INTERVIEW: The Evolution of Diabetes Treatment with Gary Taubes

Mark Hyman
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Welcome to doctor's pharmacy. I'm Doctor Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy within a place for conversations that matter. And if you have diabetes, you know someone with diabetes, or you have pre diabetes, or you're overweight, which probably accounts for 75% of you listening, you're going to love this conversation because it's with an investigative journalist, Gary Taubes, who has done a lot of work in trying to understand the nature of diabetes. He's an investigative science and health journalist.

He's the author of this new book, Rethinking Diabetes, which we're talking about today. He's also written the case for Keto, the Case against Sugar, why we get Fat, Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is amazing. It was published in the UK as the diet Delusion. He's a former staff writer for Discoverer and a correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Esquire, and he's been included in the numerous best of anthologies, including the best of the best american science writing.

And he's received three science in society journalism awards from the US National association of Science Writers. And he's a recipient of a very prestigious Robert Wood Johnson foundation investigator award in health policy research. He went to Harvard. He's got a master's degree in engineering from Stanford, a journalism degree from Columbia. And he's incredible man who's done a lot of work in trying to understand why we are overweight, why we have diabetes and what we can do about it.

I know you're going to love this conversation because we got deep into the history of how we began to understand nutrition and nutrition therapy in diabetes and back in the day. We talk about in the 17 hundreds and 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds. We were using very high fat, what they called animal diets, to treat diabetes. And we talk about how that all changed with the discovery insulin when we loaded up people with carbohydrates and lots of insulin and how that has led to some significant complications. We also talk about how some of the science that has been done is really not translated into the policies or the recommendations from the American Diabetic association.

We talk about some really fascinating research that's been done by Sarah Halberg and others looking at ketogenic diets to not just manage diabetes, but to reverse it. So I think you're going to love this conversation with Gary, and let's jump right in. Well, Gary, it's great to have you back on the doctor's pharmacy again. Mark, it's great to. It's funny, I just have to.

Gary Taubes
The last time we talked, you were in Hawaii and I was in Oakland. Oh, that's right. That was the COVID shutdown era. That's right. The time before that, we were both in Geneva.

Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's right. In Geneva. Was it Geneva? Wait, Geneva? Yeah, it was a food conference, and we were talking all about the things we're talking about today, which is how food affects our health and the epidemic of diabetes and controversies about nutrition.

And it was kind of the illuminati of the diet, nutrition, diabetes. That was a big day. Yeah, it was really powerful. It was Zurich, now that I think about it wasn't Geneva. I got to get that.

Gary Taubes
That's right. So, yeah, Gary, so good to have you back. You know, for those who don't know, Gary, I did the intro, but, you know, he wrote this article that kind of broke through the zeitgeist called what if it's all a big fat lie? In 2002 in the New York Times magazine. I read it, I didn't even know who you were at the time.

Mark Hyman
And I was like, wow, this really doesn't fit with what I learned in medical school. And it really started the conversation going about the quality of the food we eat, the quality of the calories we eat, and how they affect our metabolism or hormones and how maybe weight loss wasn't all about eating less and exercising more. And you've been deep in this for a long time. You've written so many books about it. And your latest book, which is why we're having the conversation today, is called rethinking diabetes.

And I have loved this book. I've just been savoring it every night. It's like a mystery novel about the history of diabetes and what's gone wrong in our approach to this condition. And it's really the biggest scourge today on the planet, I would say diabetes prediabetes metabolic dysfunction is really at the root of so much of the suffering we're seeing. Everything from heart disease to diabetes, obviously, to cancer, to dementia, even things like depression, infertility, even acne, can be related to the dysfunctions that we have with our metabolic health.

And recent data from the NHANES trial showed that 93.2% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means they're somewhere in the continuum of insulin resistance with have a high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, have had a heart attack or stroke already. 93%. No, 93.2%. So, no, 75% overweight. So this book has really kind of turned a lot of our ideas upside down about diabetes.

And I've been thinking about this for a lot, so I didn't really have to do a lot of rethinking, but I think a lot of people are going to read this book and go, oh, boy, we got it all wrong about diabetes. And you kind of talk about how really this journey for you, and I'll just quote you, it says, it begins with the regrettable observation that we are in the midst of a diabetes epidemic, a disease that was vanishingly rare in the 19th century that now affects one in every nine americans, and that all attempts so far to rein it in have failed. And it's incumbent upon someone to ask the question, why? So you took that yourself to ask that question, and I think we're going to get to the answer today. And did we fail because the current situation was inevitable?

Meaning the result of a food industry out of control, perhaps, or a nation of individuals who can't say no to what's next and tasty and the next ultra processed snack. Or maybe because we made the mistakes and the diabetes specialist got it wrong and public health authorities maybe allowed this to happen. So we're kind of in a disastrous situation where one in four teenage boys has pre diabetes or type two diabetes. One in nine. Now, you said have diabetes.

Some populations have one in four. The current view, and this is what I learned in medical school, which is, this is a progressive disease, it ain't, it ain't going away. You have to, quote, manage it. You have to manage it with medications, and you have to use ever increasing amounts, dosages and frequencies of medications, including insulin, to control the disease. And yet, there was a trial that happened that got me completely switched, in my thinking, that was called the accord trial.

And this was a trial done many years ago on 10,000 diabetics and what they said was, look, sugar is the problem. So if we really want to fix diabetes and the complications from diabetes, we need to be very aggressive in controlling blood sugar. So they use very aggressive insulin doses, very aggressive drugs called oral hypoglycemics, which raise insulin. And the consequences of that therapy were that more people died and more people had heart attacks than who didn't have the intensive therapy. So accord was one of three similar trials.

Gary Taubes
All of them found the same thing. So, basically, we're talking about a disease that we have been treating in the wrong way that has really been focused on trying to use more insulin to treat what has been thought of as an insulin deficiency. But, in fact, it really isn't. It's mostly a disease of insulin excess in 95% of the cases. Not if you're type one diabetes.

Mark Hyman
So maybe, Garrett, you could talk about this book from the beginning, because I think the history is really fascinating just to kind of give us a brief overview of the history of the thinking about diabetes. Because in the 19th century, it was like a rare disease. Like, if you had this in the hospital, all the residents, the medical students, the attendings had all come running. Oh, this is a rare case. And, like, we'd have syphilis.

Now, I'd never seen a case of syphilis in my life. Right. But. But I read about it, you know, so then it was. It was rare, but.

But it was happening. And so the doctors then had a very interesting approach that kind of happened upon the right answer in many cases, using a dietary approach that restricted carbohydrates and using, basically a ketogenic diet before they had insulin. So can you talk about how that developed and then what happened after insulin was discovered by banting and best in 1921. Okay. And I'm happy to do that.

Gary Taubes
Let me, before we do, though, give you just a brief explanation for why this kind of research is necessary. And in the book and rethinking diabetes, in the epilogue, I talk about the history of the evidence based medicine movement. Oh, I want to hear about that. Yeah. So, until the 1970s, basically, you know, what a doctor did with the treated a patient was based on what he had learned in med school and what the authority figures in his life said, maybe what his textbook suggested, and maybe what his colleagues were doing.

But there wasn't really a lot of effort. It was apprenticeship, basically. Yeah. And now, in the 1970s, a few smart young doctors came along, and they decided they would. One of them, a guy named David Eddy, who at the time had left medicine, was getting his PhD at Duke, Stanford University in computational physics or something.

And they had asked him to, he was going to give a talk on why doctors were prescribing for something. And he looked into the bay, chose mammography as a subject, and he went back into the literature to look at the evidence base, why people recommend mammographies and what the benefits of them are. And he thought this would explain various sort of operating systems, charts, and how you go through different branches to decide. What, like an algorithm, right? And he thought that he would find that this procedure was based in concrete evidence.

And he said instead what he found out was that it was based on Jell O. Jell O. There was just nothing there. It was just this technology that had come along that people thought might be beneficial. And they started to do, and the more they did it, the more other people did it, and they never tested it.

And this was the beginning of the evidence based medicine movement. So what you do when confronted with the dilemma as a journalist or a physician who's interested in the bigger picture, is you always ask a simple question, what's the evidence? Why do we do this? Why? As you put it, diabetes has exploded in prevalence.

The increase just since 1960 is 600 or 700% increase. If this was any other. Not genetic, not genetic. Something about our lifestyles has made this explode. Still seen after 104 years, 103 years of pharmaceutical therapy, it's still seen as a progressive chronic disease.

