NY Times: Gary Taubes’s fructose essay
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an unusual story by Gary Taubes, whom some of you might remember as the author of the controversial story in the Times in 2002 touting the virtues of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.
That story appeared under the headling, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” The headline on the web version of this Sunday’s story is equally direct: “Is Sugar Toxic?” (The magazine’s cover language is “Sweet and Vicious: The case against sugar.”)
The answer to both questions, as Taubes himself says repeatedly, is that we don’t know. In neither case is the evidence conclusive enough to make the case one way or the other. But that doesn’t stop Taubes from taking strong positions and arguing his case forcefully, even if, ultimately, he can’t prove it.
Such controversies make for good stories, and reporters who do them well try to weigh the evidence, to convey the differing points of view, and to try, when possible, to come to some conclusion. It’s not always easy, when the evidence is uncertain, but sometimes it’s enough to say which way the evidence is leaning, or when and whether the controversy might be resolved, or what additional pieces of the puzzle might emerge from current or future studies.
That’s not the approach Taubes takes. His piece is more an essay than a reported story. While it’s evident that he did a lot of reporting before writing this story, he uses few quotes and doesn’t try to present an even-handed appraisal of the current state of affairs. Instead, he marshalls evidence to support a case. This is an essay intended to persuade.
In both stories, Taubes adopted the contrarian view. Low fat diets are a big fat lie, and low carbohydrate diets are better, he argued in the first story. And sugar is toxic, he argues in this Sunday’s story.
The 2002 story prompted considerable debate. This is how I was quoted in an article in the American Journalism Review a few months later:
Paul Raeburn, a senior writer at BusinessWeek and president of the National Association of Science Writers, credits Taubes with exploring an emerging viewpoint in the nutrition field–a valuable endeavor for a science writer. But Raeburn objects to Taubes’ presentation. Although Taubes acknowledges at the outset that he’s writing about the views of a small but growing minority, Raeburn says Taubes should have emphasized throughout the article that he was advancing an unproved viewpoint and that many studies support the other side.
“I do think that Gary Taubes’ piece was misleading,” says Raeburn, who covers science, medicine and the environment. He notes that the cover art and the story’s opening anecdote suggest that people can eat as much fat as they want. “Not many people believe you can eat all the fat you want, and people quoted in the article didn’t make that case,” Raeburn says. “If you just look at the article, you might think that.”
I feel the same way about the article that will appear Sunday. Taubes will likely persuade many readers to abandon sugar, or to try to. (We can guess that the resolve of some of them will weaken by the middle of the week, when somebody brings donuts into the office.) And that might not do a lot of harm; if it makes them slimmer, all the better.
But encouraging readers to make radical shifts in their diets might be unwise. Taubes can’t make the case that sugar is toxic, though he says he believes it. And I can’t make the case that his article will be damaging to the public’s health, although I worry about that. Taubes’s editors should have worried about that, too.
Most of the piece makes an argument that excessive consumption of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup can lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. (He talks about sugar for quite a while before telling us that it’s fructose he’s worried about, not glucose; table sugar is made of both.) That link is plausible, even if one doesn’t agree that, in the view of one researcher Taubes paraphrases, “sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.”
But toward the end of the piece, Taubes raises an even more controversial question: Does sugar cause cancer?
If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they [some researchers] say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly.
I’ve met Taubes, and I like him. He’s smart, and he’s a good writer. But he’s not the person I would turn to for advice on whether sugar causes cancer.
There might be a reason why this question of sugar and cancer hasn’t often been voiced publicly. Maybe it’s because the sugar industry has muzzled the nation’s researchers. Or maybe it’s because people who know don’t think they can make the case–and that they shouldn’t yet try.
Ordinarily, I trust the reporting in the Times. In this case, I don’t know what to think, or what to believe. I can’t be sure that Taubes gave me the straight story, because he has such strong personal views–and because he’s trying to persuade me, not enlighten me. That, in my view, is a missed opportunity. This is important stuff; I would have liked more help.
- Paul Raeburn
April 15th, 2011 at 11:53 am
Great review, Paul. I just want to question one point. You write:
“But encouraging readers to make radical shifts in their diets might be unwise…. I can’t make the case that his article will be damaging to the public’s health, although I worry about that. Taubes’s editors should have worried about that, too.”
I agree with the general principle here, but I can’t think of a single harm that would occur if we eliminated sugar from our diets. As far as I can tell there’s near universal agreement that at the very least sugar calories are empty calories from a nutritional point of view. If that’s the case, then the burden of proof is shifted somewhat, and a wholesale recommendation such as Taubes makes is a bit more acceptable.
April 15th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Hi Paul,
Couldn’t resist commenting because you hit on the nub of the problem. I’ve spent the last dozen years arguably doing more research on nutrition and health than any journalist alive and I’ve come to contrarian findings. It could be because I’m a contrarian kind of guy and it could be that the evidence demands a contrarian position. There’s no way to know without doing the research yourself. In fact, in an earlier version of the article we had said (after my acknowledgement that I had done a lot of research on this subject and come to conclusions similar to Lustig) that “This could mean I’m either particularly biased or particularly well-informed on the subject. There’s no way to know a priori which is correct, but you’ll be well-served to keep the possibilities in mind.”
