That set the stage for Ancel Keys, a man of forceful opinions and apparently excellent political connections, to formulate and promulgate his hypothesis that dietary fat was the cause of this unprecedented increase in cardiovascular ailments. Keys ran the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota and was known for developing "K" rations for combat troops.

As Taubes said, "Keys' abilities as a scientist are arguable - he was more often wrong than right - but his force of will was indomitable."

In short, Keys sorted through dietary data from 22 countries, picked out what he wanted from seven of those 22 and formulated his hypothesis. Then, he used his force of will and his precedence to garner more research money to support his personal beliefs and to quash or ignore research indicating that he was wrong.

All of this eventually led to a political victory, if not a scientific one: In 1977, then-Senator George McGovern and the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition & Human Needs published "Dietary Goals for the United States", the document that codified the fat/cholesterol/heart disease hypothesis as a sort of unofficial law of national opinion.

As with many other science-oriented endeavors, such landmark studies become accepted as gospel and are never revisited, even if they are wrong, Taubes said, and he proves this throughout his extensively researched book.

Not only does Taubes cleave open this 50-year-old wrong turn in the science of diet and health, but he also lays out the ongoing science showing that fat and protein have been largely, if not entirely, exonerated by numerous scientific experiments both in the laboratory and in large studies examining the eating habits and resulting health of thousands of individuals.

Taubes also examines in great detail the well-researched, well-accepted metabolic pathways of fats, proteins and carbohydrates in the human body. In doing so, he shows just how damaging refined carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar are to our bodies and how these carbon-hydrogen chains can actually cause many or all of the "diseases of civilisation" the medical community had begun to suspect and then chose to ignore as the fat/cholesterol dogma was accepted instead.

In Taubes' closing paragraphs, he calls for science to re-examine its own research, casting aside the preconceived notions of the last half-century and going forward with research to determine whether our dietary love affair with carbohydrates is the very poison that's killing us by slow, steady and daily ingestion.

Here's the point

THE following truths may challenge your thinking. As scientific journalist Gary Taubes examined 100 years of human science research on diet and metabolism, he came to these unconventional conclusions:

* Dietary fat does not cause obesity or heart disease.

* Refined carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar are the culprits in weight gain since they elicit an insulin response to partition and save fat, which in turn leads to a craving for more carbohydrates.

* Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. Higher insulin causes us to gain weight; lower insulin causes us to lose weight.

* Further, the effects of refined carbohydrates on our insulin and blood sugar levels are the likely cause of coronary heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases.

* Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation related to the type of diet. It is not caused by overeating or sedentary behavior.

* Excess calories in our diets don't cause us to become fat. Likewise, expending more calories than we consume doesn't cause us to become thin.

Will nutrition advice change?

ONCE a person looks at the total evidence on dietary carbohydrates, fats and their effects on human health, a change in public policy and medical advice seems long overdue, yet considering the collective behavior to date, it seems curiously unlikely.

Gary Taubes, whose extensive book on diet and health makes palpable this science, isn't sure. He sees chinks in the armour, perhaps, and has been asked to lecture on his findings in a variety of venues, including before medical researchers - some with impressive credentials.

"I don't know if I'm developing a critical mass or anything, but it still keeps rolling along," Taubes said.

Taubes said he received a call from a vegan medical doctor in North Carolina who read Good Calories, Bad Calories and found it compelling. He told Taubes he didn't want to be convinced, but he was, and he changed his diet to reduce carbohydrates.

"People are paying attention, but whether it will die off without having any effect or whether much of what I say will be merged into the conventional wisdom" is hard to imagine, Taubes said.

Personal biases derail science

AUTHOR Wendell Berry in 1977 described the state of mind that apparently has ruled the study of human nutrition since the late 1950s. He called it "orthodoxy", as if it were a religion.

Berry wrote that such "self-protective orthodoxy" is "a science-as-superstition by which one clings to the assumption of the goodness of one kind of knowledge out of fear of knowledge of another kind".

This is the attitude science author Gary Taubes documents again and again in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Once accepted, the credo that dietary fat causes heart disease became codified and entrenched so strongly that countering evidence was and is ignored or attacked and belittled.

The fat-is-bad orthodoxy remains well entrenched today despite the mounting evidence in physiological/chemical laboratory science and in many human-based trials exonerating fats and indicting carbohydrates instead. According to Taubes, no large-scale trials have been scheduled to test the hypothesis that carbohydrates are the primary cause of heart disease, obesity and a number of other "ailments of civilization".

Taubes describes this entrenched paradigm at one point in his writings using the modern psychological term "cognitive dissonance". It's a tag mental health specialists use to describe the tension felt by people trying to hold or rectify two incompatible beliefs. The normal outcome of this divergent state, at least when people are faced with overwhelming evidence for the unwanted new evidence, is to modify their views just enough to where they can imagine that they've eliminated the conflict. This has happened time and again in the nutrition/health debate.

"One of the classic themes in bad science is the inability to pay attention to the evidence that disagrees with your preconceptions," Taubes said. "You decide you know what the answer is, and you focus on all the evidence that seems to confirm it and ignore the evidence that refutes it, which is the opposite of how you're supposed to do science."

As Taubes researched diabetic and other scientific literature, he found material dating to the 1910s that showed that a substance secreted by the pancreas - later determined to be insulin - was clearly the biological compound that made people fat, yet no one has paid any real heed to that research or continuation of the same revelations.

Taubes said he has even asked researchers why they don't pay attention to this evidence that insulin makes us fat, and they usually say: "I just never thought about it."

Part of the problem is that there's an increasing disconnect built into the modern research system. Specialisation in medicine and research means the heart doctors don't read diabetic research and the weight doctors don't read cardiovascular research, for example.