Good article, but there's one thing that really bothers me:
> perhaps because of his serious and scientific background – he has a physics degree from Harvard and studied aerospace engineering at Stanford [...]
Which, for the thing he's doing now, is not a serious background! Knowledge isn't transferrable and there are plenty examples of people who transfer fields with unwarranted confidence and make totally bogus claims (see the Nobel disease [1]). I wish we would stop claiming the opposite, because especially in a field like nutritional sciences you can find some "evidence" for any theory (see eg. the Chemical Hunger drama [2]).
It kind of is a serious background. The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. What the domain specialists have is familiarity with the existing literature, but that is readily remedied as anyone with an interest and motivation can become familiar with literature like nutrition science in short order.
All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. I have seen far too much sloppy and motivated reasoning in the soft sciences to trust anything that comes from people that exclusively live in that world. I am sure there are proper scientists in those fields doing good work, but that isn’t the average.
I don’t know anything about this particular case, but it is much easier for someone with mastery of the hard sciences to become fluent in the soft sciences out of interest than vice versa. It may not be fair but I have seen so many real world examples of this, where hard science/engineering experts became recognized experts in softer science fields entirely out of interest, but never in the reverse, that it is difficult to ignore.
So. I have a background in biophysics which is the part of biology where most physics folks go. It's highly quantitative, but still it struggles with the "assume a spherical cow" mental model of many physics and engineering folks. And the biology folks are stuck in a guild mentality (protecting their field by limiting the number of entrants) and very artisanal and resist increased quantitative methods.
Over time I've mentally recategorized entire parts of medical science into what I would say is non-science, or at least, a very different approach to science. In particular, nutrition, and many other areas, take extremely limited amounts of data and extrapolate it, making conclusions that far exceed what the data actually supports. And the folks publishing it got really good at convincing the larger press/medical world that they knew what they were talking about, which has led to all sorts of trends.
I would love to see more translation of quantitative physics into the medical sciences, but it's truly a challenging problem, especially because we (for good reasons) don't run the sorts of trials that would provide truly convincing evidence for causal mechanims related to disease, or whatever area of biology you care about.
> The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever.
I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. That doesn't make them better or worse, just different.
> All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences.
You are, IMO, too dismissive in your language about entire professions. "Shallow, soft sciences".
I get where you're coming from - I'm more of a CS/Math/Physics person myself. But I think "our" side of hard sciences is far more dismissive than it should be - leading to implicitly trusting people who wave the right "hard science" credentials around instead of people working on the field for many years.
^ This. CS/Math/Physics people tend to have a massive blind spot in the awareness of just how much complexity exists in the biological sciences. Couple that with a background that makes these people have full confidence in their ability to understand complex systems, and you tend to have a larger issue than if the background and subject matter were reversed.
> I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain.
Not taking sides here, but I want to point out that there is a distinction between rigor in reasoning and diligence in testing (given feasibility constraints). The true answer need not be in the space of hypotheses that's feasible to test [1]. It's crucial that scientists appreciate that; sloppy reasoning tends to make strong conclusions from weak tests because there's a desire (bias) to emphatically drive outcomes even from weak conclusions.
It's like some kind of Gell-Mann effect corollary. Scientists and other educated experts quoted in a newspaper carry automatic authority unless you understand the target field well enough. But if you do, you realize they are no more trustworthy than a guy on the bus.
Titles don't help. An "environmental engineer" might not have sufficient knowledge about zoology or bridges to support whatever they are talking about, but a layperson might not realize that.
The Gell-Mann effect overrates having an academic degree and doesn't count the fact that people might become experts in something they haven't done formal studies for.
How can you tell whether I am as trustworthy as a guy on the bus on matters of software engineering? I am a high school dropout. Likewise, I'm no medical doctor, but knowledge is a spectrum, and I believe I know more than the average Joe on matters of nutrition because it is something that fascinates me and I've read and researched a lot about.
Given that I've read and heard about Taubes for 15 years, it is simplistic to say the least that he doesn't know anything because he's got a physics background.
tl;dr: the Gell-Mann effect only makes sense in a vacuum and if you really want to believe that having a degree automatically makes you an expert with worthwhile ideas.
The effect here is more about people claiming lateral authority, rather than the base claim of authority in the first point. But I take your point.
I’m also underqualified for my position and am wary of credentialism. But if I’m looking at a topic I don’t know well — e.g. seismic building codes- I have to start somewhere.
Software engineering is thankfully a field that is particularly accessible to people without formal training. Demand is high, functional skills can be proven on the spot, and employers are (usually) not in a position where their hiring decisions have potential legal consequences.
Bollocks, physics is an actual scientific field and aerospace engineering is actual engineering (compared to say "software engineering" where it's engineering in name only), similarly there's barely anything scientific in the "nutritional science".
If you have a real scientific background and real engineering background you are way more likely to do a proper job.
It frustrates me that people think nutritional "science" is a serious scientific field. And that the "nutritional scientist" is somehow better equipped - they have barely done any real science a single day in their life.
Would you have a physicist would self-taught medicine as your doctor? Of course not.
While a scientific or engineering background might demonstrate capability to understand another scientific field, that doesn’t replace the near decade of education people in that field have.
I am someone with a computational physics background who is coupled with someone who is training to be a surgeon. We lived together during much of her medical school, and thus, are constantly around medical professionals.
I would absolutely trust a physicist (who has done actual empirical lab work) who has deeply studied a problem in the nutrition space over someone conventionally trained in nutrition.
You may be stunned to see how little numerical sense so many in the medical field have. And as someone who grows medicinal plants and follows that literature closely, I read tons of papers in that space. It is full of experimental design flaws and dubious correlations.
I have worked on a medical device that went through clinical trials.
Doctors need practice in the hospital and do an excruciating amount of rounds surrounded by senior experts.
Nutritionists? No.
Given a nutritionist who has studied the books and gotten a degree and a physicist who has studied the books and hasn't gotten the degree I would be hard pressed to choose the nutritionist
They have a point. It's easy to come with your high IQ and miss some obscure subtle data that people in the field learned the hard way. Sure the man is capable of understanding it quick and even do more.. but it's too easy to get carried in your own newcomer theory.
What makes you think you're right about any of that? Do you have any evidence to back up your (crazy) theory that an entire field of study isn't real science?
Cause from where I'm sitting, nutritional scientists do plenty of real science - studying a very complex problem that poses a lot of challenges to experiments, and still coming up with a lot of great results that teach us tons about nutrition.