The biggest challenge, the successful treatment, according to an ADA panel a few years ago, is the resistance of physicians to do what you said has to be done, which is continue to raise doses, add new drugs to the therapy. So that's what they're saying. The problem is we're not treating it. Aggressively enough, you're not treating it aggressively enough, you're letting blood sugar rise out of control in patients. And so, question I asked as a journalist was basically, as I said, as you read in that quote from me, is this inevitable?

And if it's not, what's the evidence base for the decisions? And when you start asking that question, you start going back in time. So you can start looking for clinical trials, and the clinical trials you find will reference other clinical trials or other observational studies, and you just keep going back in time. And nowadays, because of the Internet, first. Of all, it's like a time travel going to reading that book.

I mean, everything's available. Yeah. One way I described this is 1920s, when our philosophy of how to treat this drug was originally founded, and it's still with us today. The physicians who crafted that philosophy had imagined that the whole world of diabetes therapy and diet and lifestyle is like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. And they had maybe 50 pieces, and they weren't just 50 pieces in one corner.

They were 50 pieces scattered throughout the jigsaw puzzle. And that's how they were making their decisions. Now, you can go back in time, and because of the Internet and all these repositories of journal articles and documents and books, Google Books allows you to find all the textbooks. If you can't get them on Google Books, you can find bookstores that sell them. My office is full with, like, you.

Mark Hyman
Know, multiple editions, moldy books from 19. 25, 80 year old textbooks, and the third edition and the fourth. Anyway, now you can get, say, 950 pieces of that thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. You can see everything they should have seen but didn't. Hindsight is so you can go back.

Gary Taubes
And not only describe what they did, but what they missed. And you could say they did this because they saw that, or they had a patient that experienced this, they wrote about, and they gave a talk about it in 1927 at this conference in New York to physicians. And here's the talk. And it allows you not just to piece together the history of this field. And I think, historically, this book is something that's never been done before diabetes therapy, but also to see what was missed and how the thinking evolved, considering what was missed.

So, as you said in diabetes, you could go back 2000 years to when it's identified in ancient texts or indian texts. But the modern history starts in 1797. Okay. A guy, british doctor named John Rollo, working for the military, has a patient named Colonel Meredith. Meredith has diabetes.

He shows up, he's lost a lot of weight, he's hungry, he's thirsty all the time. He's peeing constantly. Back then, they would have their assistant taste the urine. This was a diagnostic technique for sure. And if the urine was sweet, that was the identification of diabetes.

Mark Hyman
And Rollo said, mellitus means is sweetness. Sweetness like honey. Yeah. Right. So Ronald thinks if there's sugar in the urine, he's not metabolizing the sugar properly.

Gary Taubes
The sugar comes from plant foods. So I'm going to feed him a diet of animal meat and recommend to see what happens. And he puts them on. He calls it the animal diet. It's actually fatty, rancid meat, blood sausages.

I mean, it sounds awful, disgusting, but Meredith gets back. It worked, and he ends up living for. I mean, at that stage in time, he probably had type two diabetes, because he had been overweight and obese, but they don't show up and that they don't manifest the symptoms. One of the symptoms of being sick is losing a lot of weight. So at that point, his pancreas was failing, but he still lives twelve more years.

Mark Hyman
Amazing. Rollo tries it on a different patient, a general. He was in the army. That patient also gets better, but he doesn't stick to the diet. He goes home, eats what he wants and dies.

Gary Taubes
So Rollo publishes a pamphlet. That's right. Disseminates it throughout the United Kingdom and says to people, this is. Look, I seem to have come up with a way to cure this diabetes. If you've got any patients, consider trying it with them.

This is medicine before clinical trials. Okay? And it's still medicine where we don't have clinical trials. It certainly is, yeah. So a few dozen physicians write back, almost universal.

I mean, the ones who write back it, the diet works. They don't understand it. Like, the patient will get better and then they'll let them eat whatever they want. Then the patient will get worse and they'll put them. Or they'll have kids.

There's a twelve year old girl who gets better, but she keeps cheating and she knows she just can't stop eating sweets. But the gist of it is works. And by the mid 19th century, this animal diet, they get rid of the rancid meat and the blood sausages and basically just becomes fatty meat and green, leafy vegetables. So it is, in effect, ketogenic diet. Paleo keto ish.

And it's a time, it becomes a standard of care for treating diabetes. So it could keep patients with type two diabetes alive indefinitely. Their symptoms effectively go away if they don't eat carbohydrates and patients with type one who are insulin deficient, it'll delay their demise, slow it down, but it's not going to stop it. You have no idea how much it slows it because you don't know how long the person would have lived. Anyway, the leading italian diabetes specialist, he's a guy named Cantani, he's locking his patients away for two months to make sure they don't eat any carbohydrates.

And they only eat this animal diet. The Germans are doing it, the French are doing it, the British. I mean, every major, basically, you can't be a diabetes specialist. And again, it's a rare disease. There aren't many of these guys without using this animal diet.

As the 19th century turns into the 20th, it becomes richer and richer. With fat, because again, patients show up in the doctor's office having lost a lot of weight. Then if they're type one and they're young, they're emaciated. So the doctor said, we want to put weight back on them and we want to feed them as much food as we can. And since you can't give them carbohydrates, we can give them fat.

Just Sweden named Petran feeding patients 95% fat diets. I mean, a German comments that the diet is unbelievably effective with his patients, but he can't get Germans to live on and cucumbers and butter the way the Swedes were. I mean, Petran wouldn't even let his patients eat bacon because there's too much protein. And some of the protein gets converted into amino acids. Amino acids get converted into glucose.

So this is a standard diet. There's a brief blip from 1914 onward for six years when this Harvard. Harvard's done a lot of damage in these worlds. This Harvard doctor, Doctor Jocelyn. No, this is Fred Allen.

Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. A friend of Jocelyn's starts advocating for this starvation diet. So the idea turns out that with the young type one patients, if you starve them, you can keep them alive longer. Yeah. So this is standard of care.

So basically by accident, some observant physician made the conclusion that carbohydrates were causing sugar in the urine and maybe we should not eat them. And that became the standard of care until, including with Doctor Jocelyn, until 1921, when insulin was discovered. Right. So Jocelyn, just for background, Jocelyn is. He's a Harvard grad.

Gary Taubes
His mother has diabetes, his aunt had diabetes and died from it. He's a type one. Well, again, they were probably both type two because remember, at that point in time, they were overweight. Yeah. And then they.

You don't. Yeah, they're not getting blood tests. Right. Nobody has any idea what their a one c is. They only manifest as diabetes when their pancreas starts to fail and you get the weight loss and all these other.

The hunger, the thirst, the peeing. So Jocelyn opens the first diabetes clinic in the United States, in Boston, dedicated to diabetes. So this is a period in time. It's still there. It's the Jocelyn Diabetes center at Harvard.

Eventually became the Joseline Diabetes center. And because he's got the only dedicated clinic, he's seeing more patients than anyone else. So by 1960, when he writes the first edition of his textbook, it's Jocelyn's Diabetes mellitus. Based on 1000 cases and probably nobody else in the United States had seen more than 30 or 40. And then in 1917, he's got, based on 1300 cases, and he just keeps releasing the textbook.

And he kept his mother alive on this high fat, carbohydrate restricted diet, thrived, lived longer than any of her other healthy relatives because he had gone to Germany, learned what the Germans were doing with all the butter and the meat and the no carbs. And she was a stern New England stock, and she would do whatever he told her to do, and she thrived. And then he buys into this Allen thing with the starvation therapy and the starvation therapy, or restricting not just carbs. Fat also, and calories. Right, and calories.

So now he kind of begins to blame fat, as Alan did, for the disorders that would kill these diabetics, because you're feeding them high fat diets, and he thinks they shouldn't diet anyway. 1921. Insulin's discovered, first used therapeutically in January 1922 on a 13 year old boy named Leonard Thompson. It's a tremendous success. I mean, Thompson was so weak, he weighed, I think, 65 pounds.

He was 13 years old. His father had to carry him to the hospital bed, like, 50 years later. The med students and residents in this Toronto hospital said they were sure he was dead. Like this was, you know, he had weeks to live. Insulin brought him back to life.

I mean, just with miracle days. It was a miracle cure. Eli Lilly begins to produce insulin, and they make it available to doctors around the US and Canada who had been treating a lot of diabetes patients. They were becoming diabetes specialists. And it's a miracle.

Yeah, it's like they've never seen these patients are resurrected. But then what happened was something interesting, which is they somehow shifted from this idea that we should restrict carbohydrates, that we should actually feed them a lot of carbohydrates and just cover it with insulin. Well, so this is an extremely powerful drug. I mean, it's a hormone, right, a peptide like ozempic. We'll talk about that in a minute.

