Good Calories, Bad Calories – Gary Taubes

I’ve heard people lament, “Gary Taubes is great and all…but he just doesn’t understand the science.” Such people typically have not read the science, much less, Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book is a comprehensive analysis of the history of human nutrition and a seminal book in our understanding of obesity.

If Why We Get Fat is written for the lay-person, this 640 page behemoth is written to satisfy the health professional: exhaustively sourced and referenced, professional yet approachable. It tackles the familiar themes of obesity as the result of excess carbohydrate consumption and posits the insulin hypothesis as the explanation for what ails us. Along the way, he uses arguments and evidence from the domains of anthropology, nutrition and medicine. Really, this is the book you would write if you read every piece of research on nutrition and obesity that was ever written.