What a great piece. Drop the words "diet and health" from the first paragraph and it could have been about almost anything, which is of course what Derek gets back to at the end.
Just another reminder that, as we try to solve a seemingly endless list of social problems, the obstacles we face include much more than deliberate misinformation from bad faith actors, but also merely misleading information from theoretically non-partisan sources who are simply trying to increase clicks and views as part of their business models.
A meta comment I would add is that while food science is complicated, scientific recommendations for what constitutes a healthy diet haven't changed much for decades.
And yet if you ask the typical person, they say the opposite.. they think the 'scientists' are always changing their recommendations, and the result is bewilderment they blame on the scientists!
This is very contrary to the journalistic urge. The reality is no one wants to write (or read) an article that says 'Yes, whole grains and beans are still very good for you' or 'Processed meats and milk fat are still not good for you'.
Every time an innocent reader reads another 'mythbusting' article, they leave thinking that the 'science isn't settled', when in fact it largely is! Which is just the way the Merchants of Doubt like it.
I took the opportunity to glance at the MyPlate recommendations that replaced the Food Pyramid, and I think it’s a bit of exaggeration that it hasn’t changed much; in particular MyPlate suggests roughly proportional quantities of fruits vegetables whole grains and lean proteins, while the food pyramid famously suggested up to 11 servings a day of grains without distinguishing white from whole. I see no emphasis on avoiding processed meats in particular, just high fat meats and dairy. I was at least a bit surprised to see they’re still recommending low fat dairy and meats, which to the best of my knowledge is absolute nonsense, but it’s at least true that they’ve been a bit more consistent than I’ve thought!
I agree with everything that Derek states here and would add the following based on my reading and personal experience:
1. There is decent evidence that our metabolisms respond to dietary changes thermostatically. That is, as we lose weight, the rate at which we burn calories may slow down. This does not contradict the calories in, calories out model. However, it is an important caveat. At best, we should expect diminishing returns over time.
2. To promote satiety, sugar is best consumed with dietary fiber and maybe some fat or protein (but especially dietary fiber). For example. an apple or a bowl of plain yogurt and blueberries can satisfy both our desire for sweets and our hunger. Sugars and refined carbs (including liquid calories like beer, wine, fruit juice, or soda) tend not to satisfy our hunger as much. This is just another way of saying Derek's #4.
3. Cardio exercise is good and will burn calories while you do it. However, strength training (adding muscle mass) is more likely to improve your resting metabolism. You don't need to be super muscular. Regular body weight exercise can make a difference. This is another nuance to the calories in, calories out model.
4. A lack of sleep can lead to bad eating habits and a desire for high sugar, high carb, calorie-dense foods.
5. Exercise, diet, and sleep tend to complement one another.
Interesting post but you provide no evidence that you made an attempt--any attempt--to understand the other side of this issue.
Can you tell us what sources you used to assure you fully understood the counter-arguments?
What books and articles, in effect, should your readers consult so that they understand this issue as well as you profess to do here? You make a compelling argument but you do so by ignoring entirely the counter-arguments. If we want to get both sides, where should we turn?
Along these lines, what did you think of this 2024 article (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39164418/ ) authored by leading authorities in obesity--including Kevin D. Hall, who's 2019 paper you rely on here so heavily? It acknowledges that there are competing hypotheses here. On what basis do you think you can present only one of them to your readers as though it is a "boring truth."
The Kevin Hall article you discuss was also heavily criticized in letters to the editor of the journal in which it was published. Walter Willett of Harvard, the most highly-cited nutrition researcher in the world called it "worse than useless" in a New Yorker article earlier this year (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-so-deadly) on the same subject as this post. Indeed the LTEs requested that the article be retracted because the methodology was so hopelessly flawed.
Are you implying that we should ignore these critiques entirely and take this study at face value as you do? If so, can you tell us why? Should this be the approach we take to all complex scientific and medical controversies?