For all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as high blood, excuse me, low blood sugar, hypoglycemia, until insulin was discovered. Now, if you overdose, you've got to balance the insulin to the carbohydrate, so there's no way to know what the proper dose is. Everybody's different. And insulin will control blood sugar. It'll desugarize the urine, which was their target.

Let's get rid of the symptoms and get the sugar out of the urine. But we don't know how much to give and how much we give depends on how many carbs they eat. And suddenly you're having. These patients are getting hypoglycemic episodes. They're going into what they called at the time, insulin shock or insulin overdose.

And that can be fatal? Yeah, it can. The cure, the great miracle drug is a cure for a chronic condition or an acute condition, type one diabetes. But the side effect is that it can be fatal within hours. Right.

Mark Hyman
Serious side effects. So suddenly you have to feed patients carbohydrates. You have to make sure they eat enough carbohydrates to protect them from the treatment that's protecting them from the. The absence of insulin are too much. Doctors realized pretty quickly this cocktail, trying to figure out how much insulin to give and how much carbohydrates to feed is really difficult.

Gary Taubes
And with children, you don't want to. This disease is when you're diagnosed back, it's a bad enough diagnosis without telling kids they shouldn't eat ice cream ever again, or they can't have cereal in the morning. Yeah. They didn't want to restrict them. So very quickly they decide, look, it's just easier to let the kids eat whatever they want.

They're gonna do it anyway, and we'll cover it with insulin. Yeah. And from the 1920s to the 1930s, doctor goes from children to adults, both type one and type two, and everyone just says, it seems to work. The patients seem to. Some patients at least seem to feel better.

They all get fatter, which is a side effect. People need to know, when you start taking insulin, you gain weight, because insulin is a fat storage hormone. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, and some people knew that and some people didn't. Then we'll talk about how that got confounded by the conventional thinking on obesity. I hope he will.

What they didn't know, this is a part of the issue with so evidence based medicine movement that I had mentioned in the 1970s. The idea was, if you want to know if you've got a therapy and you want to know whether it's better than nothing, whether it's better than what we're already giving patients, you do a randomized controlled trial, and you randomize patients. You give one of them the new therapy and won the old. It won the new therapy in one group, the placebo. And then you run them forward long enough in time, not just to see whether it's more effective, but to see whether it's safe or not or safer.

And you go with enough patients and long enough so you could see whether they have more or less of complications, heart disease, cancer, dementia, whatever you might be. They didn't have that in the twenties. The concept of randomized controlled trial hadn't been discovered. So they developed this therapeutic philosophy for treating their patients. And then as you get about 510 years down the line, they start to see this.

They refer to it as kind of tidal wave of diabetic complications. These patients whose lives might be saved by insulin, resurrected, brought back from the dead at 910, twelve years old, are now 22, 25, 27, and suddenly all the familiar complications of diabetes or atherosclerosis or arteriosclerosis. They're getting sclerotic plaques all through their body. They're dying of heart disease and strokes. They're getting blind blindness and kidney disease.

Blind and kidney disease and neuropathies are having their limbs amputated. And when you read the records, and there's a wonderful book by a pediatrician turned medical historian named Chris Feudner called Bittersweet, where he got ahold of Jocelyn's records from his early years, and these patients would be thriving. And then over the course of a year or two, their bodies would just fail them all. Was it because they were taking too much insulin or because they were eating too many carbohydrates? Or both?

You'd have no idea. Right. So their assumption, as they're trying to wrestle with these complications, is that the patients aren't doing a good enough job controlling blood. So it's the patient's fault? Possibly, yeah.

There are patients, the patients, who seem to take their drug therapy seriously and rigorously seem to do better. So the idea was the blood sugar control is the issue. And the answer, again, when you think like that, is more insulin insulin, or more regular use of insulin, or more. But what they didn't know, they didn't actually know if that was true, because all they know is that it could have been the uncontrolled blood sugar, which is what they assumed. It could have been the diet that they were allowing them to eat with the.

That was in part responsible for the uncontrolled drug therapy. It could have been the insulin therapy. You can't differentiate with the information they had because they didn't do the right clinic, they didn't do any clinical trials. Their assumption was poorly controlled blood sugar. So you move into the second world war with that as the assumption come out of the war and out of the war, you start seeing the first arrival of these hypoglycemic oral.

The holy grail of the field is a drug that could lower blood sugar and take it by mouth. You don't have to use a damn needle. This catches on pretty quickly. As soon as they establish that it's safe and it lowers blood sugar, people start using these drugs, and they work by raising insulin. They work by stimulating.

And so it's a crazy. But if you look at the label, the warning that's mandated by the FDA, it's got a black box warning on these drugs. A black box warning is essentially an alert that this has got serious side effects. And for oral hypoglycemics, the black box warning is it's gonna help your diabetes, but it's gonna cause you have a heart attack and stroke. Well, so this is the very first.

Mark Hyman
I was like, wait a minute. The very first randomized clinical trial they do in this field was called the University Diabetes program. And that starts around 1960. And it starts because there's a congressman whose daughter is diagnosed with diabetes, and she's put on one of these horohypoglycemic drugs. And the congressman asks, he's in Ohio.

Gary Taubes
So he asked the leading authority at case Western, you know, do these drugs, do they help? And he says, I don't know. Right. Who knows? Maybe yes, maybe no.

So they actually get $30 million together, do a clinical trial. In 1960. It was a loaded. Yeah, it was a big tri one for ten years. And it was these oral hybrid, this drug, tobutamide and oral hypoglycemic, and then insulin, and then diet alone.

And they added one of the fens, of the fen fens fiasco. I forget which one. Anyway, in 1970, the results are leaked, I think was the Wall Street Journal. I mean, not only is the oral hypoglycemic agent not do anything, not keep people alive any longer than diet alone, and the diet was a bad diet. I mean, it was a carbohydrate rich diet they were giving them.

Insulin doesn't do any better either. Yeah, okay. It's completely useless. And this was a huge controversy, of course, half the most of the. When you say better either, do you mean in terms of, like, reducing death, heart attacks, stress, heart attacks, kidney disease.

Whatever they looked at to go with the end points of the study were, but the drugs didn't help. And again, insulin, it must have been. It might have been mortality. They didn't play up the insulin. They played up the top for the oral hypoglycem.

But this is what doctors. This was what therapy was. When I went to medical school in 1983, that's what I learned how to do, is give these drugs, give them drugs. And it was interesting, Gary, I'm just reflecting back on my training, and what I learned was I would see these patients come in who were. Were eating a lot of carbohydrates and they were taking 100 or 200 units of insulin.

Mark Hyman
And we thought that was fine, to give them as much insulin as necessary to keep their blood sugar under control. But it never occurred to me was what was the normal amount of insulin that's produced by the pancreas every day in someone who doesn't have diabetes? Yeah. And it's like 20 to 60 units, depending on how many carbs, doctor. Yeah, depending on what you eat.

Like, we can eat ten to 20 or more units. So giving all this extra insulin can help control the blood sugar, but it's actually having all these adverse effects of weight, inflammation. The reason you have to give so much is because they're insulin resistance. It gets back to the story, they're insulin resistant. The problem isn't that they're insulin deficient, which is type one diabetes.

Gary Taubes
They have too much insulin already. And then there's double diabetes. Now you're adding more. Yeah. What's interesting, again, going back to the history we were talking about, Jocelyn and when insulin first came in, this is what really launched Jocelyn into his fame, because he embraced it.

He talked about in chapters in his textbook on how to use it. Jocelyn thought, the way to use it is you've got to minimize doses. They started patients on one unit and then they went to two units and three units. And early 1920s, they might have been using 1020 units of insulin on patients. Then you have to strictly control their diet so that minimal insulin can work, so they have to sugarize urine, which was their.

And as time went on, other doctors were pushing for much greater doses. There was a Samsung in Santa Barbara who was pushing for 5000 units, 150 units, and he would show, he said, my patients are thriving. But in his patients, in his papers, you could see his patients had gained like 50, 80 pounds in a year. So they start off emaciated, and then they maybe put on 40 pounds to get back to normal, and then the extra 40 is obesity. And there's a british diabetes specialist, Lawrence, who had type one diabetes himself.

And his life had been. He was dying in Italy when insulin was discovered. His doctor back in the UK said, if you can make it home, I can save your life. And it did. And he became.

He co founded the British Diabetes foundation with HG Wells, famous science fiction writer who had diabetes. And Lawrence tried these higher doses and he was like, this is crazy. It's like, I don't want to blow up like a balloon. We know that if you start a patient on insulin, their blood pressure goes up, their weight goes up, triglycerides go up, their cholesterol goes up. We know this.

