Twitter followers, you may have noticed that I’ve been reading Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories over the last few weeks. It may be the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever read, certainly in the last few years, if not decades. But I think I’m going to recommend reading another book instead.

GCBC is the result of five years of reasearch on Taubes’ part (he’s a science journalist by trade), and weighs in at 460 pages, plus 113 pages of footnotes. It covers the last 100 years of medical and scientific thinking on the connections between food and health, focusing particularly on what aspects of diet may lead to overweight, diabetes, and heart disease.

I despair a bit at summarizing these 460 pages of reasonably technical science history (very readable, I will add). As a teaser, I will say that one major surprise is the all but complete lack of evidence behind the low-fat diets commonly advocated. Another shocker is Taubes’ dismantling of the “calories in, calories out” equation, eg. “you lose weight if you burn more calories than you consume, and vice versa”. I’d always been a firm believer in that equation, but not any more.

While I seem to have been blessed with a genetic makeup that resists putting on extra weight (thanks mom & dad!), having my beliefs about the connections between food and health upended is still quite an experience, and it’s one that other naturally lean folks would benefit from too. If nothing else, my sympathy and understanding for people who do wrestle with the “diseases of civilization” is much greater now.

If you are a public health professional, endocrinologist, or the like, GCBC is well worth the effort, because it would be important for you to see all the gory details where your profession went wrong, and what the evidence actually says. But for everyone else, I’m guessing there’s more profit to be had by checking out Taubes’ newer, shorter book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It which seems to be the core of GCBC, with some of the more confusing parts explained more clearly, and more prescriptive material for what and how to actually eat.