Gary Taubes is the author of two of the most controversial and potentially explosive articles that The New York Times Magazine has published in the past decade....
Category: diabetes
Gary Taubes is the author of two of the most controversial and potentially explosive articles that The New York Times Magazine has published in the past decade. One appeared in 2002 under the headline, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" The other was published in April, 2011, with the cover language "Sweet and Vicious: The case against sugar."
The first challenged the notion that low-fat diets are the way to lose weight. He quoted researchers who said that "low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin...
Over at Scientific American, Laura Newman has a post recapping three recent papers in the BMJ that conclude that insulin analogues--genetically engineered insulin replacements--show no compelling advantages over human insulin but cost two to four times as much.
We've heard this kind of story before, but it's worth remembering that despite outsiders' attempts to uncover and discourage such things, the pharmaceutical industry continues, in at least some circumstances, to value marketing over research. And that is precisely where reporters should go to make the distinction and to clarify what's going on--which is what Newman does here.
-Paul Raeburn
In a previous post, I criticized coverage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of sugared sodas larger than 16 ounces. None of the stories that I saw told me whether this was...
In a previous post, I criticized coverage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of sugared sodas larger than 16 ounces. None of the stories that I saw told me whether this was likely to work. Surely, I thought, somebody has done research on this; most coverage dealt with whether it was appropriate for the government to meddle with food choices.
This morning, The New York Times has a front-page story by Winnie Hu discussing Bloomberg's efforts to promote the plan. It makes a minor nod to research by asking Kelly Brownell, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University and a prominent obesity researcher, what he thinks of the policy...
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If you go to the website of the journal, Pediatrics, you will find a section labeled eFirst pages. These are articles published online in advance of the print publication. This Monday, there were 15 such early releases, ranging from...
15Apr 2011
This Sunday's New York...
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...
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