Mark Hyman
And so insulin is not. But we got drugs for everything. We got statin for the cholesterols. We've got blood sugar. We call it comorbidities.

We call it comorbidities, like treat them all separately with drugs. You got blood pressure drug, cholesterol drug, diabetes drug. Right? And I mean, it's, you know, it sounds facile to say so, but, I mean, that was basically, you've got a pharmaceutical industry that's working hard to provide these drugs. And, you know, there are people with high blood pressure and high cholesterol don't have diabetes, so you've got the drugs, use them.

Yeah. And nowhere along the line do people say, wait, wait, why?

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I mean, your book basically rethinking diabetes challenges all of our assumptions about diabetes. It pretty much does, which makes it a difficult thing to swallow if you're somebody who believes the assumptions. The oddness about that book is it's basically written for precisely those people who won't read it. Yeah. And the reason they won't read it is because they're convinced their assumptions are correct.

Gary Taubes
And, you know, I have an odd sense of commercializing my intellect. Yeah. I mean, you have to question your assumptions. And I think Ken and John F. Kennedy had a great quote about this.

Mark Hyman
I'll see if I can remember. Essentially, it was like, you know, most people are not willing to challenge their assumptions. Well, it's also comfort of thought, challenging your assumptions, but it's challenging your assumptions on which you have built your career. Yeah. So you get to the pinnacle of your career because you basically embrace the conventional thinking of the disease.

Gary Taubes
As soon as you embrace an unorthodox approach, then you get excommunicated from your church. So the field selects out people who agree with the conventional thinking. They become professors, heads of departments, heads of associations. They serve on prestigious committees. They're the people you go to when, and the New York Times runs an article.

There are people who we consider experts and authorities, the guidelines. And the same has been said of me. And it's true. It's like, at what point can you say everything I believe, everything that not only made me the person you see that reason I'm on Mark Hogman's podcast, but the people you like and respect all think the same way. It's literally.

It is quite like a church. You all have a certain religion, kind of a cult. Yeah. It was interesting. I was interviewing the 80 year old nutritionist at Baylor University this past week.

The interview very quickly deteriorated in just extremely pleasant two hour discussion about good and bad science. But he used the phrase allegiance bias, and I said, I. Which camp you belong to. Right. Yeah.

I'd never heard that before, but it's exactly right. You have a certain allegiance and bias, and it's just. Not only does everyone you know and respect think like you do. Yeah. But it's.

You know, it's what made you the person you are today. And now you're supposed to. It's true. I mean, I. You know, I think, you know, Chris Gardner is a great scientist, but, you know, they have a plant based research.

We have a different consideration. Okay. Okay. Well, he's. He's a Stanford.

Mark Hyman
He's a smart guy. He's a good guy. He's a nice guy. And they have a plant based research institute, which seems ideologically biased right from the get go. Yeah.

Gary Taubes
Although I would. To Christopher's defense, I assume what he's trying to do is demonstrate that a plant based diet is not harmful. So what is the phrase they use in clinical trials, in medicine for non inferiority trials? Yeah, you don't want to. If you can demonstrate that it's not inferior to ways of eating with animal products, and then you can recommend that people do it if they're for ethical reasons or environmental reasons, they can eat this way and have confidence they won't be harming themselves so they can feed it to their children.

So I think that's how he would defend it. I mean, okay, but still sort of meat based diet initiative, or that's also at Stanford. Exactly. Maybe a fake meat based diet initiative. But, you know, I think you're hitting on something really important, Gary, which is that the way we've done science is really kind of skewed and biased in many ways.

Mark Hyman
And we don't challenge our assumptions, and we look at the world in a certain way through certain lenses. Rd Lang said this. He said, scientists can't see the way they see with their way of seeing. So when you look at the horizon, we're in LA, you go to Venice beach, you look out and the earth is flat. You can confirm it with your own eyes, and there's no doubt about it.

Gary Taubes
And not only is that undeniably the sun is revolving around the earth, absolutely. But neither of those are true. And until somebody started to question those assumptions, and some of them were called crazy or were put in jail or worse, we didn't really change our thinking and what we have to do, and we must do, because this disease is really going to decimate humanity. It's decimating our children, it's decimating our population, it's crippling our economy. The federal deficit is in large part due to this phenomenon of insulin resistance and the consequences of it in our society, including chronic disease, that are just such a burden.

Mark Hyman
And I think we have to get it right. And your book is about challenging our assumptions to get it right. And a lot of people would argue with you that no weight gain and obesity and diabetes, which is a consequence of obesity, are really simply the result of eating too much food and not exercising enough. And Ana, you've talked a lot about this. You wrote about this in your book, good calories, bad calories.

You had a whole research initiative called Nusi about this, where you funded large studies. David Ludwig, who's a friend of ours, does a really powerful trials looking at do different calories matter and affect your hormones, metabolism, weight. And he found that they did. And there's just a huge body of evidence around this virta health, which I know you were very close to. And Sarah Halberg, who's a friend of ours, recently died from breast cancer.

She doesn't really pioneering research looking at ketogenic diets and reversing type two diabetes. And yet the American Diabetes association and most endocrinologists are still saying you should have half of your diet as carbohydrates. So what is the truth about this? Are all calories the same? And is it just about energy balance or.

Gary Taubes
It's funny, when I first wrote about this, I mean, the first book in good calories, bad calories, and it was critically reviewed in the New Yorker by their science health reporter, Gina Colada, who I knew well, you know, well, Gina made some interest. She said, first of all, you never know what I left out, which is true of all books. You just never know what the author. Yeah, sure, selection bias, we call it. It is selection bias.

And when you're writing a book, you're also selecting for story and you're trying to select the most the information that, that really you believe has to be in the book, because a book can't be 2000 words pages long. And then she said that diabetologists, diabetes specialists, had proven that a calorie is a calorie. And when I wrote back, and the Times was kind enough to run a lengthy letter of mine in response, which they don't often do to book reviews, and I said, look, diabetes specialists of all people know that a calorie is in a calorie, except for Peter Attia, who no longer knows that. But you know that every macronutrient proteins, fats, carbohydrates, they prompt a different hormonal response in the body, and so a different metabolic response, and that the hormonal response includes a different, you know, different effects on fat storage and fat mobilization, fat metabolism, burning fat, whether you're going to burn fat or carbohydrates, or whether you're going to use protein for fuel, which you could do, or for tissue repair and cellular repair, which is how you'd like to prioritize it, all these things are determined by the hormonal response, which is different from all of them. And so the argument I began making in good calories, bad calories.

And as you point out, it's been in every one of my books, and it's in this one, too, because it's, to me, clear as day and this was worked out beginning in the 19 teens. German and austrian clinical investigators, researchers who were. They were doing the best medical science in the world, bar none, until World War Two, when they're. They. Things went south a little, worked.

Yeah. You know, fat storage is regulated independently from how much you eat and exercise. You know, your fat cells that make up fat tissue, they can't tell how much you're eating or exercise, so they only see certain things. They see the fats in the blood. I mean, c is a metaphor.

They're aware of the fats in the blood and the hormones in the blood and the glucose and the triglycerides and all kinds of other molecules, but not how much you're eating and exercising. And by the 1950s, it was pretty clear that they were responding primarily to insulin. So you raise insulin, you drive fat accumulation, you inhibit primarily, you inhibit the escape of fat, the mobilization of fat. We call it lipolysis, is the breakdown of fat. So basically, it's like a one way turnstile in a subway, where the calories get stored in the fat tissue, but they can't get out.

They can't get out. They need this process of lipolysis. They need to be broken up into small pieces so they can get out of the fat cell. And insulin prevents that from happening. Apparently, no cell in the body is as sensitive to insulin as a fat cell.

So if there's a tiniest bit of insulin in your circulation, it's going to shut down. Mobilization of fat. That's interesting. Just to point out something that our friend David Ludwig said to me once, which really highlighted that it's more than just calories. He said, in a type one diabetic, when they're untreated and they're first diagnosed, they could be eating 10,000 calories a day and losing weight.

Mark Hyman
So that's because they have no insulin and they can't store those calories. They can't get in the cells, they can't get in. So the problem with the, you know, there's always two different ways to see everything. Yeah. So the way the community saw it is because they're losing.

Gary Taubes
They're peeing away all those calories. That's why they're not gaining weight. So it's still, to them, it's still an energy, and energy out. Yeah. Losing all the calories in.

There are ways to study this, and it was studied and to pick apart exactly what's happening. And, you know, what's happening is that without insulin, they can't keep fat in the fat tissue. So that's the primary effect. Yeah. What's interesting, like I said, is they start giving insulin therapy.