Thanks. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
As someone who has long admired your work, I really appreciate these points you raise!(Also - me, in my head: oof, I hope I never piss off Gary Taubes.)
Gary, the first article you quote states "Nevertheless, although the relationship between chronic positive energy balance and weight gain remains unassailable, it does not prove cause and effect" can you clarify off you are questioning the relationship between positive energy balance and weight gain, or are you saying that while energy balance is the undisputed proximate cause, the ultimate cause(s) remain to be clarified? Thanks.
(If the latter, I'm not sure Derek's article is in dispute)
So I’ve lost nearly 25 lbs on a glp1 in 6 months. I became runner in my 50s and ran a half marathon last year. My body changed some but my weight did not during the training. I could feel my brain telling my body you need calories because you are expending so much. Quick build your storage back up. My parents were obese and died of cancer and heart disease respectively. Like mental illness we are must accept that genes can create health challenges and use interventions to optimize health. A doctor I very much trust told me I made need to use a glp1 the rest of my life. But, aside from cost for now, is this different from Prozac or Lipitor? We need honest dialogue about these drugs because if you visit retirement communities or blue zones one thing you will not see are people that are even modestly overweight and nobody is obese.
“Blue zones” have been thoroughly debunked; they’re all in places that coincidentally happen to have a lot of issues with their records from the 1920s. But what do you mean about the retirement communities? Certainly makes sense that people surviving to their 80s and 90s are rarely obese, or they wouldn’t have made it that far.
Than you! Need more discussion of this topic like this.
And, it pleasantly avoided the "studies show diet and/or exercise don't work for weight loss" thing that is technically true but also entirely misleading.
I think Dereck has a proven track record of gathering arguments from people who are experts and the best evidence available. Which of any of his arguments in this post strike you as wrong or misleading?
Thank you Derek. For everyone: I follow nutritionist E.C. Synkowski (Optimizemenutrition on IG) as she has been cutting through this BS for years. Her 10 principles of nutrition and posts showing what caloric density is with processed vs Whole Foods are the best.
If it's not already on your radar, I'd strongly recommend the book How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger for a similarly research backed and deeper take on this topic. I'd be very interested in a post by Derek exploring the research around a whole food plant based diet including any respected research pointing away from this being the right direction to go (I haven't seen it yet).
I completely agree that "ultra-processed foods" as a category is pure nonsense, and that significantly contributes to my view (as a scientist) that most "nutrition science" is nothing of the sort.
However, the absolute results from CICO are so strongly genetically mediated, and the typical pro-CICO discourse is so willfully ignorant of that fact, that I think the term and the idea are not practically useful.
The frustrating part of people that focus on quality of food, is that they largely seem to use highlights from previous problems, at best. Yes, we know for a fact that trans fats were terrible for us. Actively harmful. And there were actively bad suggestions that were at large for years.
But we have moved on from those. As things stand, now, if we have solid evidence that something is truly bad, it is regulated. That is a good byproduct of a well regulated market. It sucks, as recovering from some of the worst excesses will take a long time to percolate through, but any hope of finding a boogieman seems heavily misguided.
It further sucks, as I do think there is something to be said for the quality of food and the impact it can have on someone's energy levels. By and large, though, this amounts to not eating a pizza before going to do something active. And if you are going to be super active, you should look at how athletes have to train their bodies to consume enough calories for an event. It is not automatic. Nor easy.
Finally, it reminds me of the critics of congestion pricing and the positive impact that has had on transit use. Last I saw, there were positive benefits from so called "sugar taxes." No panacea, because of course not, but did actively move the needle in a good way. I do not understand why that gets so much bloody hate.
I believe the success of GLP actually proves it IS a will power” problem. Friends on GLP say that they are “just not hungry “ - so they don’t want to eat as much. It is that simple. So GLP is essentially injectable will power.
