Episode 124: Gary Taubes makes a case for the ketogenic diet and its metabolic benefits

And much of it still came down to this embracing of the idea that a calorie is a calorie and we get fat because we eat too much. And, to me, that's the most destructive paradigm obesity researchers could have come up with, and I think the people who promote it, which is still 99% of the research establishment, the clinicians, just don't think it through. They never have the opportunity to really think what this means and what this implies.

We have obesity and diabetes epidemics ... The explosions in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes began around the 1960s to the point that 3 in 4 Americans are overweight or obese, and 1 in 10 have diabetes.

If I tell you to give up carbs, abstain from carbohydrates, and replace those calories with fat, not Crisco, but healthy fat... you'll get healthier, and you can watch it happen. Your weight will come down, your blood pressure will come down, your blood sugar will come in to control, your own inflammation will reduce. Physicians report this all the time.

So, a healthy diet 20 years ago [was] defined as a diet that was low in salt and low in saturated fat and maybe low in fat and maybe high in mostly plants. That would have been the conventional thinking, 20 years ago. Today, if you were to ask a nutritionist to define a healthy diet, the first thing they would say is it's low in ultra-processed foods—by which they mean sugar and highly refined grains.

...It's copiously reported, anecdotally reported, that you crave fat, not carbs once your body goes to burning fatty acids for fuel, rather than glucose.

In fact, the American Diabetes Association takes that one step further—they now recommend their doctors tell their newly diagnosed diabetic patients to continue eating exactly as many carbohydrates as they've always eaten because their patients are going to do that anyway, and if the doctors tell them to do it, that way, the doctor is going to have faith the patients are following their advice.