The more insulin you give, the fatter patients became, and often they would become obese. And then type two diabetes is so closely associated to obesity. And they knew this even as specialists 100 years ago weren't thinking of it as type two diabetes. They didn't want patients to become fat because they knew that made diabetes worse. Worse.

Mark Hyman
Right. So it's kind of, you give them. Massive doses of insulin, you tell them to get fatter, and then you tell them they got to eat less. Yeah. Type one diabetics get also type two, we call it double diabetes.

Gary Taubes
Right. So you. You give them enough carbohydrates and enough insulin, they become insulin resistant, and so they need massive doses of insulin, and it's like they literally get double diabetes. Yeah. No, and it's along this way.

I mean, one of the other things is the whole science of, well, it's called endocrinology, hormones and hormone related diseases. And it's also sort of born in the late 19th century, but it's very primitive and it's growing and then evolving through the 20th century. And these doctors are realizing that there are diseases of, you know, excess hormone, and if you have too much of a hormone, then you gotta lower it, and if you have too little, you gotta add it. But the problem is they can't really measure hormones in the bloodstream accurately until 1960. So we're giving insulin to everyone, whether they have too little insulin or too much, because all we're trying to do is lower blood sugar.

And then if patients have side effects or complications, they get all the. With diseases that associate with it. You say, well, the problem is uncontrolled blood sugar. Yeah, but you're giving. The problem in type two is insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia.

Too much insulin, and you're treating it with more insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. You keep knocking at the door to try to get someone to pay attention, but it doesn't actually work. Right. Doesn't actually work.

So what you do, you have more boys. So, Gary, you know, we're in this moment now where we really, I think, have begun to really understand the biology of diabetes and the biology of insulin resistance and poor metabolic health. Yet more people than ever are suffering from this. And we now have this drug, ozempic. So, is obesity an ozempic deficiency?

Quite possibly. No. I mean, what's going on here? The issue with the drug is fascinating, because part of the thinking here. So one of the ways this was captured, this was originally an epigraph in the beginning of the book.

And then I decided, if I put in the beginning of the book, I'm giving the whole book away. Nobody has to read. I took two epigraphs out. That's too bad. So what were they?

One of them was from 1870s british physician who was talking about a patient who came in, a woman in her seventies, very healthy, plump, robust. And she came to see him because she had type two diabetes, and she had it completely under control by diet. And he thought, this is terrific. Why are you seeing me? And it's because she didn't want to be on a diet anymore.

And he's like, are you crazy? You know, you're as healthy as can be with a disease that for other people is chronic. I forget why we took that one out. The other one was a story that was told to me by, from my perspective, a young man, he was diagnosed with diabetes in his thirties. This was like 2017.

He was a chef. He became a journalist. He actually interviewed me for my sugar book, then told me he had type one diabetes. And I said, I got to interview you for my diabetes book. So when you're diagnosed with diabetes, particularly type one, it's like you go from maybe never having thought of this disease in your life, unless a friend or a relative had it, to being dropped into this world where now you have to learn as much about it as you can, as quickly as you can, because you can pretty quickly die.

Like, within a day, you're going to be injecting insulin. And the doctor tells is briefing him, and he says, what we're going to do is you've got this insulin deficiency disease. It's type one. And so we're going to give you insulin, and you can no longer metabolize carbohydrates safely. So in order for you to do that, we're going to give you insulin, and then you're going to eat, you know, get 50% of your calories from carbs, and you're going to regiment them.

So, you know, certain amount for breakfast, certain amount for snacks, certain amount. And he says to the doctor, well, wait a minute, let me get this straight. What you're telling me is that carbohydrates are now toxic to me and insulin is the antidote, and you want me to eat the toxin and take the antidote? That's right. Why don't I just not eat the toxin?

And of course, the doctor has never thought about it. This way in his life. And he's like, there's got to be a reason, right? And the reason is, well, that's too hard to do. Or, you know.

And he actually says, well, wait a minute. If I told you I was going to now exercise an hour a day, you would. You would say, that's terrific, even though the hour a day is going to be like 30 minutes getting to the gym and 30 minutes taking a shower. But I tell you, I don't want to. Maybe I shouldn't eat the toxin.

That's going to be too difficult to do. What's the problem? That's very funny. As soon as we had insulin, the idea was, eat the toxin, take the antidote. And if the antidote didn't work well enough for, there would always be a new antidote also.

So 1937, there you go. You had long acting insulin is discovered at noble, Nordisk and Copenhagen. And that was the beginning of the. We're now making ozempic. And so this is the long acting insulin generation.

Then post world War two, you have the oral hypoglycemics, and then by the 1970s, you've got insulin pumps, and now you've finally got blood sugar monitors. So you can monitor blood sugar, and there's always a new drug. And then we have, you know, the trans insulin made from molecular biology. Recombinant. Yeah.

Recombinant DNA insulin. And so there's always a new drug. So the idea is. Yeah, so you're using pig and. Pig and beef insulin.

Mark Hyman
We were before, so now we had human insulin. We could synthesize it. We're gonna need vegan insulin, undeniably. But the, gosh, if you're a vegan and you type one diabetes and they have human insulin, would you do anyway? But the idea is always like, yeah, well, acknowledge that therapy isn't great now, and there's room for improvement.

Gary Taubes
It's always better than it was, which is true. But we also see other drugs coming down the pipeline, and there's always other drugs coming down the pipeline. So now the latest drug, the GLP one agonists again, bozempic wigobi, Manjaro. Terrific drugs. I mean, you being facetious.

I mean, they seem to. Are they the solution? Wonderful things? No. Why?

Because they're still treating. They're still treating the symptoms. Yeah. As you put it, it said, we don't have a GLP one agonist deficiency disease with obesity. I mean, maybe we do on some level, but who knows?

Certainly you can treat it a lot. Actually, a lot of the ways we eat, in the process we eat actually lowers glp one. Glp one is a something our bodies make. It's a peptide, it's a natural thing like insulin. And we're just making something that acts more than our body can actually produce.

And make and acts and slightly is kept alive in the circulation so it's not degraded as quickly. But so this is always the issue, is we can treat the symptoms, we don't have to, people don't. So along the way, as the obesity community was failing to treat obesity, failing to understand obesity, and failing to provide a dietary therapy that worked. This is the convention, the establishment, not the diet doctor world, because we think they got it right, but they created all these mindsets, belief systems that would allow them to continue doing what they were doing without feeling, and ultimately they'll blame the patient. But the idea was, nobody wants to be on a diet.

That was a message from, with the kids from the early 1920s. Nobody wants to be on a diet. They're not going to a diet. Fair enough. But people would if you give them a chance.

Well, it's got to be the right diet, and that's the point. So if you give them the wrong diet, why would they stick with it? Or if you're giving them a diet just to prevent the appearance, delay the appearance of a disease 1020 years down the line, like, if I tell you, eat a low fat diet to you, delay heart disease, prevent heart disease. Assuming it works, you don't never actually see prevention happen. You don't experience the prevention of a disease.

And if you get the disease 30 years later, you don't know that maybe you would have gotten it 1020 years later if you had eaten the way you used to eat, or maybe you'd get it 40 years later. You have no idea. There's no feedback on prevention. It's one of my issues with the whole longevity world. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
How do you know? Even if you have a drug that keeps dogs alive longer? Like, maybe if I live to 120, Gary, I think that'll prove a point. If. I think that would be, if you see a strong enough signal, like suddenly there's a whole world of people who have been taking a drug and live to be 120.

But it's going to take a minute. It'S going to take a while to establish that observation. It better be clear. Yeah. Because those same people are probably doing a lot of other things too.

Gary Taubes
So anyway, but that's the issue. So nobody sticks with the diet, and as long as nobody sticks with the diet, drug therapy is always better. Yeah, but it's not really, because it ends up causing other complications. Well, and this is what you have to find out again. I have an essay sitting at the Atlantic that I hope by the time this is aired, maybe we'll have made it to about ozembic, and it's, you know, so.

Mark Hyman
So what's your take on it? Well, this is what scared me. They wanted talked about the history and the tidal wave of diabetic complications. If you think of insulin, 1922, it's a lifesaver. It's a miracle drug.

Gary Taubes
First miracle drug. Undeniable. I mean, people at the brink of death, and it brings back, it takes this intractable disease, and it makes it tractable. And like ozempic and obesity patients do. Better, they clearly live longer.

It's clearly minimizing diabetic. I mean, the complications for the first five or ten years, the acute complications. Yeah, yeah. But then you get to see the long term complications of people not just living with this disease that used to kill them, but living with the disease and the drug therapy and the dietary approach that had been adopted along with it. And you cannot separate them out.