Something we know from anthropology is that any time you introduce a new food to a population, it tends to cause problems until the local culture adjusts. The required adaptation usually isn't genetic, but cultural: the society needs to adapt norms around when and how the food is prepared and consumed so that it doesn't get consumed in unsafe or unhealthy ways. This adaptation usually plays put over tens or hundreds of years because that's the speed of cultural evolution and generational turnover (many important food habits are developed in childhood).
The problem with "ultra-processed foods" isn't the processing per se, it's just the fact that new foods can be introduced faster than we can adapt. Every time we start to get a grip on the junk food environment, snack food companies come up with entirely new products that bait us into over-consuming.
IMO this is part of why fad diets are a phenomenon. They work early on because the arbitrary rules block most ultra-processed junk food. But once enough people are on the diet, people start working on ways to over-consume without technically breaking the rules (this innovation happens on both ends - dieters looking to "safely" satisfy cravings and snack food entrepreneurs form an accidental alliance).
I think that in the future, we'll probably start to think of new foods as inherently suspect until proven safe. Instead of maintaining an ever-changing blacklist of bad foods, we'll develop a manageable whitelist of foods known to be safe and healthy. Other foods may not be banned per se, but they may be stigmatized or regulated in different ways. This won't be because all other foods are actually unhealthy, but rather because we need stability and simplicity to succeed in an adversarial environment. Unless it just turns out that ozempic or similar drugs patch human psychology to be compatible with a rapidly-evolving food environment, in which case this could all be totally moot.
None of this is to say there is something ontologically unhealthy about ultra-processed foods. Probably any ultra-processed food could be worked in as a component of a balanced diet. But the rate of change industrial food processing allows is just too fast. People are not good at navigating a food environment that changes every year (unless, like I said before, it turns out this is a problem we can patch out with a pill).
What a great piece. Drop the words "diet and health" from the first paragraph and it could have been about almost anything, which is of course what Derek gets back to at the end.
Just another reminder that, as we try to solve a seemingly endless list of social problems, the obstacles we face include much more than deliberate misinformation from bad faith actors, but also merely misleading information from theoretically non-partisan sources who are simply trying to increase clicks and views as part of their business models.
Great post.
A meta comment I would add is that while food science is complicated, scientific recommendations for what constitutes a healthy diet haven't changed much for decades.
And yet if you ask the typical person, they say the opposite.. they think the 'scientists' are always changing their recommendations, and the result is bewilderment they blame on the scientists!
This is very contrary to the journalistic urge. The reality is no one wants to write (or read) an article that says 'Yes, whole grains and beans are still very good for you' or 'Processed meats and milk fat are still not good for you'.
Every time an innocent reader reads another 'mythbusting' article, they leave thinking that the 'science isn't settled', when in fact it largely is! Which is just the way the Merchants of Doubt like it.
I took the opportunity to glance at the MyPlate recommendations that replaced the Food Pyramid, and I think it’s a bit of exaggeration that it hasn’t changed much; in particular MyPlate suggests roughly proportional quantities of fruits vegetables whole grains and lean proteins, while the food pyramid famously suggested up to 11 servings a day of grains without distinguishing white from whole. I see no emphasis on avoiding processed meats in particular, just high fat meats and dairy. I was at least a bit surprised to see they’re still recommending low fat dairy and meats, which to the best of my knowledge is absolute nonsense, but it’s at least true that they’ve been a bit more consistent than I’ve thought!
Useful information delivered concisely and well. The good kind of ultra-processed information.
I agree with everything that Derek states here and would add the following based on my reading and personal experience:
1. There is decent evidence that our metabolisms respond to dietary changes thermostatically. That is, as we lose weight, the rate at which we burn calories may slow down. This does not contradict the calories in, calories out model. However, it is an important caveat. At best, we should expect diminishing returns over time.