Most people that criticize the field do so because they read a bunch of articles. Or because they're in the world of hard sciences, and are simply arrogant enough to think they know better than everyone else, even in fields they've never studied.
You don't need to be an authority to see how the majority of human nutrition science is barely a step above junk. Pick any journal in the field and go through the last few issues. You'll mostly find observational studies with subject reported data (known to be inaccurate). Very few long, term randomized controlled trials with meaningful endpoints.
There have been tons of nutritional experiments which are extremely rigorous.
Unfortunately, like most fields it’s the junk you read about because rigor is slow/difficult/expensive and therefore less common than BS. Just look at say fusion research and all it’s seriously flawed experiments.
That's just not true. We know a lot about the basics of nutrition. Actual nutrition scientists mostly agree on lots of different things.
The problem is that the public doesn't want to hear it, so the media keeps running articles that make it simple like "nobody knows anything". Which is just plain false.
Care to list some of the basic tenants of nutrition that are widely agreed upon?
About the only things I see as generally accepted are to eat a varied diet (whatever that means), keep total consumed caloric content near the amount expended, eat at least the RDA of micronutrients, and drink enough water to avoid overt dehydration.
I'm not a nutrition scientist, so obviously not at all an expert that can probably chime in with some more findings.
But generally - yes, afaik there's mostly a consensus that total caloric intake is the driver of amount of adiposity, that maintaining a 10%-20% body fat percentage (for men) is optimal for long term health, that most diets are close from a health and fat-loss perspective - meaning, amount of adiposity is the main driver of long-term bad health, especially as compared to individual ingredients. There are some things that are known to be specifically problematic, e.g. trans-fats, at any amounts. And there are healthier and less healthy foods, some of which we know - but total caloric intake is the only driver of body composition, and a bigger driver of body health.
Most of this is basic - probably because, as I said, I'm not a nutrition scientist myself so only understand the basics myself.
That said, a large part of the population doesn't even understand these basics either, preferring to constantly talk about and argue about specific diets, keto vs. vegan vs. whatever. And science mostly has that question covered, as far as we can tell right now.
For a more in-depth take on this from someone who actually is an expert, I recommend videos by Mike Israetel:
At a practical level nutrition isn’t generally a problem, but that says more about the human body / food than the lack of scientific knowledge.
There is a long list of things that cannot be synthesized by people and must be consumed. (Elements like Potassium as well as specific nutrients like Vitamin C and Thiamine being well known.) There’s a longer list of things than can be synthesized but should largely be consumed ex:
Linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fatty acid, and α-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid, are considered essential fatty acids because they cannot be synthesized by humans.
The long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), can be synthesized from ALA, but due to low conversion efficiency, it is recommended to consume foods rich in EPA and DHA.
There’s also a lot of basic facts that get complicated when you dig into them. For example calories produced by burning foods isn’t 1:1 with the calories available to people. Cellulose for example burns but is effectively indigestible. One way to investigate this is to have some eat something and then burn their poop, followed by many studies that do so for various reasons.
There’s also a lot of nutrition science that straddles the line with medicine. Thus there exists many specialized diets for various conditions etc.
Snake-oil and moralizing. Dietetics suffers from the same issue that mental health does: there's an underlying stigma that causes people to inflict a moral judgement on the ill; fat people - or so the old line of thinking goes - are immoral. A shocking number of people, including many doctors and scientists, view diabetes as a "fat people disease," and that diabetics are in effect being punished for their gluttony. This isn't always a conscious bias, but it has very negative effects.
It reminds me of the studies they've done in Canada and the US about how natives (American Indians) die a lot of the time in the ER because they're immediately written off as alcoholics or drug-addicts, and so their complaints are evaluated through the lens of "this person just wants opiates."
People generally consider, although this is not universally agreed, that math isn't science. To me the distinction matters, although it's fairly subtle.
This is underscored by frequently cited articles, like: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", in which math is treated as separate, but intimately related, to natural philosophy.
I think you can do math without science, but you can't do science without math.
Let’s pretend all of that is true. How does a background in the “hard sciences” with experiments involving materials that can’t make their own decisions prepare you for a field with experiments where you have to account for the fact that you can’t imprison your test subjects for 6 months, and that when they are on their own may not follow the experimental protocols (or even lie about that fact)?
Gary Taubes has written multiple scholarly books on the subject. He has won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. I think a training in one scientific field does qualify a person to go spend their time digging into other fields. How well they do is a matter of personal ability and effort and one would have to read their output and judge for oneself. I have read many of Taubes's book and many of the papers cited in his books and have concluded that he is a well qualified expert in the field.
Not true. The fact that he was able to get through two rigorous programs at prestigious universities with low acceptance rates automatically gives him a certain amount of credence.
Well, if it came to nutritional or health advice, would you give Trump more credence, over some random person from a state school? After all, Trump is a Wharton graduate.
Exactly. I don't think his guess is any better than any else given the poor track record of the dieting industry overall. He made a lucrative career by latching on to a theory, that like virtually all diet fads, falls short when applied to real people in a controlled setting.
No one has any idea which diet (if any) is best, or the connection between insulin and obesity, or if fats are good or not, etc. All hunches. Carbs have been falling out of favor for a while now but obesity getting worse.
The problem with anecdotes is that they're not science. And as there is wide variety in humans this is very much a case of ymmv.
Anecdotally, my wife went onto a low-carb diet 18 months ago. She likes low carb food, and isn't a huge fan of bread, potatoes etc anyway, so it was easy. She's not total though, still eats a rusk at breakfast, and has a (home made) pizza once a week.
She also started exercising a lot more, and found a sustainable rhythm for that. She's lost 50 lbs. (Around 25kg).
Interestingly, her blood sugar levels have not dropped significantly, but they did drop a bit.
I sporadically do low-carb, and always lose weight doing so. I like bread, potato's, rice though so my diet is much less obsessive. My results are more fluctuating but slowly trending down. I'm in no rush, but eould like to drop around 15 lbs this year. I lose about 1lb per week if I'm "fairly strict" - exercise levels don't change (I exercise a reasonable amount.)
Incidentally, I've found that just slowly reducing quantity has helped as well. Eating from small bowls and plates has helped me.
None of this is data. And I still "cheat" (I'll happily eat normal in social situations, and often on weekends etc) but I seem to have found a pattern I can maintain long term. It's a "diet" in the sense there's good and bad, but its also "lifestyle" in the sense that I try to be "moderate" with the bad.
