BIG FAT LIE TAKES A HIT

In case you've been on Mars without a working satellite dish, you'll remember Gary Taubes's "Big Fat Lie" article in The New York Times Magazine last summer, as everybody's been talking about it. Taubes's thesis - if that word can be applied to a screed of "Atkins was right, you were wrong" - was that the Atkins diet made people lose weight not because they were consuming less calories, but because of some magico-mystical process he tagged "endocrinology 101," whereby increasing fat intake proportionate to carb intake simply melted the pounds away. (That Taubes was forced to misrepresent, misquote or utterly ignore many of his own sources and most of the relevant data is a side issue here.) Well, a team of doctors from Stanford and Yale begs to differ, after analyzing more than 100 diet studies involving more than 3,000 people. Turns out that "any weight loss achieved on a low-carb diet comes from consuming fewer calories, the crucial factor in a standard weight-loss diet. Carbohydrate restriction had nothing to do with it." Don't worry, I'm sure it won't impact Taubes's book deal - he'll just have to move on to the even-more-mysterious "endocrinology 102."