the mainstream view is that people gain weight when they consume more calories than they burn, but both calorie intake and calorie expenditure are regulated by complicated mechanisms we don't fully understand yet.

How does this square with starches occupying the bottom of the pyramid?

Yet Taubes goes on at great length about how obesity has other causes beyond simple calorie math as if this were somehow a refutation of mainstream nutrition science. So I'm going to provide a series of quotes from relevant sources to show that the experts are perfectly aware of that fact. All of the following sources are ones Taubes cites as examples of how absurd the views of mainstream nutrition experts supposedly are:

(...)

What you're doing strikes me as analogous to defending someone who gave bad financial advise by pointing to the "past performance is no guarantee of future results" disclaimer at the bottom of the reports. The meaningful content of these reports is the advise they give, not the COA disclaimer they attach to them.