2. To promote satiety, sugar is best consumed with dietary fiber and maybe some fat or protein (but especially dietary fiber). For example. an apple or a bowl of plain yogurt and blueberries can satisfy both our desire for sweets and our hunger. Sugars and refined carbs (including liquid calories like beer, wine, fruit juice, or soda) tend not to satisfy our hunger as much. This is just another way of saying Derek's #4.
3. Cardio exercise is good and will burn calories while you do it. However, strength training (adding muscle mass) is more likely to improve your resting metabolism. You don't need to be super muscular. Regular body weight exercise can make a difference. This is another nuance to the calories in, calories out model.
4. A lack of sleep can lead to bad eating habits and a desire for high sugar, high carb, calorie-dense foods.
5. Exercise, diet, and sleep tend to complement one another.
Hi Derek,
Interesting post but you provide no evidence that you made an attempt--any attempt--to understand the other side of this issue.
Can you tell us what sources you used to assure you fully understood the counter-arguments?
What books and articles, in effect, should your readers consult so that they understand this issue as well as you profess to do here? You make a compelling argument but you do so by ignoring entirely the counter-arguments. If we want to get both sides, where should we turn?
Along these lines, what did you think of this 2024 article (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39164418/ ) authored by leading authorities in obesity--including Kevin D. Hall, who's 2019 paper you rely on here so heavily? It acknowledges that there are competing hypotheses here. On what basis do you think you can present only one of them to your readers as though it is a "boring truth."
The Kevin Hall article you discuss was also heavily criticized in letters to the editor of the journal in which it was published. Walter Willett of Harvard, the most highly-cited nutrition researcher in the world called it "worse than useless" in a New Yorker article earlier this year (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-so-deadly) on the same subject as this post. Indeed the LTEs requested that the article be retracted because the methodology was so hopelessly flawed.
Are you implying that we should ignore these critiques entirely and take this study at face value as you do? If so, can you tell us why? Should this be the approach we take to all complex scientific and medical controversies?
Thanks. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
As someone who has long admired your work, I really appreciate these points you raise!(Also - me, in my head: oof, I hope I never piss off Gary Taubes.)
Gary, the first article you quote states "Nevertheless, although the relationship between chronic positive energy balance and weight gain remains unassailable, it does not prove cause and effect" can you clarify off you are questioning the relationship between positive energy balance and weight gain, or are you saying that while energy balance is the undisputed proximate cause, the ultimate cause(s) remain to be clarified? Thanks.
(If the latter, I'm not sure Derek's article is in dispute)
So I’ve lost nearly 25 lbs on a glp1 in 6 months. I became runner in my 50s and ran a half marathon last year. My body changed some but my weight did not during the training. I could feel my brain telling my body you need calories because you are expending so much. Quick build your storage back up. My parents were obese and died of cancer and heart disease respectively. Like mental illness we are must accept that genes can create health challenges and use interventions to optimize health. A doctor I very much trust told me I made need to use a glp1 the rest of my life. But, aside from cost for now, is this different from Prozac or Lipitor? We need honest dialogue about these drugs because if you visit retirement communities or blue zones one thing you will not see are people that are even modestly overweight and nobody is obese.
“Blue zones” have been thoroughly debunked; they’re all in places that coincidentally happen to have a lot of issues with their records from the 1920s. But what do you mean about the retirement communities? Certainly makes sense that people surviving to their 80s and 90s are rarely obese, or they wouldn’t have made it that far.
Than you! Need more discussion of this topic like this.
And, it pleasantly avoided the "studies show diet and/or exercise don't work for weight loss" thing that is technically true but also entirely misleading.
Respectfully, I don't understand what gives you authority on this subject.
I think Dereck has a proven track record of gathering arguments from people who are experts and the best evidence available. Which of any of his arguments in this post strike you as wrong or misleading?
Do you know what journalism is?
Well he IS pretty dang skinny for one...
I'm guessing he does research before he writes about anything and also subscribes to good journalistic practices.
This is very, very good. Hope everyone reads and considers.