Science isn't the memorization of facts. To graduate from Harvard, you must actually understand how to do science at a high level. Many of those skills transfer between subjects. Having a physics degree might not make you a great biologist, but it's also not nothing.
As a newly diagnosed Type 2, but not overweight, I take metformin and have a carefully altered my diet to slow down my digestion and have few easily digestible carbs (i.e. such as the whites, flour, sugar, potatoes and rice). But it takes 3 months to see if my A1C goes down (a measure of the past 3 months of blood sugar), so I won't know for a couple more months. Going keto to me seems like using a shotgun to kill a fly on your foot, it is too hard to keep up with, and causes other issues, while simply understanding how carbs affect your blood sugar is much easier to do.
Part of the problem is that all the tables of carbs assume you are only eating the one thing (which is how they make the tables), but the actual affect on blood sugar spikes is the sum of what you ate. For example, eating a boiled potato by itself will spike a Type 2 steeply, but eating it with lots of butter will not.
I prefer to understand my health issues by reading a wide variety of information from people who specialize in them, not just read one guy's opinion.
I’ve been a T2 diabetic for 14 years. For the first 8 years I was insulin dependent and bought into the dietary reqs provided to me at the time which was “grains and fruit are good, just push insulin to manage glucose”. I realized that every month it was taking more and more insulin to manage my blood sugar. I shifted my diet to higher fat and low carbs and was off insulin completely within 3 months and within 6 months my A1c was running low 5s
YMMV of course, but at no point eating the approved ADA diet and pushing insulin was my A1c ever below 6.5. Since eating low carb and no insulin, my A1c has never been above 5.4
It is incredibly hard to beat a sugar addiction (a lot harder than nicotine or weed) but it is worth it, I promise.
Going full on no-carb and taking long walks daily got a friend out of pre-diabetes type 2. No sugar, no fresh potatoes (cooking and putting them into the fridge for 24 hours is fine), no rice, no fruits, and much more got them off metformin and normalized their blood sugar enough for them to be able to eat cake and sweets again without fearing to get diabetes.
> It is incredibly hard to beat a sugar addiction (a lot harder than nicotine or weed) but it is worth it, I promise.
It's not trivial, I will certainly admit, but it is eminently doable with the right mindset and a reasonable plan. The hard part is that sugar and carb-laden foods are positively ubiquitous in the western diet, due to the fact that carbs are cheap to grow, process, ship, and store. Fat and protein are expensive and harder to find depending on where you live. But I look at it like this: by going out of my way to find and cook metabolically-optimal food for myself, I am investing in my future health in a way that will be _much_ cheaper than the cost of getting my foot removed in a few decades.
If I could give any advice at all to someone considering a keto diet, it would be this: do some research, start with some kind of plan, and be forgiving of yourself. It will take some time to figure out which keto-friendly foods you have available to you, and which ones you will actually enjoy eating. If you fall off the wagon and murder a bag of chips in a moment of weakness, know that the whole effort isn't down the drain. You just try to do better tomorrow.
Yep. Apparently doing a second cooling phase bumps it up even more.
I'm a big fan of Dr. Patrick and she's been promoting the notion that the gut is foundational in one's immune system and feeding the critters there food that they want will serve one well.
My go to internet advisors:
Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Dr. Peter Attia
Dr. Brad Stanfield
Andrew Huberman
It may be confirmation bias on my part, but they're quite aligned in what they advise.
That word gets thrown around way too much about him. He's many things, but not a grifter. Look up the definition if you don't believe me.
And of course he's not perfect, but there's still a boatload of worthy information coming from his podcasts. He's disappointed me multiple times, but again, there's worthy nuggets of knowledge gathered there.
That's why I specifically described him as "grifter-adjacent".
He's obviously a talented scientist and he's always careful to qualify his claims, but he still ends up with an audience that takes away conclusions that ignore the qualifications.
He knows this because this is the only way to keep pumping out content because what we know actually works is the same old boring stuff no one wants to pay attention to.
Compare this to folks like the Barbell Medicine guys, run by MDs who have a sworn duty to do no harm, and their advice. Watch enough of their episodes and you'll often be able to predict what they'll say because they're relying on what we know works, whether from programming of strength training or medical advice. (Their recent episode on the Common Cold is a particularly useful episode to contrast with Huberman.)
Leaving starchy foods to rest for a decent amount of time after cooking results in some amount of the starch converting into “resistant starch” which the body can’t convert into glucose. So a given portion will be less blood glucose spiking than a portion that hasn’t had that rest.
The overall effect is modest though, the whole thing doesn’t turn into resistant starch. It makes it better, but I don’t think it would make a big portion of potatoes suddenly safe for a diabetic.
the thermal cycling causes resistant starches to form. actually you are best off heating/cooling it twice, and minimizing the extra water content. instead of being broken down into sugars they get fermented into fatty acids deeper in the gut. pasta is eligible for this effect too idk how the final starch compositions vary between them tho.
Body will always try to reach homeostasis, diabetics (type 2) just never gave it a chance by overeating sugars and/or not moving enough to use that sugars properly. Once you cutoff sugars and give your body enough time it will back to normal so you will be able to eat cake again.
There's a standard formula for calculating your A1C based on your average glucose level. If you get a dexcom G6, (about $200), you can monitor your glucose levels constantly, and know what your A1C will be. The app gives you rolling averages for 2 days, 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days.
Extremely useful. I'm not a T2 diabetic, but did have a slightly elevated A1C at my last physical. I asked my doctor for a prescription for a CGM, she gave me one, and it has been a huge help in learning both how food effects my blood sugar, as well as how blood sugar effects my mood.
I think everybody regardless of their current health should have one of these things. Blood sugar is a fantastic look into sorts of aspects of your health.
> ). But it takes 3 months to see if my A1C goes down (a measure of the past 3 months of blood sugar), so I won't know for a couple more months.
Yes, though depending on what your diagnosis is, you may be able to get a monitor which allows you to track your blood sugar in near-realtime. The technology has advanced a lot in the last 20 years.
Ancedotally, a friend spent 3 months on a keto diet, and yes they eventually quit. However, their carb shock thirst tiredness that they used to have after a modest meal stopped occurring, and persisted after stopping keto. I've heard that there is some evidence of regeneration of receptors with ketogenic diet..
perhaps occasional bouts of keto can be therapeutic?
For anyone new to it, the words you’re looking for are “continuous glucose monitor” (GCM), and “flash glucose monitor”.
Popular brands of it in the US are Freestyle Libre and Dexcom.
Their final cost to you will vary hugely by your insurance provider. Some with little to no cost, and others several dollars per day.