And by the 1930s, you're seeing these people suffering the tragic consequences that they might not have had to suffer. People really understood what's going on now. And so the question is, you take. Is that happening with Ozempic? Are we now in this, in this golden era of ozempic, like we were with insulin and giving it to everybody without really any kind of thought about it?

If people are going to have, if it's like insulin, they're going to have to be on it for the rest of their lives. So it's not just, you've got some clinical trials that have tracked people out three, five years and looked at specific complications that might stand out from the background. Pancreatitis, bowel obstruction. Yeah. So the question is, what happens after ten years and 20 years, and what happens when people try to get off?

We also have clinical trials that show that after a year or two, people get off these treatments, the weight comes back if you're doing it for weight. So we know that. But what happens if you try to get off after ten years or 20 years or 30 years? What happens if somebody does these drugs? You know, obesity for most people is an intractable condition.

I mean, we both think that very low carb, high fat ketogenic diets will do probably the best approach, the most effective approach, dietary approach for treatment. But we really have no idea for how many people may work for some, may not work for others, and, yeah, I mean, just don't know. Those studies have never been done. So for many people and for children, obesity can be an incredible burden. So she was winning five year olds and twelve year olds on ozempic.

Mark Hyman
That's what the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending. Yeah. Now you're going to have kids who are going to be on these drugs for 40, 50, 60 years. And what about the girls who then get married in their twenties and want to get pregnant? So what do these drugs do?

Gary Taubes
We know there's this concept of fetal programming in which basically the mother's metabolic health is passed on to the child through the womb. And it's an effect that you, I mean, it's manifests itself as larger babies. Yeah, but for the most part, you can't really see the effects for generations, literally generations, until these kids are middle aged adults. And then you see the explosion of diabetes. These are the epigenetic changes that are literally programmed disease in utero for obesity.

Diabetes and heart disease. So now you've got this very powerful drug that, for all we know, might reverse this. I mean, maybe it's be a godsend mothers take this drug during pregnancy, maybe it's not. There's no way to know. And if the mother goes off the drug to get pregnant, that means she's going to be gaining weight back while she's pregnant, which we know is a.

Mark Hyman
Problem for fetal, unless people change what they're eating. So I think about the way Jocelyn thought about insulin in the early years. What if he used the lowest dose of, and this was Richard Bernstein's revelation in type one diabetes in the seventies. Let's use the lowest doses and craft a diet that allows those lowest doses. To be effective, which is basically lower starch and sugar and higher fat.

Yeah, I mean, we have a friend in common who is a type one diabetic, who's a doctor who basically uses one or two units of insulin a day because she's on a ketogenic diet. So she needs very, very low doses. She needs a little, but not that much. Yeah, we know it can be done with that, and it can probably be done with these drugs, maybe. And it's quite possible that with the right dietary approach and dose, maybe people can get off the drug, get to a maintenance weight, a weight they're comfortable with, and then, I mean, I think.

It'S possible, but really that's not what's happening with the drugs. They're just being prescribed with no lifestyle change. Dietary advice? No. Regimen of exercise to prevent muscle loss.

Gary Taubes
Well, and then the question is, are people if you don't need the diet advice? I was just. Oprah just had her special on how Zempic and how it's changing obesity. And I haven't checked. Ally out there emailed me and said, you should watch it and see if the word sugar is ever mentioned.

Mark Hyman
Yeah, right. So if you can. I mean, again, apparently these drugs do inhibit appetite, an effect. I don't know if it's a direct effect or an indirect one. And they might inhibit specific tastes for carbohydrates and sweets.

Gary Taubes
I wouldn't be surprised. They'll feel full of the drug. Right. And they get nauseous. But it's.

To have a drug just explode like this. And our history of pharmaceutical therapy is full of examples of drugs that were wonder drugs that ended up, you know, thalidomide. Well, thalidomide was an extreme, prevented because you could see it. But benzodiazepines, for instance, I mean, the world is full of people who took them on prescription, as prescribed, and got to the point where either the complications became unbearable or they became inured to the dose and they didn't do anything anymore and then couldn't get off it. Yeah.

And then you have nightmare, siri. I actually had a tenant who was sent off to a rehab center for a month to break his klonopin habit and had a mental breakdown afterwards.

You know, it's the. What do you do if the drug helps 80% of the patients and causes intractable harm to 20% and you don't find out for ten years. Yeah. Whether you're in the 80% or the 20%. Well, we're gonna see that.

Mark Hyman
I have no doubt. I mean, I think it can be a boon to some people, and I think it's not a bad drug, like any drug. It's how it's used, who it's used with, how long it's used, what dose. It'S used, and the extent of the problem that you're using it for. Right.

But I've had so many patients, Gary, who've lost 100, 200 pounds without that by just giving them proper nutritional advice. And in many of these cases, restricting carbohydrates. But again, we have a world of ways to think about it. I mean, one of the diagnostic criteria of an eating disorder is not eating an entire food group. And there are other people, you and I, saying, well, the problem is a carbohydrate content of the diet.

Gary Taubes
So we don't need carbohydrates. There are no essential carbohydrates. Don't eat them. You'll be fine. That was basically what I'm arguing for, diabetes.

You don't need these foods, so you don't need to take all the medications, the pharmaceuticals that are prescribed to you to treat the symptoms that come from eating them. Yeah, I want to stop you there for a second, because what you said is really important. There are essential fatty acids, there are essential amino acids, there are no essential carbohydrates. So the body actually does not need them biologically to thrive, even though it's our main fuel source. So historically, we've been adapted to a whole range of diets, from the Inuits and basically a ketogenic diet, to the Pima Indians, who were 880 percent carbohydrates.

Mark Hyman
But it was all high fiber plant, plant based carbohydrates that were really nutrient dense, so the body can survive and thrive on many different things. And the quality of the calories matter, which is really the thesis of your book. Good calories, bad calories. And I think most people dont understand that they actually can regulate their biology if they figure out what their particular metabolic type is, because everybodys different. And for example, I need a little more carbohydrates because im kind of thin, and if I dont eat them and I go keto, I'll lose too much weight.

But if I take a patient who's overweight and type two diabetic, they're going to do really well. If I do that, and a little. Bit of carbohydrates might prevent them from doing really well. Yeah. I think one of the points that I've made in my other books is we do, everybody is different, and we definitely evolved to cope with the proteins and fats in our diet.

Gary Taubes
The idea that the foods that we didn't, the new foods of modern life. Ultra processed food that's not even food. Yeah, I'm not wild about the term ultra processed, because it's sort of like the miasma theory of all these kind of vague things that we're gonna throw. And, you know, Michael Pollan called them food like substances. I prefer that it gets more to the point, but they don't meet the.

Mark Hyman
Actual criteria of the definition of food. We didn't have time to adapt to high levels of sugar in our diet and sugary beverages in our diet. These things didn't exist. We didn't have time. I mean, I'm agnostic about the seed oil issue.

Gary Taubes
I don't find the evidence. I mean, I can easily believe that these things are toxic, but I. The evidence is confusing, for sure. There's a certain absence of human clinical. Trial, just like sugar.

Mark Hyman
You know, when you think about sugar, we never had exposure to the amount of sugar we're eating. Now, historically, as species, we never had 10% of our diet being refined soybean oil before. That's a new phenomena for humanity. And maybe it's okay, maybe it's not, but I think it should be questioned. Yeah, it certainly should be questioned.

Gary Taubes
And that's the thing. So you can propose that those are problems. And with the sugar and refined grains, you could see what happens when you take them out of people's lives. And we have clinical trials. Can you talk about that?

Mark Hyman
Like you talk about the virta health work and Sarah Halberg's work and the work on advanced type two diabetes, where they actually were able to reverse it, not just slow it down or delay the complications or to manage the disease, but literally to reverse it. Yeah. Well, so this is getting back to the history a bit. We get to the 1970s, eighties, the diabetes community, their credit, did some really ambitious clinical trials. And what they find out, in effect, is that disease as.

Gary Taubes
By their treatment as a chronic progressive disorder, it just gets worse. A famous british trial where they just. They show they start people on diet only, and then they add one drug, and then they go. And they see how many of the patients diagnosed with type two diabetes can stick with one drug, monotherapy, and the answer is, like, 10%. So as time goes on, you keep on having to add drugs to keep the blood sugar under control.

They do these. We said a court, and I forget the other names of the other two trials. Looking at intensive insulin therapy, and they find that it does more harm than good at the very best. And then they do this huge look ahead trial, $200 million to demonstrate that if you lose weight, you'll reduce diabetic complications. It's a fundamental pillar of thinking with diabetes.

