CARBOHYDRATE MYTHS DEBUNKED - The Simple Life · 2020. 11. 10. · Gary Taubes is an award-winning science and health journalist, and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science

Primal Power Method :: www.primalpowermethod.com :: [email protected]

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CARBOHYDRATE MYTHS DEBUNKEDAn Interview with Gary Taubes

As taken from www.garytaubes.com/biography) Gary Taubes is an award-winning science and health journalist, and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (Knopf, 2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007). Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. These include the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. (He is the only print journalist to win this award three times.) Taubes graduated from Harvard College in 1977 with an S.B. degree in applied physics, and received an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981).

GARY C: Having a background as a scientific writer, what initiated the concept for the New York Times bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories?

G. TAUBES: I had pitched an article to the New York Times magazine back in 2001 on what caused the obesity epidemic, which was new enough in the public consciousness at the time that I thought you could do an article about what the likely causes were. I had a couple of hypotheses that had come out of an article I had recently done for Science—“The soft science of dietary fat”

What we knew about the obesity epidemic is that it’s localized in time between two National Health and Nutrition Examination surveys, between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Two very relevant things happened during that time period. One was high fructose corn syrup. It was introduced in 1977-78. By 1984 it replaced the sugar in Coke and Pepsi and it continues to replace the sugar in other drinks and food products. As a result, sugar consumption—caloric sweetener consumption—in the United States starts to increase dramatically for the first time in about 80 years. So, can you blame it on HFCS?


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The other hypothesis is related to the institutionalization of a low-fat diet as a healthy diet, a process that began officially in 1977 and also peaked in 1984. As a result, all these foods that in the 1960s were considered inherently fattening—pasta, bread, potatoes—were transformed by the 1980s into heart-healthy diet foods, and the public health authorities were telling us they should be the staple of our diet. They went on to become the base of the Food Guide Pyramid. So this also happened at the same time.

As I’m doing the story, the HFCS hypothesis doesn’t hold up on its own because, well, it’s just another form of sugar. I was interviewing food industry analysts and they’re saying, “Look, it’s not that there’s something inherently more fattening abut HFCS than sugar.” What’s relevant is that we start consuming more caloric sweeteners in part because we didn’t believe the HFCS was sugar. The sugar refiners were pitching it as a kind of healthy fruit sugar. Then the idea that a low-fat diet is healthy went along with a hypothesis making the rounds at the time that if a food didn’t have fat in it, it couldn’t make you fat. Yogurt’s a classic example: you remove a little bit of the fat from yogurt so that you can call it a heart-healthy, low-fat food, and you replace the fat with HFCS. So, take a little fat out, put in a lot of sugar, now you have a healthy food and we’re back to the low-fat dogma. And now you can eat it to excess—or so we thought—because it wouldn’t make you fat or give you heart disease. But what you’re eating is more sugar, although in the form of high fructose corn syrup.

Now, while I was doing the research for this story I came upon 5 clinical trials that had been completed and presented in conferences, but not yet published. These trials compared the Atkins Diet to a low-fat, low-calorie American Heart Association Step One diet. In each case, the Atkins Diet not only resulted in greater weight loss—you could eat as much as you wanted, you just had to stay away from carbs—but it also improved heart disease risk factors, which was the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen if you believe that dietary fat and saturated fat cause heart disease.

You go on this diet where you are eating as much as you want of bacon and fatty meat and cheeseburgers without the bun and cheese and butter and lobster Newburg and your heart disease risk improves. Which suggested not only that carbohydrates caused obesity and you’ve got your deus ex machina for the obesity epidemic, but that this whole low-fat dogma was completely misplaced. That this was one fundamental reason for the obesity epidemic. And that’s how I ended up writing this famous—or infamous—story for the New York Times magazine, “What if it’s all been a big fat lie?” and that got me a big book advance and I spent the next 5 years of my life writing Good Calories, Bad Calories.

GARY C: So basically these 2 articles are what inspired you to go on to write the book?

G. TAUBES: Yes; the article for Science had made me question the whole low-fat dogma itself: the idea that a low-fat diet is inherently a healthy diet. And then the research for the New York Times magazine article led to this idea that not only is a low-fat diet not necessarily a


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healthy diet, but it’s a high-carb diet, and that will not only make you fatter, but actually cause heart disease and diabetes and other disorders (depending on the carbs you’re now eating). Then throw in the sugar issue with HFCS on top of all this and you’ve got a national disaster in the sense of the obesity epidemic and the diabetes epidemic that goes with it.

