Gary Taubes, co-Founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, is a science and health journalist and currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research at the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health. He is the author of Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories. Gary has been a contributing correspondent for the journal Science since 1993, and has contributed articles as a freelancer to The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Slate, and numerous other publications. His 1997 book, Bad Science was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards. He is the only print journalist to be a three-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers science-in-society journalism award. Gary received his B.S. in physics from Harvard University, his M.S. in engineering from Stanford University, and his M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. (Bio taken from the NuSi website)

Taubes Lectures:

Gary gives a general lecture on the topic, Why We Get Fat, an excellent primer on why we are overweight.

There are two competing theories of the cause of obesity. One is that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, in which obesity is attributed to taking in more energy than one burns in physical activity. The second theory is that hormones control the flow of fat in and out of the individual fat cells.  Insulin is the primary driver of fat into the fat cells. In this video, Gary Taubes describes the difference between the energy balance equation and the metabolic advantage paradigm describing how insulin may make fat cells build and retain fat in the fat cells even if the energy expenditure if lowered by diet.