How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity
https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/13/how-...nce-of-obesity/
By Gary Taubes Sept. 13, 2021


I’ve been a science reporter for 40 years. I’ve wanted to assume that the experts I interview can be trusted to understand their subjects. Put simply, to get it right. But watching researchers in the field of obesity almost blindly follow a failed paradigm has led me to cross a line that few journalists ever do, to publicly embrace and promote a minority opinion that many in the obesity field think is quackery.

For nearly a century, obesity research has been predicated on the belief that the cause of the disorder “is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended,” to quote the World Health Organization. By this ubiquitous thinking, obesity is an energy balance disorder: People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend. They stay lean when they don’t.

This is the central dogma of obesity science. Virtually all obesity research is interpreted in the context of this balance principle; all related public health discussions, not just on obesity but on all the common chronic diseases that associate with it, as well as the very nature of a healthy diet, rely fundamentally on its implications.

The concept that obesity is essentially an energy balance disorder, a problem of calories in and calories out, is “the number one concept that starts everything,” as Harvard researcher Bruce Spiegelman said when I interviewed him in 2019. “If you’re a serious scientist,” he added, “it’s just kind of obvious.”

I might have embraced this thinking as well if the prevalence of obesity had not risen relentlessly for the past half century; if obesity — along with type 2 diabetes, its partner in pathology — had not become the dominant non-Covid health crisis of our time. But I can’t.[...]

That the environment plays a critical role is a given. The undeniable evidence is the enormous increase in the prevalence of obesity worldwide. In the U.S., 12% of Americans lived with obesity 60 years ago; more than 40% do today. Something has changed in the environment — in diets or lifestyles — to trigger such a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity. But is it nature or nurture that the environment triggers, behavior or physiology, minds or bodies?-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Fascinating discussion.

Not all that surprising.... "science, medicine, experts...."