It is fitting that I finished this book while descending for landing over Newark airport in the middle of intense turbulence. It was the airsickness that the turbulent descent caused that I consider fitting. The sickening feeling one is left with after reading this book is similar: it starts slowly, it rises almost imperceptibly, but eventually, it seizes you almost entirely and renders you incapable of perceiving anything else.

Such is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, a book of such significance that it shakes you where you sit. And though it will make you sick to read it, it will make you sick in all the right ways and for all the right reasons. It can only be hoped that it will also lead you to make all the right changes in your personal health worldview because nearly everything you believe about what you eat is wrong.

That’s the power of this book, its ability to mercilessly unearth issues you thought long ago resolved and buried. “Fat people are fat because they overeat and don’t exercise enough.” “Eating meat will cause heart disease.” “A low-fat diet will reduce your cholesterol.” These are just samples of the things you believe today that, in Taubes’ painfully thorough hands, you will come to find have not only never been verified through experimental studies in animals or humans, but actually contradict the combined evidence of over a century of research.

Taubes’s approach is exhausting. He is so thorough – 601 pages attest to this – as to scare away anyone without a basic comfort in health science. Though this is a shame, it is a necessary one, made so because the author hopes to avoid the many sins he enumerates among the researchers he chronicles who have so often selectively favored the slight evidence that supported their hypotheses and ignored evidence that contradicted their sincere beliefs. The result is an absolutely dizzying array of studies and references – the bibliography reaches 65 pages in length – that you must not only be led through but which you have to be able to retain in memory over many chapters because they will necessarily re-emerge later on.

It would be impossible to summarize his conclusions in this review for the same reason. However, there are three observations that one can abstract from the many stories and multiple health studies he weaves together: 1) The specialization of all scientific disciplines leaves each discipline with a partial, and often incorrect view of the whole; 2) Scientists often become so persuaded of the validity of their hypotheses that they stop looking for any evidence that would contradict it, and in fact, rationalize or simply ignore such evidence, even when collected by their own hands; and 3) Many studies in this area are flawed because they are designed under the assumption that the causality of the variables involved (meaning which thing controls which thing) is already understood.

(Perhaps more detail on #3 is warranted. One of the most poignant examples in the book came from an interview with a scientist who believed in the “law of thermodynamics” as it applies to obesity, which led him to conclude – and nearly all of us along with him – that fat people are fat because they eat too much and are lazy. When his own research demonstrated that the calorie intake of fat people was not related to their weight gain, he avoided this evidence by deciding that fat people may not eat too much but being lazy is enough to make them fat. His evidence? We should all just sit in an airport and take note of the fact that the lean people walk while the fat people take the escalators and moving walkways. This is particularly appalling because not only is his experience in an airport not a controlled scientific study, but also because his hypothesis that fat people are lazy is one explanation of why obese people prefer the moving walkways. An equally likely explanation of the same behavior is that it’s harder for the obese to walk than it is to ride. In essence, the scientist assumed causality went one way: lazy => fat, yet there is no reason other than personal dogmatic insistence on a particular view not to consider an equally rational direction for causality: fat=>”lazy” where lazy is defined as taking an escalator when one is offered. This is a radical rethink of our personal assumptions, and if there were no evidence to further strengthen this alternative hypothesis, then we would be forced to conclude that lazy=> fat. However, the evidence points almost completely the other way, as Taubes shows.)

By the first 50 pages I realized I had found a unique book. The opening is spectacularly engaging because it draws on historical examples and evidences such as the heart attack of President Eisenhower and his unsuccessful attempts to reduce his cholesterol though he ate almost no fat after that. It makes for good journalistic writing. However, once it gets through the engaging niceties, the book reveals itself as the disciplined scientific literature review it truly is, appropriate historical anecdotes mingled in to give the reader an occasional break. By the end of that first day, I resolved to begin restricting my carbohydrates immediately, though I hoped I would more fully understand my decision by the end of the book. That was ten days ago. In the intervening days I have lost 8 pounds. Fully aware that this could just be the result of a new enthusiasm for this diet, I decided early on not to confound my results by exercising or by cutting back my calories. Instead, I have used my few free mornings for writing, and yes, reading more of Good Calories, Bad Calories. Additionally, I have given myself license not only to eat whatever fat and protein I want, I have consciously tried to overeat both. Four pieces of bacon, an egg, a 4-carb cracker smeared with a thick layer of cream cheese and topped with pancetta – they are all not strangers to me. I have steak for dinner when possible, and eat sausages of all sorts. I regularly dine on cheese whenever I feel hungry, and I go through peanuts as though they were going out of style. To make my experiment complete, I should be cataloging this intake, but suffice it to say I am not only not hungry, I am stuffed.

Interestingly, this book contains no diet at all, a fact that Taubes’s editors must have pointed out, leading to the epilogue which summarizes all his conclusions and comes close to recommending specific diet steps. It’s not actually his goal to change how you eat, rather to change how scientists and researchers approach the important questions of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, each of which is reaching epidemic proportions, despite our public obsession with all things low-fat. This is another reason why the book is so credible. Not only is the author pedigreed as a science journalist (a correspondent for Science, a magazine that has more in common with a scholarly journal than with Newsweek); and not only is the book astonishingly well researched and documented; but the author hasn’t (yet) produced a diet handbook to make himself rich. This last fact is significant and something that Atkins couldn’t say (and for which the research establishment ridiculed him) and something that health researchers receiving million dollar grants from refined carbohydrate producers like Procter & Gamble, M&M/Mars or Post also can’t say.

My advice: read the book, think through the logic, and perform a personal test. As one friend with high blood pressure and high cholesterol who experimented with a low-carb diet explained to me: “My doctor is very bothered by my results – I am eating fat all the time, I practically can’t have a glass of water without putting a pork chop in it – but my lab tests are coming back healthier and cleaner than my doctor has ever seen them.” I imagine that upon seeing these counterintuitive results the doctor felt a sickening feeling similar to airsickness. It is disconcerting, even sickening for a doctor to find that everything he believed – and everything he recommended to his patients – was based on faulty assumptions never proven by science yet perpetuated by every expert panel and official report. That’s a sick feeling I know and one that may well make us all well if we heed it.

-- Update, August 2008. I'm at 198 pounds, a loss of 20 pounds, and still dropping weight, without exercise and without restricting calories