The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Detail from Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

The Dark Ages were an inglorious period of human history bounded on the one side by the Classical Age and by the Renaissance on the other.   These grim times began when a classical empire was savaged by barbarians plunging the world into a long era of darkness ruled by ignorance, superstition and fear, and ended finally by the intellectual stirrings of the Italian Renaissance.

I believe that the latest dietary study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is an early indicator that our own era of dietary darkness may be coming to an end.

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I’ve just discovered that the soft-cover version of Good Calories, Bad Calories is out.  I guess it has been out for a few weeks, but I just discovered it was available.  If any of you have been waiting for the paperback before reading this terrific book, now is the time to get it.

Since GCBC came out a year or two ago, I’ve gotten countless comments asking me what Gary thinks about this topic or that one.  And I’ve gotten comments from folks asking me to ask Gary a question for them.  I was going to interview Gary and post his responses to my questions when it occurred to me that you all might like to ask questions of him directly without having them come through me.  I contacted Gary this weekend to see if he would be willing to answer specific questions from people on this blog.  He very generously agreed to do so.

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Ancel Keys, Ph.D.

Once again I’m putting up a post out of sequence. I just found this great video on the life of Ancel Keys that I wanted to make available to all readers of this blog.

Keys video high bandwidth download

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In late November of this year Gary Taubes gave a number of talks to members of various departments at the University of California at Berkeley. One of these talks - The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care - was recorded and can be viewed by clicking here. You need Real Player to watch the video. If you don’t have it, simply Google real player or real player mac and you will find a free download of the program.

Gary’s talk expands on one of the theses in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: the idea that obesity isn’t caused by gluttony and sloth, but by excess carbohydrate intake instead. If you haven’t read the book or if you have and you want the weight-loss section explained in greater depth, this video is for you. He’s a little more open than he was in the book about naming names and pointing the finger at people who for whatever reason can’t see the forest for the trees. The video is long - almost two hours - but well, well worth watching.

I’m going to be seeing Gary in about a week. We’ll have one of our many hour visits at a coffee house in downtown Manhattan. If anyone has a question for Gary, put in in a comment, and I’ll ask him as many as I can while I’m overdosing on caffeine.

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