Michael Rae—Aubrey de Grey’s co-author and the most knowledgeable person about matters of nutrition and supplementation that I know—doesn’t have a high pinion of Gary Taubes. Most of his remarks are spread over several messages on the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list; here’s a representative sample:
More Calories cause people to gain weight and develop metabolic disruptions. Nothing Taubes presents meaningfully challenges this. And even if loading up on lard really didn’t cause one to gain weight and doing the same with green veg (or even Wonder Bread) did, that wouldn’t make loading up on lard healthy.
Taubes is very good at picking apart the weaknesses in the epidemiological case against saturated fat (tho’ the recent meta-analyses, particularly in the breakdowns by poly:sat ratio, significantly beat back much of the case there); what he hasn’t done is either make a good case to the contrary, or even propose a credible alternative means of establishing the truth. You can only rely on the evidence you have, not the fifty-year, thousand-subject, randomized
metabolic-ward diet-heart clinical trial on which Taubes wants to insist before he’ll drop the pork rinds.
Michael Rae—Aubrey de Grey’s co-author and the most knowledgeable person about matters of nutrition and supplementation that I know—doesn’t have a high pinion of Gary Taubes. Most of his remarks are spread over several messages on the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list; here’s a representative sample: