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Gary Taubes Presents at Authors@Google Transcript

Opening Speaker: This talk is part of the Authors@Google of the Health@Google series. We’ll have a lot of time at the end for questions and there’s a mic here.

So, I’m very pleased to welcome today, Gary Taubes, who is a contributing correspondent for Science Magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Esquire. His work has also been included in The Best of The Best American Science Writing and also has received three Science in the Society Journalism awards from the National Association of Science Writers.

He’s the author also of Good Calories, Bad Calories that I’m sure many of you know about. And currently, he is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation investigator in health policy research at the University of Berkeley.

So, with this, we’ll have Gary Taubes talk about his latest book.

Gary Taubes

Thank you very much. This book is basically — Good Calories, Bad Calories took me about five years to write and was 500 pages long.

This is the screen I used to use for this talk and I had written that book hoping to get both the lay readers and to the public health authorities around the country and the medical research community. Because the goal of these books are to convince people that–I mean, it’s almost a cliché–but that our fundamental understanding of why we get fat, of obesity, is completely incorrect and that a new paradigm is in order.

And that Google should change the foods that they’re serving at their wonderful, healthy, low-fat cafes. So, after Good Calories, Bad Calories came out, I wrote Why We Get Fat, in effect, to make it the kind of airplane-reading version of Good Calories, Bad Calories for people who don’t have the time.

I got a lot of emails from people, from doctors, who asked me if I could write a book that their patients could read, from patients who asked me if I could write a book that their doctors would read.