Just get your patients to lose weight, they'll be fine, and they get them to lose weight, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. A trial was ended for futility, a $200 million trial, and a great quote in the New York Times from a Harvard diabetes specialist named David Nathan, who says, we have to have an adult conversation about this, and they never do. Yeah, but while this is. But this is an important point. They lost weight and they got worse.

So, no, they lost weight and they didn't get better. The idea was, you lose weight, you'll have fewer complications. You reduce heart disease, you reduce strokes, reduced mortality from this disease. It didn't make any sense. Was it because of how they lost weight?

Well, it could have been because of how they lost weight. And in fact, back around 2003, when I first heard about this trial from one of the principal investigators, I was at a conference. He invited me to talk in Houston. I remember saying to him, look, are you doing a low carb arm? Okay, just do a low carb arm.

Make it not just low calorie, low fat fruits, vegetables, whole grains. The usual mediterranean diet, right? Well, this was pre mediterranean. I mean, this was. Yeah, it was just classic low fat.

But in low fat, they're also saying you're eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, you know, cut back on meat, exercise. No, they never crossed their mind to do a low carb diet because that was still considered. Are quackish. But as the diabetes community keeps learning about how ineffective their treatments are and how their belief system is falling apart on top of them and not having an adult conversation about it, which is maybe we're making some mistakes here, other physicians coping with this increased obesity in their patients are confronted with patients who don't take their advice and instead, like, buy Atkins diet revolution book and lose 40 pounds on Atkins. Yeah.

And a few of these doctors are open minded enough. Eric Wessman and David Lud, they say, I'm going to look into this. I'm going to actually do a clinical trial. So they start doing clinical trials. There's a big study at the Philadelphia, Va, and there's a woman named Linda Stern.

Is frustrated by how much her inability to help her patients. So she literally goes to, like, a Brentano's bookstore, and she sits down in the diet section, starts reading diets. The doctors go into the bookstore to read self help books, because it's not in the textbooks. You know, it's not. Not.

Definitely don't get grades. Good grades for this in med school. Anyways, I think she found protein power, and she sounds interesting. That's right. She tries it on herself.

And this is effortless to lose weight. So they put together a clinical trial, and this is a veteran's administration's hospital. So there are a lot of vets. They're not just obese. They have metabolic syndrome and type two diabetes.

And instead of cutting them out of the trial, as you would, the inclusion criteria in a pharmaceutical trial is going to say, we're going to take these patients because they're ill. She says, since this so associates with obesity. Let's do it. And not only do these patients lose a lot of weight on the diet, but their type two diabetes gets better on this high fat, low carb Atkins small protein power diet. So you start getting this groundswell, this movement of doctors who are reading these articles in the literature and saying, look, diet really seems to help.

They don't know this deeper history, although Eric Wessmann, because looking into it, it's just patients do well if you don't feed them carbs. How weird is that? It's a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism. If you tell them not to eat it, they do fine. You don't take the toxin, you don't need the antidote.

So Steve Finney and Jeff Volak, two. Steve is a PhD nutritionist. I've had them on the MIt and out at UC Davis and he's been. He had studied ketogenic diets and Jeff Volek as an exercise physiology PhD, then at the University of Connecticut. And they started working together, publishing on this.

And they helped start this company, Virta Health. I remember Steve's idea. I think it was we could just convince insurance companies and employers that they could save money. Diabetes is an expensive disorder. It's costing.

It's the most expensive disease, costs $20,000 a year in medical bills. If they could save 80% of that by getting these people on a diet, wouldn't they want to do that? So they'd become the clients, not the patients. We'll go after the payers of the insurers, the kaisers and blue shields of the world, and they create this company. They get this brilliant CEO, Sammy Inkonen, who is a world class Stanford MBA, made millions creating the website.

I always forget whether it was Trulia or one of the real estate websites. And it's a world class triathlete who was diagnosed with prediabetes despite having come in first in his age group in the Ironman triathlon. And Sammy goes to Steve and Jeff for advice on how to treat the prediabetes and also how he wants to. This is Sam I wants to row to Hawaii from San Francisco to Hawaii with his wife Meredith. And he thinks they could do it.

Mark Hyman
It's like a fun ketogenic diet. Jeff and Steve can coach him and they start talking about this idea and they start this company, Virta Health. Meanwhile, by the way, Sammy and Meredith do wrote to Hawaii and they break the record and they don't eat any carbohydrates on the whole trip. I think it was 24 miles how. He got the prediabetes was he was using all those goos and energy things that athletes use to fuel their bodies.

Gary Taubes
Not only that, Sammy believed that a low fat diet was the healthiest way to eat. He had been told that. And Sammy is. I think he's norwegian. And as he put it, not that being norwegian matters, but.

And if he's finished, I apologize. He's just got the best. You know, if somebody tells him not to eat fat, he doesn't eat fat. I mean, this is an extraordinarily, the man has an extraordinary strength of will, and then he's diagnosed with prediabetes. So there's something wrong.

This is a common phenomenon that happens to many people in our world, right? You're doing what's supposed to be the right thing and it doesn't work for you. And then you do the wrong thing, which in this case is low carb, high fat ketogenic animal diet. And you get better and you say, wait a minute, if it's wrong for me, maybe it's wrong for a lot of people, if not everybody. So they start this company, virtihealth.

They realize they need a clinical trial to convince. And they meet Sarah Hallberg, who is a physician in Indiana, amazing woman to whom the book is dedicated, who has been asked to run an obesity clinic at Indiana Health and has to learn everything she can about obesity. And she starts reading all the literature, and she goes down the rabbit hole and she experiences this, you know, based on Jell O revelation. And she realizes that the only people who seem to be having effective, who seem to be effectively getting their patients to lose weight are these people like Wessman who are advocating for these Atkins low carb keto diets. And so she goes and spends time with Westman.

She goes and starts advocating for this at her obesity clinic, and she meets Jeff and Steve, and they put together a clinical trial where they're going to randomize people for people with type two diabetes to either this nutritional ketosis keto with smartphones and personal coaching, coaching, nutrition. Telematics, adjusting their medications if they need to. Yeah, because you're going to have to adjust medication. If you stop eating the toxin, you're going to have to lower the dose of the antidote. And it's either that or the American Diabetes association standard of care, which is drug therapy.

And they do the trial, and after a few years, they report one year results. And after three years, they report two year results. Yeah, for patients who comply with the diet, they seem to put this progressive chronic disease into remission. So it's not a progressive chronic disease? No, it's only a progressive chronic disease if you're eating the toxin.

If you're not eating the toxin, you don't manifest the symptoms. And it's not the ideal clinical trial. There's all kinds of problems with. It wasn't randomized, actually, I probably said randomized and I should not. It was.

They let patients choose whether they wanted the diet or the ADA standard of care. But even with those constraints, it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that a disorder which is considered chronic and progressive is not necessarily chronic and progressive, and that the defining factor is a die, again, whether you eat the toxin. That's true. I mean, our practice, the ultra wellness center, I've seen that over and over again. People just don't on insulin, get off insulin, on meds, get off meds, normalize their weight, normalize their metabolism, their a one c goes down.

Mark Hyman
They went from eleven to five and a half in a few months. I mean, it's quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable. And so by the end of the book, my apple, I mean, again, I. This book does not advocate.

Gary Taubes
It's a dense historical. Yeah, it's like a mystery novel and. A mystery novel, who done it and. Who didn't do it. I think it's a very good book.

The question is, imagine a scenario where everybody, every physician was taught not just the proper drug therapy, but how effective this dietary therapy was. Because there are always been two levers to pull to keep blood sugar under control. There's diet or drugs. Until 1921, we only had diet, and for patients with type two diabetes, it was effective. Don't eat these foods, you'll be fine.

Once we had drugs, you had two lovers. And the idea was, use the drugs, give the drugs. We're going to say that diet is integral, the cornerstone of 30, but we're going to pay lip service to it because we got the drugs. What if, confronted with a new patient, you give them the diagnosis, you have type two diabetes or type one diabetes, and you say, look, we can do this. We can treat your symptoms with drugs, you can continue to eat exactly the way you want, or if it's type one, you're going to eat at specific intervals, specific amounts, to allow us to maximize, craft a diet, to maximize efficiency of the drug therapy.

There's all these complications we know are going to ensue. So you're going to have an increased risk of heart disease and stroke and dementia and blindness and retinopathies and for some of you, no matter how well you manage your blood sugar with these drugs, those complications are going to happen anyway. At which point we're going to blame you, but the patient's fault. Or you can do this diet now. What it means is no more bread, potatoes, sweets.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. Which people. Sugary beverage, which people crave. It's hard because they crave the, those foods when they have insulin resistance. Yeah.

