Response to "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"

The author, Gary Taubes, makes the point that heredity is not the cause of obesity--diets are. He emphasizes that high-carbohydrate diets can cause rapid weight gain. Demonstrating that exercise habits haven't changed much over the years, Taubes concludes that he culprit must, then, be the way people eat.

Though he wrote this article in 2002, it is still more than viable today. The way that many people eat has become deplorable in a large part due to fast food. Fast food has long been known to be terrible for consumers. If this article can convince people to avoid fast food and to instead turn to more healthy choices, a couple of things could happen--people could eat healthier, and fast food restaurants would have to respond to the change in demand by serving more health-friendly foods.

As this article was written in 2002, it predated many of the revolutions that have occurred in the fast food business for this very reason. People have become more health conscious recently. Maybe all it took was a simple expose on how unhealthy high-carb food could make people obese.