GARY C: I understand that the controversy with HFCS is because of the “double whammy” effect: the glucose rise causes an insulin spike and then the fructose comes in with slower processing and turns into fat via metabolism by the liver.

G. TAUBES: I discussed this first in Good Calories, Bad Calories and then in a piece I did for the New York Times Magazine this past April, “Is Sugar Toxic?” Once a few influential authorities start blaming obesity on HFCS, the industry responds by making “No HFCS” a selling point. Back in the 80s, what made HFCS so popular was everyone knew that sugar was this generally noxious nutrient, so if you could have your foods, sweets, drinks without sugar but using this HFCS that corn refiners were pitching as a healthy alternative, that would be great. Now, 25 years later, corn refiners are backpedalling like mad to get us to realize that HFCS is sugar. The problems is that yes, it is sugar, and it’s not that it’s as harmless as sugar, it’s that it’s as harmful as sugar. Or at least that’s what I think. And the problem, as you point out, is that you get the glucose stimulating insulin secretion, and the fructose being metabolized mostly in the liver. The liver responds by turning it into triglycerides, and the insulin and the glucose end up influencing how the liver metabolized the fructose and you get a perfect storm of metabolic and hormonal response that appears to be the fundamental cause of insulin resistance. A few papers have just come out on that from UC Davis—which is one of the few research groups studying this in the United States—and once you become insulin resistant, then all these easily digestible carbohydrates are problematic.

GARY C: You have a background as a science writer and now you’ve become an authority on nutrition. Can you comment on that transition?

G. TAUBES: I’m always writing about good science and bad science. Even in my blog, when I write, infrequently as it is, I’m writing about good science and bad science, and about why I believe “x” and usually why other people believe “y”. This was always my obsession as a science writer: what does it take to get science right, to get the right answer? But it’s weird being a nutrition guru of sorts; somebody who people go to for advice. It’s kind of wonderful to know I have this effect on people, that I change their lives for the better, that I’m told this when I lecture, and I get these emails—it’s what keeps me going. It’s frankly a crusade, but having a crusade is fundamentally at odds with being a journalist. Even with investigative journalism you’re supposed to hit your subjects and then move on. And now it’s hard for me to move on. As I was explaining to someone the other day, what you want to do as an investigative journalist is uncover wrongs that are being perpetrated, and then the establishment steps in and fixes the problem. But what if the problem is the establishment and it’s system-wide—in this case, much of the nutrition, obesity, research community is doing science in a way that cannot establish reliable knowledge, and they may be perpetrating ideas that in this case actually affect the lives of the entire population.


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How can you just walk away, and say, “Well, I wrote that, so now I’m going to do something else. I’m going to look into some fraud case in nuclear physics, for example, or some other subject that looks ripe for a good investigation.” So the situation locks you in and, as I say with my colleague Peter Attia, in the co-founders letter on our NuSI website, you get to a point in life where you think somebody has to do something, and that somebody appears to be you. There’s no one to whom you can easily pass the buck.

Back when carb-restricted diets were being studied in any significant way back in the 50s and 60s, medical doctors read the literature and said, “This is interesting, carbohydrates seem to cause obesity, so what happens when I go on a carb-free diet, or carb-restricted diet?” They lost weight effortlessly and then they prescribed it to their patients and their patients lost weight effortlessly, and then in a few cases some them said, “This is important, I know how to cure obesity,” and they wrote books about it and the books sold really well. And the establishment response is to label them as quack diet book doctors whose only motivation is to make money.

From the research perspective, one of my repeated, depressing experiences is when I go to research seminars and you see these people who are getting funded to cure or prevent obesity, and yet their subjects are so arcane. For instance, a few years ago I listened to a talk at a childhood obesity conference about gene expression in the arcuate nucleus of zebra fish. I wanted to say to the researcher who gave the talk, “What if your research panned out beyond your wildest dreams and you were to win a Nobel Prize for it, how many decades do you think it would be before it affected the weight of one person?” Yet for this researcher, this was her life. This is not just what she’s interested in, but this is what she gets paid to do—it’s her job. She has to get grants from the NIH (National Institute for Health) and the grants have to be on the gene expression of the arcuate nucleus of zebra fish. And that’s what she does, that’s her niche, her schtick. And the whole conference was filled with people just like her. Not a single one of them is addressing environmental or lifestyle causes of obesity in a meaningful way. And they’re not, in part, because they believe those issues are settled—people eat too much and there’s too much junk food out there, etc. etc. So they’re studying these arcane subjects and they get funded to study them, and so this whole research establishment is self-perpetuating, and their motivation may have been to learn the truth about something, but it was also to keep getting paid to do this research that would never address the weight of a single individual. It’s a crazy world.

GARY C: It’s the same when I try to explain to people who actually fund the ADA (American Dietetic Association now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics), and they can’t believe it. The ADA is the backbone of registered dietitians and nutritionists, and when people find out that Kellogg’s and Coke are some of their head financiers, and in fact, fund a lot of the research, they can’t believe it.

G. TAUBES: Why don’t other journalists care? Wouldn’t that be a great story for the Washington Post: The food industry support of the American Dietetic Association? The American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association. I have colleagues at major newspapers, whom I’ve known for 25-30 years. I’ve tried to get them interested in these stories, and I can’t do it. Often their response has been, “That’s your story, and we don’t want to infringe on your story.” And I say,


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“But don’t you understand, if I do it, the story will be marginalized because I did it! I need other journalists to care!” They don’t say I’m wrong or that these aren’t good stories; they just don’t want to get involved.

GARY C: Is it the fear of being ostracized?

G. TAUBES: I don’t know what it is. If it’s that important they wouldn’t be ostracized—certainly not at the New York Times. Now it’s true that what I’ve been writing conflicts with what people they work with have written—Jane Brody and Gina Kolata—so maybe they don’t want to do it because they don’t want to be in a situation where they’re implicitly criticizing their colleagues, but it’s a little crazy.

GARY C: Did you think Good Calories, Bad Calories would cause so much controversy as you were writing and researching it?

G. TAUBES: Well, yes and no. I actually thought it would create more controversy. And then I had to be reminded that no book can create as much controversy as a New York Times magazine cover story. I had thought that when the book came out it would make a huge splash and people would be debating it in the literature and medical research. It’s been a slow and building controversy, and it’s growing, but I thought it would be bigger than it was. People can ignore a book, but if you have a New York Times magazine cover story, even if you want to ignore it, your neighbor or your assistant or your boss will read it and at least ask you about it, so you can’t ignore it! A book? Easy to ignore; especially a 500-page book with a faux diet book title and is a dense and difficult read.

GARY C: Why do you think scientists and researchers are so hung up on the calories in-calories out theory as it relates to weight loss—the law of thermodynamics?

G. TAUBES: There are a few reasons. First, it seems obvious, which is why we all believed it. Even if you think about it for 5 minutes, you just don’t bother to question it—I just assumed it was true. Even when I wrote the original New York Times magazine story in 2002, I was still thinking in terms of calories in and calories out. It just seems obvious and you’d never really think about it.

The other reason is that everyone else you know thinks the same way. If you live in the world where everybody thinks that the sun rotates around the earth rather than vice versa, you’re going to think that way also. And if you ever start suspecting that it doesn’t, you’re going to get in trouble and look like a quack when you start arguing with everyone else that something so simple is wrong. If everyone you respect believes something, then you’re going to believe it also. And one of my jobs now, I feel, is to show the research community that everybody they respect actually doesn’t believe as they believe anymore. These people have taken a look at what I’ve been saying, taken it seriously, and as a result, have changed the way they think.

G. TAUBES: So here are the reasons in short: first, this idea seems obviously true; second, everyone else you know believes it is obviously true; third, if you argue that it isn’t, you get


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marginalized. (One of my favorite lines on this was from a British researcher who told a friend in the UK who was giving him my argument, that he “sounds like a creationist.”) This is classic cognitive dissonance. When someone like me comes along arguing that this seemingly simple truth is just wrong, it’s far easier to believe that I’m a nut then that there’s substance to my arguments. And then part of this is the assumption that there must be hard evidence refuting these counterintuitive arguments. There has got to be evidence that what I am saying is wrong and what they’re believing is right. So the perfectly reasonable approach in 99.999999… percent of cases, is to ignore these arguments and get on with whatever else it is they’re doing—their productive work. Then there is this sort of a gut feeling we all have that when we work out a lot we lose a little weight. When we eat less, we lose a little weight. When we eat more, we gain a little weight. So maybe what Taubes is talking about is relevant to some weird special cases, but the conventional wisdom is right about everything else.

GARY C: When it comes to calories, they don’t matter as much as people think, but it’s the quality of calories that truly counts. Explaining calorie quality is one of the most difficult concepts for me to explain to my clients. I always use the 2,000 calories of Doritos (11 ounces) compared to 2,000 calories of carrots (8 pounds) example.