So, your comment that I’m not necessarily the person you’d turn to advice on whether sugar causes cancer is well-taken, but begs the question who would you take it from? I’m the person, after all, who interviewed Lew Cantley, the director of the Beth Israel Deacconess Cancer Center at Harvard, and Craig Thompson, president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and they’re the ones who told me that they think sugar is a likely cause of cancer. Now I assume you’d take advice from them, no? And if you interviewed them — which you can now do — and that’s what they tell you, what would you write?
I’m not trying to be defensive, only making the point that once you’ve done the research and come to a contrarian position you become someone who is a questionable source. It’s a difficult issue to escape in journalism and I don’t know how to do it. Much of my struggle writing about these issues is to convince my journalistic peers that the arguments I’m making should be taken seriously, even though I’m just one of them, a journalist, and don’t have an endowed chair at an institution of higher learning.
April 15th, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Mr. Taubes:
Well, thank God SOMEONE is doing some “contrarian” work, because frankly, I don’t see much of it in journalism. In my film GENERATION RX, I report “the rest of the story,” along with Pulitzer finalist (and science journalist) Robert Whitaker. Why did I feel the need to tell “the rest of the story?” Because so many in journalism, including Gardiner Harris, only sniff around the periphery…even though they know there is so much to the story of drugging kids with Ritalin, antipsychotics and SSRIs. And if there was honest-to-God research—and SCIENCE reported, many of the myths surrounding ADHD, Bipolar and other “mental health” drugs would be exposed.
So I applaud your work…we could use a few thousand other journalists like you.
April 16th, 2011 at 11:48 am
I appreciate the comments, which raise some interesting issues.
Larry, I agree that it’s hard to know what harm could come from warning people about sugar, unless they suddenly starting consuming stevia by the gallon, with unknown consequences. And Kevin, I’m all for the other side of the story. Keep at it!
April 16th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Gary,
I don’t think you’re being defensive at all; I greatly appreciate the thoughtful debate. And I think you, too, have hit on the nub of the problem (there must be several nubs here): It’s difficult to take a contrarian stand. The line that was cut–”I’m either particularly biased or particularly well-informed”–is a good one; I’m sorry it didn’t survive the editing. Even without that, however, you were very clear about how you came to your conclusions.
You noted, at length, the differing responses to Robert Lustig’s views of sugar, and you went on to say:
“If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.”
I don’t know if we could ask for any more clarity than that from any writer.
The story was, as I said, well written, and persuasive. So why, I keep asking myself, did I feel something was missing when I finished it?
Maybe I wanted more from Cantley and Thompson, in their own words. I did have a sense, throughout, that I was reading too much paraphrase and not enough direct quotation–which is why I said the piece read like an essay. I don’t mean to suggest there is anything wrong with essays (I hear the ghost of Montaigne). But it was something about the tone…
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe I wanted more acknowledgement that, despite the conclusions that you and many smart people have come to, much uncertainty still remains. I remember, years ago, hearing a woman scientist at the annual American Heart Association meeting report on the benefits of estrogen replacement. She said something like this: “The findings are not definitive, but I told my mother to take estrogen.” I called my mother and told her to take estrogen. Then you know what happened–those findings fell apart. I’ve never made another call like that to anyone, and I never will.
You can see that I’m nibbling around the edges here, quibbling with the editing or the tone. You’ve produced an admirable piece of work, and one which will, I think, prompt many people to cut down on sugar. Or at least to think about it. I’m one of them, I admit.
I’ve written plenty of contrarian stories myself, and I understand the problem. I’ve been in many tight spots with editors arguing that we ought to do stories that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Sometimes I’ve won, and sometimes not. Sometimes the stories that made it into print had important consequences; sometimes they became, as we used to say, “forever exclusives.”
I don’t know the answer to the question you raise: How does one take a contrarian position without becoming a questionable source?
But let’s keep working on it.
April 16th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I certainly agree with many of Gary’s positions.
On the other hand, I think, as he himself noted in his most recent book Why We Get Fat,
“One problem here is that when people, experts or not, decide to review the evidence on an issue dear to their hearts (me included), they tend to see what they want to see. This is human nature, but it doesn’t lead to trustworthy conclusions”
And that’s certainly what I saw with many of his positions in Why We Get Fat, and perhaps what you’re getting at here.
April 17th, 2011 at 9:39 am
Instead of focusing on how Gary has only told one side of the story on sugar, or one side of one aspect of the story (it’s a really complex and vast subject), I think that the onus is on publications like the NYT and others to get other journalists to write on the same subject from other points of view. And then perhaps to engender debate between these science writers on the issue. It’s not the job of one reporter to do this, and journalists are certainly not responsible for coming up with diet advice. In fact, a journalist is the last person you should look to for advice about anything other than how to research and write a story, in my opinion. It’s not advice we need – it’s points of view, information and solid criticism, which Taubes definitely provides. And we need a lot more of it.
At the same time, the health science community needs to do a better job at communicating with lay people, and getting involved in the politics of food, since their research is used to decide on dietary recommendations that affect the well being of millions of people. I think the structures that govern research funding and publishing in the health science field need to change so that scientists can work together more, rather than competing for publication space and funding.
Jennifer Dales