If you like data and are analytical by nature, and since you’re on HN that’s fairly likely, I’d highly recommend using them for a little while if you can afford it. They’re great for newly diagnosed people to understand in near real time without repeated finger pricking. But those are no terrible either and much better than not managing and monitoring! Slightly annoying at first but it is something that most people can get used to fairly easily.
A1C represents the long-term glycation of hemoglobin due to blood sugar exposure. Even if you could measure it at home, it wouldn’t change fast enough for rapid tracking to be meaningful. You need to wait for red blood cells to be replaced (hence the 3 month cadence) before expecting any change in A1C.
> A1C represents the long-term glycation of hemoglobin due to blood sugar exposure.
You're not measuring HbA1C in real-time; you're measuring the blood sugar in real-time.
HbA1C is a lagging indicator, used because it's a convenient and non-invasive diagnostic and a summary statistic. It's not the way you measure the short-term or medium-term effectiveness of interventions.
Ah I misread your comment — thought you were suggesting measuring A1C at home, which wouldn’t get you anything. Re-reading, you definitely meant measure blood glucose itself.
I do wonder if A1C remains a useful metric though, as perhaps it better captures the actual damage done by consistently high blood glucose. Would be interesting to see if there is research showing that CGM area under the curve is a better (or worse) predictor of clinical outcomes than A1C.
> I do wonder if A1C remains a useful metric though, as perhaps it better captures the actual damage done by consistently high blood glucose.
Both metrics have their own use. Continuous glucose monitoring is better for measuring the short-term impact of interventions, but it's also more invasive (albeit less so than it used to be) and more expensive. HbA1C is still measured for diabetic patients who have continuous glucose monitoring.
One downside of A1C is that the baseline values actually vary, and it's known to be either downward biased or a particularly lagging indicator for certain groups that are predisposed to Type 2 diabetes (e.g. South Asians and people of African descent).
I ended up prediabetic and switched over to eating what basically amounts to a strict paleo diet, or something like whole30, and 0 sugar (other than the occasional piece of fruit). Something switched in my head, as I had other issues going on and thought I was going to die. In 3 days some of the really worrying issues went away. 3 months later my blood sugar levels had come down considerably, and a few months after that they were well within the health range. I didn’t count calories or carbs or anything like that. I just ate stuff with 1 ingredient… and hot sauce or whatever, that had real ingredients and no sugar (or fake sugar). It’s kind of crazy, after a while, carrots start to taste sweet.
My dad ended up with Type2, I mentioned the no sugar thing. He said it sounded too hard and he had done Atkins before. He read all the recommended books and tried all the recommended diets, even went vegan for a while. After about 6 years he found some doctor that put him on an extreme elimination diet as part of a medical study, basically nothing but protein shakes (with some added nutrients). He didn’t eat solid food for months. Then had to slowly add real food back over several months after that. It ended up working for him, but it seemed far more difficult and unmaintainable than what I suggested to him 6 years earlier.
My mom also ran into it. She called me, did what I mentioned and was good to go a few months later. Of course that doesn’t mean she could go back to eating how she did before, but still has some treats and things she enjoys. She found some balance once out of the danger zone.
My dad’s experience made me pretty cynical of the industry around type 2 diabetes. They have no incentive to cure a person, when they can keep them sick and have a lifelong customer buying all that medication. The diet may have been extreme, but for me, I’d rather be extreme for a few months than have it drag on for years like my dad. And actually, I didn’t feel like I was being that extreme. I ate until I was full (giant plates full of vegetables), I felt great, and didn’t feel deprived. Every Saturday I’d cook myself a big ribeye with a sweet potato; it was great. It was only other people saying it was extreme or too hard that got to me. I started questioning myself. My doctor told me I was doing awesome and not to listen to them.
Best of luck on your next A1C check. Hopefully the road you’re on work for you. If things aren’t working, I’d question the motivations of those providing the information, or the systems which educated them. A doctor telling someone with type 2 diabetes to eat white flour and sugar doesn’t sound like a doctor who understands what type 2 diabetes is.
That’s interesting about fat and potatoes. Didn’t know that. Another similar thing is vinegar. It slows gastric emptying and keeps the spikes lower (eg french fries with malt vinegar).
You can test fructosamine which I believe is a 2 week avg. or you could do finger pokes or even a CGM if you got the ability. [1]
I personally enjoyed The diabetes code by Jason Fung. He’s a nephrologist in Canada. Good luck in your diabetes journey! Luckily you seem interested which is such a distinction.
Same here (diagnosed about 10 days ago, on metformin, removed simple carbs as much as possible). I've been looking at Michael Mosley's 800-calorie and 5:2 fasting diets, involving an intake of 800 calories a day for about 8 weeks to "reset" your system, then fasting 2 days out of every 7 (i.e. 800 calories for two days a week) thereafter. I haven't "officially" started it, but in practice without simple carbs and sugars, my calorie intake must be pretty close to 800 (the appetite suppressant characteristics of metformin really help here). I've also started exercising after big meals (I've never really exercised before!). There's a website marketing a guided programme if you're into that kind of thing):
Exercise is probably the most important thing you could do! Hope you’re able to stick to it and improve! The other thing that helps me is cutting off sugar - not carbs or starch just actual sweet sugar. In coffees and desserts. Makes me eat less!
Increase unsaturated fat in your diet and take melatonin. Melatonin upregulates the insulin receptors, so the insulin you have can do more. Trace minerals and following a standard meal plan worked up by a nutritionist.
Have been tested for the type 1 antibody? I was diagnosed as type 2 cause doctors assume type 1 doesn’t happen in your late 30s. It happened to me. Wasted a bunch of time trying to treat it as type 2.
Strength and endurance training both increase insulin sensitivity.
You might not be overweight, but you might still have a high body fat percentage. Increasing the amount of muscle you have while getting leaner should help all aspects of your health.
I'd recommend checking out the Barbell Medicine podcast episodes on diabetes, cholesterol, strength training, and their recent 3-part series on endurance training.
> have few easily digestible carbs (i.e. such as the whites, flour, sugar, potatoes and rice)
Should potatoes be in this list? I understood the potato diet to be very effective at causing weight loss (thought to be due to high potassium content of potatoes)? Can something consistently cause weight loss and cause a major insulin response (which I think causes calories to be stored as fat…)?
Potatoes have a GI of about 70, comparable to white rice or white bread (pure glucose is 100). So pretty bad.