Thank you Derek. For everyone: I follow nutritionist E.C. Synkowski (Optimizemenutrition on IG) as she has been cutting through this BS for years. Her 10 principles of nutrition and posts showing what caloric density is with processed vs Whole Foods are the best.
If it's not already on your radar, I'd strongly recommend the book How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger for a similarly research backed and deeper take on this topic. I'd be very interested in a post by Derek exploring the research around a whole food plant based diet including any respected research pointing away from this being the right direction to go (I haven't seen it yet).
Derek, you did not address the question of why it is nearly impossible to not only lose weight, but to keep the lost weight from returning.
I completely agree that "ultra-processed foods" as a category is pure nonsense, and that significantly contributes to my view (as a scientist) that most "nutrition science" is nothing of the sort.
However, the absolute results from CICO are so strongly genetically mediated, and the typical pro-CICO discourse is so willfully ignorant of that fact, that I think the term and the idea are not practically useful.
The frustrating part of people that focus on quality of food, is that they largely seem to use highlights from previous problems, at best. Yes, we know for a fact that trans fats were terrible for us. Actively harmful. And there were actively bad suggestions that were at large for years.
But we have moved on from those. As things stand, now, if we have solid evidence that something is truly bad, it is regulated. That is a good byproduct of a well regulated market. It sucks, as recovering from some of the worst excesses will take a long time to percolate through, but any hope of finding a boogieman seems heavily misguided.
It further sucks, as I do think there is something to be said for the quality of food and the impact it can have on someone's energy levels. By and large, though, this amounts to not eating a pizza before going to do something active. And if you are going to be super active, you should look at how athletes have to train their bodies to consume enough calories for an event. It is not automatic. Nor easy.
Finally, it reminds me of the critics of congestion pricing and the positive impact that has had on transit use. Last I saw, there were positive benefits from so called "sugar taxes." No panacea, because of course not, but did actively move the needle in a good way. I do not understand why that gets so much bloody hate.
I believe the success of GLP actually proves it IS a will power” problem. Friends on GLP say that they are “just not hungry “ - so they don’t want to eat as much. It is that simple. So GLP is essentially injectable will power.
Something we know from anthropology is that any time you introduce a new food to a population, it tends to cause problems until the local culture adjusts. The required adaptation usually isn't genetic, but cultural: the society needs to adapt norms around when and how the food is prepared and consumed so that it doesn't get consumed in unsafe or unhealthy ways. This adaptation usually plays put over tens or hundreds of years because that's the speed of cultural evolution and generational turnover (many important food habits are developed in childhood).
The problem with "ultra-processed foods" isn't the processing per se, it's just the fact that new foods can be introduced faster than we can adapt. Every time we start to get a grip on the junk food environment, snack food companies come up with entirely new products that bait us into over-consuming.
IMO this is part of why fad diets are a phenomenon. They work early on because the arbitrary rules block most ultra-processed junk food. But once enough people are on the diet, people start working on ways to over-consume without technically breaking the rules (this innovation happens on both ends - dieters looking to "safely" satisfy cravings and snack food entrepreneurs form an accidental alliance).
I think that in the future, we'll probably start to think of new foods as inherently suspect until proven safe. Instead of maintaining an ever-changing blacklist of bad foods, we'll develop a manageable whitelist of foods known to be safe and healthy. Other foods may not be banned per se, but they may be stigmatized or regulated in different ways. This won't be because all other foods are actually unhealthy, but rather because we need stability and simplicity to succeed in an adversarial environment. Unless it just turns out that ozempic or similar drugs patch human psychology to be compatible with a rapidly-evolving food environment, in which case this could all be totally moot.
None of this is to say there is something ontologically unhealthy about ultra-processed foods. Probably any ultra-processed food could be worked in as a component of a balanced diet. But the rate of change industrial food processing allows is just too fast. People are not good at navigating a food environment that changes every year (unless, like I said before, it turns out this is a problem we can patch out with a pill).