Gary Taubes

Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist. He began writing and reporting on science and medicine for Discover magazine in 1982. As a free-lance journalist, he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Science, Nature, the British Medical Journal, and a host of other publications. He is the author of Rethinking Diabetes (2024), The Case for Keto (2020), The Case Against Sugar (2016), Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (2007), published as The Diet Delusion in the UK. His journalism has been included in numerous Best of anthologies, and his books have been translated into two dozen languages. Taubes was also co-founder and president of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org).

Taubes has focused his reporting on controversial science and, specifically, the confluence of research in nutrition, obesity, chronic disease and public health policy. His 2002 New York Times Magazine cover article, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” has been credited with catalyzing the metabolic health movement. He is also the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), and Bad Science (1993). Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard as an undergraduate and has an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981).

Awards

• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research
• National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award (3 times, the first print journalist to do so)
• International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization

Number of Publications

Seven books, 11 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, innumerable journalism articles in Science, Discover and elsewhere.