The “potato diet” will only lead to weight loss if you’re eating fewer calories than you’re expending, same as anything else. You could eat nothing but bacon grease and you’d lose weight if you were eating below maintenance.
The effect of food on blood glucose if a matter of how easily it is converted to glucose. Starches like those in potatoes, flour, rice etc are basically converted nearly as easily as straight sugar.
I think there might be other things going on with the potato diet. In Slime Mold Time Mold's study participants seemed to lose more weight when cooking potatoes with the skin on. My wife and I recently tried three diet for about a week with good weightloss. However, my wife who prefers potatoes cooked with skin quickly got abdominal pain and dropped the diet. When I started to eat all the potatoes I had cooked for her, I got similar issues. I think there is a good chance that the solanine which is mostly in the skins messes with people's digestive system and contributing to weightloss. Poisoning yourself doesn't strike me as a valid approach to weightloss. Supposedly someone tried supplementing solanine and didn't see the weightloss. I don't trust that though, since there was a more comprehensive trial or a believable alternative explanation
One interesting thing about those digestible carbs is that cooling them after cooking helps convert them into diet resistant starch that helps feed the gut biome, e.g., https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/s/q2g00a
If you want to deal with T2 through diet, you should really try to get a sensor on your arm, if only for a year or so. You need to learn what food cause a sugar spike in you, and which don't.
T2 Diabetic for ~12 years (actually probably a lot longer but I only got diagnosed 12 years ago).
I've "beaten diabetes" (i.e. I tested as not being diabetic) twice now by losing weight (via calorie counting) and getting fit, but found it too hard to maintain that lifestyle. I've made dietary changes but they had less/no effect. Keto was fine, but my wife didn't get on with it and making two meals every time we ate was too onerous.
I stopped measuring my blood sugar a few months after getting diagnosed because it was kinda pointless. I haven't had a single symptom. If I didn't visit the doctor every 3 months or so I'd never know I was diabetic (and I was probably diabetic for 10+ years before getting diagnosed). I take Metformin regularly mostly for the anti-aging side effect. The endless diarrhoea from Metformin is something I got used to, though I had to suspend taking it while travelling because the combination of Metformin shits and travel shits was too much.
It all feels like a non-thing to be honest. I know people lose limbs to D2, and go blind, and stuff, but it's hard to take that personally and know that as a definite risk that mean I need to make drastic and difficult lifestyle changes. I keep getting checked and told there's no sign of any damage, but my blood sugar is too high. For 12 years now. I know this sounds a bit anti-vax, but it feels like the science is wrong here. I do not want to go down an anti-science rabbit hole and end up in a conspiracy theory world of my own. So I just keep doing the thing they tell me as best I can. But when/if someone finds out that we've been thinking about D2 all wrong, I will not be the faintest bit surprised.
edit: and another thing: I've never had consistent advice from doctors around this. Some GPs say I need to come in every month to get checked up. Others says I only need once a year. Some examine my feet and eyes. Others don't. Some think I'm on too high a dose of Metformin. Others say it's fine. Some are really strong on the diet thing, others not so much. Almost every aspect of this disease seems to be subject to personal opinions about treatment.
Opinions vary a lot, because people vary a lot, and because of this science "that applies to everyone" is very hard to do.
There's no question that there us good medical science, but equally there is a lot of junk-science and so in this age of "hearing everyone's opinion", it can be hard to separate fact from opinion.
I think we can agree on some stuff. Smoking is bad for you, exercise is good, and so on. Keeping your weight down, more accurately keeping % body fat down, and so on.
Making small, incremental, sustainable changes to lifestyle that trend you in good directions, are definitely the best.
GPs are (with respect) not a terribly good source. They tend to see sick people all day, and gather lots of superficial anecdotes. Which is not to ignore them, but to understand their POV. But it's worth taking their opinions on board as an hypothesis.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I get that it's a muddle. It just feels like it shouldn't be ;)
The ambiguity seems to point to "we don't understand this very well yet, but this is what we think you need to do", which would be fine if that's what anyone said. But it's presented as "we know exactly what's going on here, and this is what you need to do", and then different people give contradictory advice with exactly the same level of confidence.
Anyway, keto is great. I wasn’t terribly overweight and lost 19lbs in 9 weeks with it with a cheat day included. It’s great because it’s a very simple set of very few rules. It’s easy to adhere to because it removes moment decision making around whether or not you “should” or “deserve” to have X food. It’s nearly impossible for you to eat enough calories to maintain your current weight on keto when you’re already overweight. Therefore a deficit is nearly guaranteed therefore weightless is guaranteed. On top of all that you do get better at burning fat and don’t get as hungry.
The counterpoint is the tough piece - how do you come off that diet and reenter the real world where people eat carbs. How can you get pizza with friends, etc. I understand their are some who view keto as a lifestyle, good for them but most people aren’t going to do that.
Beyond the simple reality of calories are calories, none of this other stuff around fat vs protein vs carbs is really very hard to understand. Simple carbs are rocket fuel, they provide a lot of energy over a very short period of time. If you’re not going to use it, once the sugar saturates your blood, the excess will be taken out and stored. Then you’ll get hungry again. Fats are slower burning, so it’s harder for you to saturate your blood quickly.
This is an over simplification obviously but this is just not so hard to understand that it needs to be an endless debate over or be positioned as controversial in order to sell books.
1. Losing weight can and often will fix your diabetes. 2. Be conscious of the method you choose for weight loss, when you obtain your goal weight - what will you do long term?
Modern foods are horrifically fiber deficient, as in it's removed and fed back to animals. One of the key things you said around this is...
>once the sugar saturates your blood,
This is the glycemic index. Our modern diet is filled with foods that are pretty much instantly available to the bloodstream. If like me you have a continuous blood sugar monitor you can see this in effect. Drink a soda and minutes later your sugar levels go up. Eat simple carbs and 15-20 minutes and it starts climbing. Move to more complex carbohydrates and items high in fiber that take a long time to break down and the ramp is slower and less steep.
The problem for just about everyone is how do we get away from our simple carbohydrate based lifestyles.
The problem with your simple model of carbs, fats, proteins is that in people with type 2 diabetes their dietary fats have clogged up their muscle cells ability to store blood sugars as glycogen. So while removing the "rocket fuel" from the diet its not clear that the underlying problem has been solved. At least not until the fats have been removed from the muscle cells.
And yes, transitioning off of a keto diet may lead to the reversal of the positive gains (insulin sensitivity, body composition, average blood sugar level measured using red blood cell oxidation or A1C).
And agreed, controversy gains attention which may lead to book sales.
I wouldn't describe my diet as "keto" (I don't think of it as a "diet" at all.)
I am aware of carbs though. Specifically though the difference between "sugar" carbs and "starch" carbs. I try and minimise sugar carbs (I haven't eliminated them) and I do starch carbs "in moderation". With cheat days for both. I'll happily enjoy a good desert when eating out. I'll have a pizza now and then. I love re-fried potato. I only very occasionally drink soda. I don't take sugar in coffee.
Each change has been introduced slowly. I stopped taking sugar in coffee. It took about a month to adjust. Now its just how it is. I reduced bread (oh man, I love good bread..) Over time I've come to enjoy a bit less, a bit less often.
My weight is trending down. I'd like to lose 15 lbs, but I'm happy if it takes all year to do it.
I'm confused. De-loading carbs for fat makes sense for overall wellness and health (since healthy things tend to be fatty and/or low carb), but it is not possible to "manage" T1 without insulin treatment.
The fact that either he or this article does not seem to distinguish between the two types in this regard is a basic category error.
The low carb "managing" of T1d before the 1920s was basically a permanent hyperglycemia which you could last months, maybe years. Once your honeymoon period ends you die a spectacularly brutal death -- your blood turns to acid and you starve in insatiable hunger. None of this is "manageable" through diet, since your body has a baseline rate of gluconeogenesis entirely independent of diet.
Type 1 and Type 2 sharing the "diabetes" name has to be up there on "most frustrating lexical errors" ever.
Another example, for Taubes, of how early researchers were mistaken, concerns the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, which are so different they almost shouldn’t share a name. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone which regulates the level of glucose in our blood; people living with type 1 need insulin injections or an insulin pump, to survive. Like type 2, type 1 can cause complications such as heart, kidney or eye disease, and nerve damage.
Type 2 diabetes accounts for about 90% of cases, and is a metabolic disorder in which the body either can’t make or can’t use insulin (AKA insulin resistance) to metabolise glucose, leading to persistently high levels in the blood. Ultimately, people living with type 2 diabetes may need insulin and other diabetes medications, too, but for a lot of people, diet and lifestyle modifications can defer that need.
Type 2 here. The article text sounds strange to me, maybe because I live elsewhere than the US/UK. From Day 1 of my diagnosis (in 2009) I was prescribed a low-carb diet alongside with medication and, eventually, insulin. I was never told I could just manage my blood sugar with insulin and medication without a low-carb diet. So this guy comes across to me as preaching to the choir.
From all the diabetic I know, in France, Asia or North America, you're the only one I ever heard of with such recommendation. A friend of mine in France was actively advised _against_ a low-carb diet to control her diabetes. She did it anyway and saw incredible results. Nevertheless, and despite improvement on all indicators in her blood test, her doctor advised her to return to a normal diet and control it with insulin and "complex" carbs. That was in 2019.
My mother’s doctors do similar things - partly because they have internalized the “cultural impossibility” of old Asians to cut carbs and if someone says they are cutting carbs, according to their experience it’s often a lie. It’s also possible that some of these doctors have indoctrinated themselves into believing this can never work.
It's standard diabetology doctrine in Paraguay (South America). Most diabetologists do it. They say that the key to control blood sugar lies in a multi-faceted approach.
It's not "carb abstinence", but "carb restriction". Carbohydrates should be greatly reduced and if you must eat them, eat complex carbs with a lot of fiber instead of sugars. But they should be reduced as much as possible.
Taub, a science writer, has a theory and book to sell. His theory that drugs instead of diet leads to later problems is pretty well established. I don't know if he also discusses how insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes starts, or how the ability of the pancreas to make insulin in adulthood can be damaged by fat soluble poisons leaking into and out of fat cells.
If nothing he says is fundamentally wrong, why not let this narrative be around. More people than not have a distaste in science nowadays and it’s beneficial to have multiple perspectives as long as they’re not scientifically inaccurate.
The next phase of diabetes treatment just may be sleep.
30% of people get insufficient sleep, which directly leads to increased insulin resistance the following day, along with increased appetite and craving for sugary and fattier foods, and a decrease in willpower.
Diabetes needs to be treated as a whole person health, diet is absolutely key, but so is sleep and particularly as we age, as slow-wave sleep decreases naturally with age (this is what we're working on).
~30% of the population are slow metabolizers of caffeine, yet the prevailing attitude is that coffee is considered a “net positive”.
For those with slow caffeine metabolism, it’s killing your sleep, it’s making you anxious and eventually it’s going to cut your life short.
If you’re a slow metabolizer of caffeine, your sleep quality is suffering. Cut out caffeine for two weeks - see how deeper your sleep becomes.
“ Slow caffeine metabolisers are:
Associated with a higher risk of heart disease [19]
Associated with a higher risk of hypertension [20]
Associated with impaired fasting glucose [21]
May not have the protective effects against some cancers that it appears to for “fast metabolisers” [22,23]
A recent umbrella review of 218 meta-analyses concluded that coffee presented statistical harm only in pregnancy and possible fracture risk for women. [4]”
I'm surprised a bit that this seems to be contentious/not already part of normal treatment in the US? Or is the article wrong?
Yes, Insulin is the "last line of defense" for Diabetes 2, but at least here in Germany dietary change (e.g. Keto or at least less carbs) is an essential part of treatment. And so are other medications (e.g. Metformin). Insulin is given if there's no other option, cause well, not giving insulin if your blood sugar is really bad leads to very bad outcomes, but if there is any other option doctors will take it first.
This matches my experience in India. A dietician consultation is recommended on diagnosis of diabetes, however adherence to low carb diet is low. Still, insulin is considered last line of defence if diet control, drugs like metformin, glimiperide, sitagliptin etc are not sufficient to keep blood glucose in check.
Indians typically follow either a rice based diet in southern regions or wheat based diet in northen regions. Doctors down south recommend eating limited or no rice and switching to wheat based roti, whereas northen doctors recommend switching to rice. I suspect this is to reduce overall consumption, in anecdotal experiences it works better than just asking people to limit their preferred grain. People eat less of unfamiliar foods.
It’s pretty amazing how many different ways people approach this problem. The article scared me a little when there were anecdotes about people just using an insulin pump to keep levels in check…do people understand what insulin does? Diabetes Type 2 is an awful name and needs to be rebranded. Type 1 is fixed by insulin, Type 2 is slowed down(?) by insulin, they’re not the same thing.
