II in the US tended to be these European igrays or their students. Were European emigr ⁇ s. And so you had this very rigorous approach to”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Well, first of all, we don't know that it's actually better than other areas of medical science. One of the questions I'm always, we know what we see, right? So I study nutrition science. I write about nutrition science. I know nutrition science is to me almost not a functional science, but I've never had the opportunity to put that effort, investigation into other areas of medicine or other areas of science. You just hope they're better. My take on this is sort of historical, and the way I see it, science was sort of honed to a very fine edge as a methodology for establishing reliable knowledge. The universe in Europe, was at its height in Germany and Austria pre-World War II. And sort of these people...”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yeah, it's funny when we talked about the things that I didn't want to talk about, one of the things I was thinking can I say I don't want to talk about my daily diet. Then I thought I probably can't say that because it'll probably come up at some point in the interview. The easiest way to think about it is I don't eat cranes and starches and sugars anymore because I think they make me fat and unhealthy. And I replace them for the most part with fat animal products, so not good for the animals, but I think it's good for me physically. And I'm one of these people who have convinced myself that butter and bacon are health foods. And I hope I'm right.”

    2017-11-30 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT