Yeah, I was trying not to pull you ahead. But dealing with the big picture is more my style.
Taubes certainly does say things that seem to suggest that, but what it would even mean for that to be true?
I think he says it pretty directly actually. Good Calories, Bad Calories:
When Rony discussed positive energy balance, he compared the situation with what happens in growing children. “The caloric balance is known to be positive in growing children,” he observed. But children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing. They require the excess calories to satisfy the requirements of growth; the result is positive energy balance. The growth is induced by hormones and, in particular, by growth hormone. This is the same path of cause and effect that would be taken by anyone who is driven to put on fat by a metabolic or hormonal disorder. The disorder will cause the excess growth—horizontal, in effect, rather than vertical. For every calorie stored as fat or lean tissue, the body will require that an extra calorie either be consumed or conserved. As a result, anyone driven to put on fat by such a metabolic or hormonal defect would be driven to excessive eating, physical inactivity, or some combination. Hunger and indolence would be side effects of such a hormonal defect, merely facilitating the drive to fatten. They would not be the fundamental cause. “Positive caloric balance may be regarded as the cause of fatness,” Rony explained, “when fatness is artificially produced in a normal person or animal by forced excessive feeding or forced rest, or both. But obesity ordinarily develops spontaneously; some intrinsic abnormality seems to induce the body to establish positive caloric balance leading to fat accumulation. Positive caloric balance would be, then, a result rather than a cause of the condition.”
Why We Get Fat includes more like the above, but the copy I have with me doesn't allow for easy copy and pasting. But that's the story basically. Yes, people who are fat are going to necessarily have had a positive caloric-intake balance from when they were not fat. But that doesn't mean that the causal node to intervene on is a) how much a person eats or b)how much they exercise. Taubes's claim is that the fat composition of your body is determined by your hormones, insulin in particular which is secreted based on your blood-sugar levels. Your body then overeats -- or avoids burning calories-- to compensate.
Illustrative of this effect are a wide variety of lab animal experiments that induce obesity by manipulating the animal's endocrine system while controlling food intake.
Why don't we start there. What do you find incoherent about that?
But children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because they are growing.
Taken literally, this is false. Children voraciously isn't literally an epiphenomenon of their growth. If it were, children would still grow regardless of how little they eat. But in fact, not eating enough when you're a kid stunts your growth.
Of course, one way to defend Taubes here is to assume a lot of his rhetoric isn't meant to be taken literally. But the farther you go in that direction, the less he ends up disagreeing with mainstream nutrition, and the harder it is to make sense of the things he says about how awful mainstream nutrition science is supposed to be.
Previously: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity
Edit: In retrospect, I think it maybe should have combined this post with part 3. Unfortunately, the problem of what to do with existing comments makes that hard to fix now.
Taubes first made a name for himself as a low-carb advocate in 2002 with a New York Times article titled "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" When I first read this article, I was getting extremely suspicious by the second paragraph (emphasis added):
It's one thing to claim that, all else equal, low-carb diets have advantages over low-fat diets. It's another thing to claim you can eat unlimited amounts of fatty foods without gaining weight.
I'd heard of Atkins before but didn't know much about him. I got curious to know more about the man Taubes was casting as the hero who just may have been "right all along," so I popped over to the Wikipedia article on the diet, which says:
The last sentence of this paragraph is helpfully marked "citation needed," leaving an unresolved conflict between whatever Wikipedia editor wrote the paragraph and what the Atkins folks (at least now) claim. I ordered a used copy of the original 1972 edition of Atkins' book through Amazon, and what I found supports the Wikipedia editor. The folks currently in charge of Atkins Nutritionals are white-washing.
The sensational "truly luxurious food without limit" quote in Taubes' article, for example, can be found on page 15 and comes with no context that would make it more reasonable. In fact, lest anyone misunderstand it, it's followed by a statement that "As long as you don't take in carbohydrates, you can eat any amount of this 'fattening' food and it won't put a single ounce of fat on you." (In the book, this is italicized for emphasis.)
Atkins acknowledged that most of the people who used his diet ended up eating less overall, but claimed that some of his patients had lost significant amounts of weight eating 3,000 calories per day or more. In one case, Atkins claimed, a man had lost fifty pounds on a diet of 5,000 calories per day. He attempted to explain this by invoking the fact that extremely low-carbohydrate diets will cause people to excrete ketones (which Atkins referred to as "incompletely burned calories") in their urine. However, as a statement on the Atkins diet put out by the American Medical Association explains:
As far as I can tell, nobody today defends Atkins' original "ketones in the urine" explanation for how his diet supposedly works. It's not entirely clear to me what was going on with the patients Atkins claimed lost weight on a high-calorie diet, but it wouldn't be surprising if a minority of his patients had simply misjudged their caloric intake. In spite of this, Taubes still appears to want to defend Atkins' most extreme claims about people being able to eat unlimited fat without gaining weight.
This isn't entirely obvious when you read his books Good Calories, Bad Calories or Why We Get Fat, which go for a slightly less sensational presentation than the Times article. Nevertheless, in the epilogue to Good Calories, Bad Calories, he claims that "Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization." There's a sense in which that claim might be somewhat plausible, if he meant that it's total calories, not fat per se, that's the main culprit in all those problems. But Taubes also puts a lot of energy (no pun intended) into attacking the mainstream emphasis on calories.
Why We Get Fat, for example, contains claims such as:
No effect? That's a strong claim. And as we'll see in the next two posts, Taubes' evidence for this claim ends up consisting largely on a series of misrepresentations of mainstream nutrition science, which allow him to present his views as the only alternative once he's knocked down his straw men.