Gary Taubes is a correspondent for Science magazine. His articles about science, medicine, and health have appeared in Discover, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He has won three Science-in-Society Journalism Awards given by the National Association of Science Writers—the only print journalist so recognized—as well as awards from the Pan American Health Organization, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society. His writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2002 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and 2003. He is the author of Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. He was educated at Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and their son.

Also by Gary Taubes

ALSO BY GARY TAUBES

Bad Science:

The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

Nobel Dreams:

Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment

Footnotes

*1 When the first American edition of The Physiology of Taste was published in 1865, it was entitled The Handbook of Dining, or Corpulence and Leanness Scientifically Considered, perhaps to capitalize on the Banting craze.
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*2 Endocrinology is the study of the glands that secrete hormones and the hormones themselves.
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*3 By 1973, there had been six major conferences or symposiums dedicated solely to research on obesity: at Harvard and at Iowa State University in the early 1950s; in Falsterbo, Sweden, in 1963, hosted by the Swedish Nutrition Foundation; at the University of San Francisco in 1967; the inaugural meeting of the British Obesity Association in London in 1968; and an international meeting in Paris in 1971. In all six, carbohydrate-restricted diets were portrayed as uniquely effective at inducing weight loss.
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*4 Arteriosclerosis is the condition in which atheroma accumulates in arteries throughout the body. The term was often used interchangeably with “atherosclerosis.”
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*5 Decreasing cholesterol consumption from four hundred milligrams a day, the average American intake in the 1990s, to the three hundred milligrams a day recommended by the National Cholesterol Education Program would be expected to reduce cholesterol levels by 1 to 2 mg/dl, or a decrease of perhaps 1 percent.
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*6 It did include a half-page of “recent scientific references on dietary fat and atherosclerosis,” many of which contradicted the conclusions of the report.
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