(Lesson: Whatever is DaOfficialRecommendation - DO THE OPPOSITE! - CL)
Given our massive, unprecedented rise in obesity, diabetes, and related health problems I think we are faced with the very real possibility that roughly a half-century of America’s officially-endorsed nutritional policies may have not merely been incorrect but entirely upside-down and backwards, leading to severe health problems for perhaps a hundred million Americans, with many millions of these individuals probably suffering premature death as a consequence. This is hardly a comforting notion to accept and surely raises serious questions about the basic competence and objectivity of our academic scientists and researchers in such public health matters.
In reading the Taubes books, I had a strong sense that exactly those same thoughts had often crossed his mind as he carefully explained how a gigantic, decades-long public health policy that may have impacted a billion people worldwide had been originally formulated based upon little if any solid scientific evidence. Taubes’ undergraduate degree at Harvard had been in applied physics, his brother currently holds an endowed chair in mathematics at that same elite university, and his first two books had dealt with physics issues, including the successful research of a Nobel Laureate. So I suspect that the lack of competence he had discovered in the fields of public health and nutrition must have utterly appalled him.