This is kind of like how calorie restrictions will fix your issues, how you achieve that restriction is the hard and very human problem that people endlessly debate about.
So the only lesson to take away is that this is a solvable problem, and ultimately you gotta cut calories (and exercise). But how is important; so keep trying till you find something that works for you.
So I have been at risk of diabetes for 8 years ... started tracking actively since I had a cardiac incident. My first 2 years of cardiac recovery were whole food vegetarian with zero added sugar and they were awesome. But then the discipline slipped and it has been one thing after the other with degrading health (mostly A1c, still not diabetic, and weight gained 30 pounds in the past 6 years). Went back to Whole Foods plant based diet since January 1st and have cut down sugar significantly. This time I am prepared by having a fridge stocked with fruits and other alternatives when I get tempted to eat.
But based on what I am reading in the interview, and the other comments on this post, am I chasing a fool's errand?
My personal experience says that any diet works as long as you are disciplined, and although in my social circles (work and family), it is hard to be sugar free, it is still possible (along with vegetarianism) as compared to low carb. However, I do not see any advocates for that here, are there?
Btw I am planning for a modified version of something called LMK diet, LMK is not a doctor and is probably at the extreme edges of selling veganism, and I am definitely not going that far, but going as close as I can. Mentioning it just in case someone wants to counter or support it.
Gary Taubes is not a good source of information. Someone else posted this [1] review of another of his books.
If you define "work" as losing weight, then sure any diet can indeed "work" if you're able to stick to it. But personally that wouldn't be my sole criteria, especially if I had had a cardiac event.
I have never heard of LMK. I couldn't find any actual description of what that means except for a graphic at the bottom at lmkhealth.com, which needs clarification. Why are you wanting to follow LMK and not any of the usual WFPB doctors (Greger, Essylstyn, Campbell, McDougall, Ornish, Barnard, Fuhrman, etc.)?
> Why are you wanting to follow LMK and not any of the usual WFPB doctors (Greger, Essylstyn, McDougall, Ornish, Fuhrman, etc.)?
No reason. I was ready for a change to vegetarian lifestyle anyways and a friend independently added me to whatsapp group run by him. He follows all the names you mention anyways so it is all the same to me. And I am familiar with all of these names since I followed them for a while but then got confused by the alternatives. He has a few youtube videos which repeat what he says on whatsapp just that whatsapp morphs into local support groups on completing first 2 months. Not yet there.
Although he is a vegan killjoy, reason to prefer him would be indianized recipes.
> Eat a minimum of 1% of your body weight in fruits (must include berries) and a minimum of 1% of your body weight in vegetables (half in green leafy vegetables) daily.
But there is lot of nuance and adjustments available by juicing but that's the high level pitch
Ahhh, that is actually consistent to the rest of the diagram. I was so very confused because I couldn't figure out what that percentage could possibly be that made sense in context.
Juicing isn't recommended much any more now that we understand the importance of fiber and fiber-bound nutrients. As long as it's greens and not fruits, and only offsets a part of the cruciferous veggie intake, it could still be a healthful part of a WFPB diet. I have heard some of the nutrition intervention type retreats do that, as their guests may need the extra boost.
For my body weight, 4+ pounds of fruits and veggies is a lot to chew every single day. So I might juice the greens, and he suggests doing that too, because the alternative of slipping into some other food is a bigger problem. But juicing is recommended by him only for Greens.
As long as your diet is built mainly around plants and whole foods, and you maintain an appropriate energy balance to maintain a healthy weight and body composition, you should be fine. It's the common factor in every healthy diet.
If you enjoy a sweet treat on special occasions or social gatherings, just enjoy it. Being good 90% of the time allows you to indulge 10% of the time.
A sufficiently good diet combined with regular strength and endurance training will be the most powerful levers at your disposal to drastically improve your health and quality of life.
I'd check out the Barbell Medicine podcast for more reliable information.
> For Taubes, dietary fat wasn’t a problem at all. Instead, the real danger was carbohydrate, he asserted, sparking a backlash, and fuelling the ongoing conversation about what constitutes a “healthy diet”
I've successfully lost 80 pounds in the past year after 10 years of yoyo dieting with low carb and counting calories. I did not become a healthy weight until I was counting calories on a HIGH CARB and HIGH PROTEIN diet and doing a significant amount of exercise 6 days a week. Meaning, 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, 1 gram of fat per 1/3rd of your weight in pounds and as many carbs that fit in your calorie budget and at least 30 grams of fiber.
Note, I'm not giving advice to people with diabetes but the reason there are so many people with metabolic disease in this country is not carbs. It's lack of exercise (and walking) and processed high calorie food. Those french fries you are avoiding, the reason they have so many calories is not because of carbs, it's because of fat.
If you want to lose weight and you plan to also exercise, going low carb will hamstring you. The difference between running in the morning fasted and running after eating a single banana is the difference between feeling like you are being tortured and being able bounce around like a bunny.
I was literally lying in bed all day with 0 mental energy on my diet because I went low carb. I failed my diet 3 times over 10 years because I believed the low carb bullshit. Go look around at how many people successfully lose weight, they all believe the same low carb stupidity.
I'm running 30 miles a week and lifting 6 days a week, if I went low carb I would be tired in bed all day. If you don't have diabetes or some other metabolic disease, don't go low carb.
Alternatively, I did keto for years and worked as a painter in the midwest US during the summers. No breakfast, no lunch, worked 8 hours in the peak summer heat no problem, setting up/tearing down scaffold, putting up siding, etc. Never felt exhausted. Lost weoght sucessfully and was in good shape.
So basically all im saying is you gotta listen to your body and adjust accordingly. Keto/low carb does not work for everyone but it definitely is very effective for some
hmm but a lot of people who do physical labor tend to be fat. I think what happens is they eat a lot off the job because the work causes hunger. Meanwhile, office people can stay slim despite not moving much. Of course, not everyone is the same.
> If you want to lose weight and you plan to also exercise, going low carb will hamstring you. The difference between running in the morning fasted and running after eating a single banana is the difference between feeling like you are being tortured and being able bounce around like a bunny.
A low carb diet may still contain enough carbs to inhibit the ketone generation mechanism. Was your ketogenesis active at the time? My experience of exercising under ketogenesis was OK.
Same. First time I went low carb I couldn't get through a full workout for close to a month. Adapting to keto can take longer especially if you're metabolically unhealthy to begin with.
>you. The difference between running in the morning fasted and running after eating a single banana is the difference between feeling like you are being tortured and being able bounce around like a bunny.
