These days obesity and its related health problems are a national obsession for doctors, politicians, and public health officials. Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. in recent years, with obesity rates sharply increasing for children as young as six months old. With higher obesity rates more prevalent among poorer Americans, obesity, and all the public health consequences of it, becomes an issue of social and economic justice. Now, a new book by science journalist Gary Taubes synthesizes ten years of research into the reasons behind obesity. The book is simply called Why We Get Fat. In it, Taubes makes a damning case about how the science linking dietary fat to heart disease and obesity was seriously misreported, leading to government agencies prescribing a low-fat, and in-effect, high-carbohydrate diet, that is precisely the recipe for obesity and its related diseases. Thirty years of increasing obesity rates, coinciding with pushing such a diet, is a testament to a public health policy gone horribly wrong. Taubes asserts that it is the tendency among health professionals and health reporters to link obesity to individual failings that has perverted the interpretation of the existing science. “We don’t get fat because we overeat; we overeat because we’re getting fat,” says Taubes.

GUEST: Gary Taubes, award winning science journalist, contributing correspondent for Science Magazine, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.