P. 44. The book refers to the psychological concept of punishment as “negative reinforcement”. Negative reinforcement is a psychological concept as well, but not the one I intended to refer to in that passage. This has been corrected in the paperback version. Pointed out by Rebecca Strickland.| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
Gary Taubes argues that energy imbalance (calories in > out) does not cause obesity; rather, energy imbalance is a result of the fattening process. In this post, I evaluate this claim, which boils down to the question of which side of the energy balance equation is driving the other. A version of this debate has been happening within the obesity research community, including my corner of it, for decades. The truth is that while fat mass can clearly be changed by altering energy balance, an...| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
April fools post!| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
We live in a complex world, and it’s impossible to be an expert on everything that impacts our lives. In many domains, we have to trust the expertise of others to guide our decisions. Yet not all experts hold rational beliefs, and many people who are framed as experts in media are not actually experts. How do we separate the wheat from the chaff, focusing on high-quality sources of information and ignoring low-quality sources?| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
After publishing my post Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) in retrospect, I received an email from Peter Attia, MD, the former president of NuSI, suggesting that I had gotten aspects of the story wrong due to a lack of additional context. Attia and I spoke twice by phone, and I think he has a point. I also had an additional conversation with Kevin Hall, PhD, one of the key researchers NuSI funded, for additional context from his perspective.| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with Kevin Hall, PhD and Rudy Leibel, MD on a commentary in JAMA Internal Medicine (1). It was fun for me to work with two researchers who I respect tremendously. Hall’s energy balance modeling work has brought important new insights to the obesity research field and Leibel is, well, the co-discoverer of leptin. And he has done as much as anyone else to help us understand how this hormone works in humans.| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
On Monday, Wired published an article about the Nutrition Science Initiative, “The collapse of a $40 million nutrition science crusade“. This seems like a good time to review the trajectory of NuSI and what we can learn from it. NuSI was founded in 2012, ostensibly on the idea that our current understanding of obesity is at best incomplete, and possibly incorrect, and we need larger and more rigorous experiments to tease out its true causes. In practice, it was founded to investigat...| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
I’ve always been struck by the imprecision of how the terms “low-glycemic-index diet” and “low-glycemic-load diet” are used. In theory, these are diets that reduce post-meal blood glucose and their benefits derive from this property. In practice, they often differ from typical diets in multiple ways. If a “low-glycemic diet” is also higher in fiber and protein and/or lower in palatability, calorie density, and carbohydrate, can we really attribute its beneficial effects to...| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD
***April Fools post***| Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD