Gary Taubes, Good Calories Bad Calories

I just finished the first chapter of Good Calories, Bad Calories written by Gary Taubes, an award-winning science writer. This book may be one of the best nutritional books of the past twenty years.

Reuters recently published a review in their Lifestyle: Health & Fitness section. Here's an excerpt from that piece:

"Good Calories, Bad Calories" examines an alternative hypothesis to the calorie- and fat-centric idea through decades of literature and clinical data on diet and obesity, Taubes says. It's another way to explain observations about diet and weight gain, he says, one for which strong data existed. "If we had taken this other fork in the road," he asks, "what would we have come to believe?"

In the first chapter, Taubes explains how we got to where we are today regarding public health policies and dietary recommendation. Then he examines two competing hypotheses. One is the diet-heart hypothesis, which describes how we came to believe that dietary fat causes heart disease. The other is the carbohydrate hypothesis.

I'll be commenting more on this once I get a little further into the book. But in the meantime check out what this New York Times article has to say...