This seems really wrong for the vast majority of people.
Is your average person really bottlenecked by their blood glucose levels and not say, cardiovascular health or lung capacity?
I think most people get winded in a hard run way before their muscles are low on energy and they are feeling sluggish, no?
From what I understand the vast majority of people have very low metabolic health and their ability to use fat as energy during exercise is not well developed. Meaning they are almost exclusively using glucose and glycogen.
From personal experience, when i was untrained, i could feel if i was fasted or not. Additionally if i did not eat some form of carbs 40 minutes into my workouts i would crash and burn but if i had a small gel pck i could go for another hour. I dont know the mechanism for how to glucose would even be absorbed that quickly but i did feel a noticeable boost in energy as soon as i consumed the gel.
I think there is some connection between the digestive system and the brain that signals that you can use more glucose immediately after consuming food.
This can be replicated without consuming any glucose, by simply washing something carbohydrate around the mouth. It's called the "Carbohydrate Mouth Rinse"[1].
If I can summarise, from memory, it tricks the brain into thinking more fuel is being added so it's okay to release more of the stored fuel it was holding back.
> Routinely rinsing a carbohydrate-containing solution around the oral cavity for between 5-10 s has been shown to improve high intensity endurance performance lasting 30-70 min.
> The magnitude of the performance benefit is similar to that of carbohydrate ingestion, although athletes who are prone to gastro-intestinal (GI) distress during high intensity exercise may want to consider rinsing because of the reduced risk of GI discomfort.
> These effects appear to be specific to carbohydrate and independent of taste or sweetness.
My experience is yes, absolutely. As in, the inexperienced beginner will feel the difference faster and more then someone in shape who runs often. Meanwhile, your body if you run often will handle lack of glucose in blood much better, at least subjectively.
I think the assumption in that sentence is that you're already someone who runs, so you already have decent cardio fitness. And if you're a runner, yes, you can notice a massive difference between running on an empty stomach vs. running with some carbs in you.
Bodies vary. Years ago my partner of the time and I did low carb at the same time, eating a lot of the same meals, of course. We both lost weight. We both ran. I felt great and had a lot of energy. They felt miserable for the whole multi-month period.
Too low carb can actually slow down thyroid and end up increasing both LDL and A1C because overall metabolism slows down too much. healthy carbs combined with lots of exercise works.
There are possible causes that simply cannot be considered on account of the level of investment that big pharma has sunk into that sort of treatment. No investigations are undertaken whereas such a cause should be a consideration. IMO.
Another example, for Taubes, of how early researchers were mistaken, concerns
the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, which are so different they
almost shouldn’t share a name.
>Taubes has published five books on sugar, fat and carbohydrate, including his latest, Rethinking Diabetes, in which he posits that low-carb diets have been under-used as a way to manage blood glucose in type 1 and type 2 diabetes, in favour of drug-heavy treatment regimes which, he suspects, may do more harm than good.
So, it conflates and then says "we shouldn't conflate".
It's not good enough. I currently live with a type-1 teenager who is not at all happy about her condition and my family simply does not need cross talk that can be selectively quoted back at us over the dinner table. This sort of wording and "questioning" is harmful and dangerous. Before my daughter was diagnosed she got scary thin, we were seriously frightened by the process and I have no doubt that without insulin she would have died before her 10th birthday.
Taking insulin or not taking insulin is a life and death issue for us, this sort of article is not the right place for a debate of this sort - that debate should happen in the scientific community. This isn't a popularity contest.
Will low-carb diets allow type 1 patients to use less insulin? Probably. At least, that is my conclusion of all the papers I've read on the subject. I would even go so far as to say "almost certainly".
You have a problem with a daughter who doesn't reason well. That is too bad but it should not be other people's problem. It is also not a problem with the Guardian article or with Taube's writing.
It also not "conflating" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Some fields attract higher levels of intellect and employ more rigorous methodologies than others. This is mostly a consequence of the economic value to be gained from working in a field, rather than anything deep about the nature of the problems in that field.
There is plenty of low hanging fruit for smart people to pick by jumping over to a field that has less talent, and less sophisticated methodologies. For example many of the social sciences struggle to reproduce findings, and properly deploy the scientific method. There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
There is not much low hanging fruit in biochem / medicine in 2024. It’s a gargantuan mountain of knowledge you have to get through before you have any hope of seeing the big picture.
> There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
Then why do I keep hearing about superconductors on here?
This sort of thinking comes from ignorance and arrogance. When you do research at the frontier of any subject, you won't compete with the average university graduate in that subject, you'll compete with people with the highest "intellect" who also studied this subject for their entire lives, and you're incredibly unlikely to find a breakthrough without doing that too. The amount of Nobel Prize winners who went on to support compete bogus theories in other fields is endless.
> There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
... also seems to completely miss that there is a spectrum from "hard" science to "soft" science (contrary to what many might expect, "soft" sciences are arguably much more difficult to work with), and that physics is the "hardest" (ie.: in many ways "most straightforward", although by this I do not mean to trivialize it at all) natural science there is.
You need much more sophisticated statistical techniques & experimental design when you're dealing with complex systems (eg.: society, ecology, psychology, etc) than when you are dealing with simple systems (cue the joke about physicists assuming spherical cows).
One thing I appreciate with Taubes (having read his early books, not the more recent ones -- I really liked The case against sugar), is that he has an epistemologically correct approach to the problem. He looks at it through the eyes of a rigorous scientist, unlike most people in nutrition science.
For the most part, he was very cautious in his claim and spent most of his time discussing why claims accepted as correct are completely full of shit. It's likely that, through time, he built a corpus of knowledge and understanding that allow him to be a bit more assertive today (again, I've not read his recent work), but really, his early books are, in my opinion, remarkable for their thoroughness and intellectual honesty.
There is no shortage of studies whose conclusions were later found out to be false or overly-simplistic.
Nutrition science isn't bad because nutrition scientists are bad.
The truth is that nutrition is a very very young science, and it also happens to be one of the most difficult health sciences. It will take a very long time for the body of knowledge in that field to take form.
> perhaps because of his serious and scientific background – he has a physics degree from Harvard and studied aerospace engineering at Stanford [...]
Which, for the thing he's doing now, is not a serious background! Knowledge isn't transferrable and there are plenty examples of people who transfer fields with unwarranted confidence and make totally bogus claims (see the Nobel disease [1]). I wish we would stop claiming the opposite, because especially in a field like nutritional sciences you can find some "evidence" for any theory (see eg. the Chemical Hunger drama [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...