Free Republic

THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating...

Ten years ago, science writer Gary Taubes exercised an hour a day. He avoided fat in his diet, never even using milk in his oatmeal. But he kept gaining weight. As an experiment, the self-described carnivore tried the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet - eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, pepperoni with melted mozzarella for lunch, and a steak for dinner - and lost 20 pounds in six weeks. Since then, Taubes, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author, has stuck with the diet and spent countless hours collecting evidence to prove that it's not how much we eat but what we...