Gary Taubes
Which is fascinating. If you eat this way, as far as we can tell, you'll be fine. No drugs, no complications of drugs, no needing more doses or new doses. No waiting for new drugs to come along. No dialysis.

As far as we can tell, if you eat this way, you'll be fine. Amazing. I mean, we spend and it'll probably take two or three months. It might take my, you might love it immediately. It might take two or three months to get used to it.

In which case, you know, like somebody who's quit smoking, you, you won't miss cigarettes after a while. Right? You will at first. You won't after a while. It's your choice.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're happy either way. Yeah. Okay. Because we want you to be healthy, but this way.

Gary Taubes
Chronic progressive disease, diabetic complications. More and more drugs. Complications of drugs this way, as far as we can tell. And we can't, you know, there are unknown, unknowns here. As far as we can tell, if you eat this way, you'll be fine.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. You choose. Yeah. And if you do eat this way, let's make sure you do it right. Yeah.

Gary Taubes
And if you choose the drugs, we'll make sure you do. I mean, it's such a simple notion, and yet it's bugging against the establishment paradigm that we should be using drug therapy and high carbohydrate diets and diabetics. I mean, I think the ADA is starting to come along, the American Diabetic association. But it's really tough. Well, they're starting to come along, but if you see how they do it.

So they put out these standard of care documents and every year, every January, and there'll be like eight or ten of these documents. And what they do is they revise based on what research came out in that past year. So they really have no mechanism by which to say, let's just rethink this, everything. And then when they're revising it, the discussion of diet is buried, is inside, in this document where it's sort of, you can do this or you can do that or you can try this diet. We have this research for this or this research for that.

They don't have any mechanism to say, can we just try? Let's try a different approach. Yeah. Okay. Let's divide the world up.

Let's say this is what we can be achieved with diet, and this is what can be achieved with drug therapy. And this is the complications that we know of with diets. Not many. And these are the complications we know with drug therapy. Chronic, progressive disease.

Many people might choose drugs. Maybe they're right. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think when you look at the data, to me, it's pretty clear that if you use drug therapy, that it is a progressive chronic disease, and you can mitigate or slow the complications, but it's not going to prevent them. Well, this is.

Mark Hyman
And then if you use the dietary therapy, it goes away. And, you know, I think people might be listening, going, well, Gary, youre giving these people a ketogenic diet with 75, 80% of their diet is fat. What about their heart? And maybe, say, their diabetes? But actually, they looked at over 20 cardiovascular biomarkers as part of the Virta study, and they were all improved.

Actually, they got better. Ive seen this over and over. I had a patient I, which was really struggling with weight loss, and she had prediabetes. She had triglycerides of three plus 100. Her hdl was very low, and her total cholesterol was over 300.

Very high insulin levels, rising blood sugar. And I'm like, why don't you try a ketogenic diet? And she did it. Not only did she lose 20 pounds, but her cholesterol dropped 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points.

Her hdl went up 30 points. Her blood sugar normalized. Now, that may not work for somebody else who's a thin guy, who is an athlete. And I've seen people who use a sketogenic diet like that who actually don't do well. And I'm one of those guys, if I eat too much of the wrong fats, my cholesterol goes off the rails.

Gary Taubes
But we don't know how harmful that is. We don't. We don't. Unless we look inside your arteries, and then we can. Well, you can.

Yeah, then, yeah. So it's just fascinating. I think this is really this really important moment in history because. Because we have this craze of ozempic and wagon Manjaro. It's the golden child of the moment of pharmacology, and nobody's really talking about the issue that matters, which is what we're eating and why we're eating what we're eating.

And that's because we have this mindset that people with obesity, we're not going to blame it on willpower. We're not going to acknowledge that it's a disease. Now this is what Oprah was saying, but we're also going to assume that they won't change their diet. And, you know, it's really complicated. I've read a lot of the literature of mostly women, but not entirely women with obesity.

They're so confused. They know it's not a willpower problem. No, it's not a willpower problem. And often these authors will say, I tried every diet, none of them worked. And I want to reach out to them to say, well, you didn't try the right one because they always include Atkins in the list.

Did it not work for you? Or are you someone? But then they'll say, you know, it's just one of these books I read recently. It's, you know, I don't want to go through my life not eating a doughnut. Right.

Well, I understand. I get that. I get that. But, you know, I was I been biased by my history as a cigarette smoker. There was a period in my life where I couldn't imagine going through my life without a cigarette.

In fact, my next cigarette was what pulled me forward into the future.

Maybe it's an inappropriate metaphor. I'm not sure it is. Or not. Well, no, and we know there's real addiction with these foods, particularly whatever you call them, food like substances or ultra processed food or high starch in sugar foods, they activate the brain centers for pleasure. And we can map that on brain imaging studies.

Mark Hyman
So there's no doubt that these have biological effects on the brain that drive our behavior, our cravings, our appetite. But I think what's really remarkable as a doctor treating these patients is that when you do the right thing, their brain chemistry changes, their hormones change, their metabolism changes, and they don't actually have those cravings. It's not like they have to use willpower to fix it. Use science. And this is really what your book is about.

It's challenging the orthodoxy, challenging the science, making us rethink diabetes and come up with a new vision for how we can deal with this obesity crisis. Rather than spending $5 trillion on ozempic for the population, which is what it would cost if we gave everybody who was overweight ozempic. Well, this is the idea that this will somehow impact the obesity epidemic is insane, right? Because. Oh, I suppose if it gets off label, and people can buy, you know.

Even if it's cheap, is it safe? But then. Then, yeah. Then the question is, what are the side effects? What are the complicated?

Gary Taubes
Will there be a tidal wave or, you know, a wave of complications down the line that are going to make a whole host of. I think there is. I mean, they had never started. I mean, I think the data is already coming out that the longer you're on it, the more likelihood you're going to have complications. Not everybody will, obviously, but what's interesting.

Is even these studies, the studies that looked. That I looked at, that looked at long term use, and again, they went out about, they had patients in them who had been on the drugs for, like, five years, and they were looking at specific possible complications, but they would also say these were for lower doses and for diabetes, not for obesity. And then they would say, well, 60% of the patients discontinued use. Yeah. Could they have nauseous or blood?

And the question is, yeah. Why did they discontinue and what happened when they did? Because if when they did, they then fell out of the system. They were no longer in the clinical trial, so nobody has any idea. Was it difficult to discontinue use?

Did things get worse that then had to be treated with other. Well, what happens when you take these drugs is you lose muscle and fat, and you gain back the weight, usually gaining back as fat, and so your metabolism is slower at the end of the process than at the beginning, and you need to eat less food in order to just maintain the same weight. It's a real problem. Unless you eat a lot of protein and do a lot of strength training while you're taking these drugs, you're gonna be in trouble. You know, I've been an athlete, a jock, my whole life, and I, you know, I've lifted weights my whole life.

And the idea that you can solve the muscle loss problem by going into the gym, eating protein and lifting weights, it's like, do you have any idea how hard that is? Well, you can do it. You can do it, but look at. You, you're buff and you're 67, you know? Yeah, but it's.

It isn't. The muscle that comes off easy with the drugs is not going to be put back. No, no, that's right. That's an important point. It's easy to lose, hard to gain.

And as people get older. Yeah, it's even harder. The gaining is also dependent on hormones and wane with time. Totally. Well, Gary, this has been such a fascinating conversation.

Mark Hyman
I think your book is kind of a pivotal book in helping us literally rethink diabetes and challenge our orthodoxy, challenge our assumptions, poke the bear a little bit and say, hey, let's get real with this and let's look at the data, let's look at the science and not go along with the current recommendations, which are in many ways, I believe, harming people. And I agree. I think we have a moment to change that. So thank you for writing it. It's a beautiful book.

It's beautifully written. It's very entertaining. It's not a dense medical book like mine. I think youll all like it. I encourage you to get it.

Its called rethinking diabetes. And also I would encourage you to check out his newsletter called Unsettled Science on Substack. He writes it with Nina Tycholtz, who wrote a book called the Big Fat Surprise. Also another great book and its really a great way to get another point of view about nutrition that you might not be hearing through conventional channels. Gary, thanks for being on the podcast again.

Thanks for what youve done, having the patience to weed through all those thousands of pages of historical data and illuminating us with the history of diabetes and hopefully paving weight toward a future that is much better than what we've had in the past. Thank you. Mark, thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and follow me on all social media channels.

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INTERVIEW: The Evolution of Diabetes Treatment with Gary Taubes

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1. Historical Approaches

2. The Introduction of Insulin

3. Modern Treatment Challenges

Actionable Advice

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