G. TAUBES: That’s a good way to do it. And everyone would accept that as obviously true, but there are still ways to explain it that are consistent with the conventional wisdom—i.e., the calories in the Doritos are denser calories, and so you can eat more of them. When I give my lectures, I think I do a good job of getting the audience to accept that they don’t really benefit by thinking of fat accumulations in terms of calories consumed or expended. And I think most of the audience typically does get it. They are all nodding and they understand, they see the point. But I feel like once they leave it takes about 36 hours before the vast majority return to their conventional way of thinking about it. That’s their default position and it’s resistant to change.

GARY C: Calorie counting is what we were taught and it’s completely ingrained into us from day one. When I take clients on the “Primal Shopping” service, I have to show them how to read labels, and even then they will revert to the calories per serving habit.

G. TAUBES: I got an email from a friend the other day with an excerpt from an interview with a nutritionist at Boston University talking about putting patients on calorie-restricted diets. So this BU researcher, when someone comes into her clinic, she puts them on a 1,200 to 1,500 calorie a day diet, significantly lower than the 2,000 calories a day that a normal moderately active female eats or the 2,500 a day that a male might eat. And then the interviewer says, well, with that degree of calorie restriction, most people produce a chronic hunger. And the BU researcher agrees, and says that, indeed, many people cannot tolerate hunger for too long and that’s why most diet programs fail. And I’m thinking, well, why then are you putting these poor patients on this diet? You’re basically starving them. Of course, no one can tolerate starvation for long. But for whatever reason, this BU researcher doesn’t see the lunacy of this approach, or the inconsistency in the thinking. How do you get their attention? Wake them up? And the answer is, it’s going to take time because appealing to common sense doesn’t work.


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GARY C: It really doesn’t, that is the amazing thing too about the fad programs that I tell people. Such as the P90X and Insanity workouts, they are great workouts, don’t get me wrong. I mean, the workout portion is based on pretty solid principles, but when you dig a little deeper, you see that the diet uses the typical starvation philosophy based on calories in vs. calories out. You are eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,100 to 1,200 calories while working out 6 days a week for an hour and half a day or whatever it is. You are basically working out at maximum intensity and I tell people you are not losing weight primarily because of the workout, but you are just starving yourself at this point. Sure it is possible to get ripped in 90 days, if you can stick with it. I have only met one person who has made it through the entire P90X program. At least they told me that they finished it. But yeah, it is tough.

GARY C: Did you make any changes to your diet as you were researching Good Calories, Bad Calories?

G. TAUBES: I had started applying the principles when I was doing the research for the original science story. I had actually done the Atkins diet in an experiment and lost weight effortlessly. Then I had fallen off of it like many people do, but when I started the New York Times magazine article I sort of decided to go back to restricting carbohydrates. When I was done with GCBC and understood what the data actually showed, I had come to trust my own judgment more than I trust the establishments. So I am kind of stuck with living by it now, and it works, which certainly makes it easier. I feel I can eat as much as I want and not gain weight, so long as I am not eating carbohydrates. My weight stays stable regardless of how much I eat. And when I have to go without eating, I’m not particularly hungry. It was about 4:00 pm before I got around to having lunch today. I had to run downtown before our interview and that put off lunch for a few hours. That would have never happened prior to my research and embracing this way of eating. Now I find it relatively easy to skip meals, even go a day without eating. And I think I know why that’s true, because my body is working correctly, or as least as I understand it.

GARY C: And that is another point I try to make to people, and I tell them if they don’t believe the concept, or if it is too foreign to them, just run a simple experiment. One day, eat highly processed carbs. Eat nothing but bagels, sugary yogurt, pasta, bread, other bread items, which for most people is their typical diet. Almost all of them come back and go, “I literally can eat all day.” I can eat until the time I went to bed no problem and I was still hungry. I then tell them, the next day eat healthy fats and nothing but protein, and try to stuff yourself. Try the same technique that you did with the highly processed carbs, and they are shocked. After the first meal they eat, they stuff themselves and they find they are not hungry until 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 in the afternoon. I find this gives them a good baseline to understand how their body processes the different nutrients, and especially highly process carbohydrates. It is so simple.

GARY C: What would you say during your research over the years would be the one food item that does the most damage to Americans’ health?

G. TAUBES: Sugar…a combination of glucose and fructose that’s in both sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily lose significant weight by getting


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sugar out of your diet, or become metabolically healthy merely by doing that, but it seems to be the substance that causes the most problems to begin with. There’s compelling evidence (to me, anyway) that it is the likely dietary cause of insulin resistance.

GARY C: I tell people it is a two-fold addiction, physical and mental, when it comes to sugar.

G. TAUBES: I am not sure that the addiction is in the brain directly, so much as it is the brain responding to the effect these sugars have in the body.

GARY C: Not to the hormones?

G. TAUBES: Well, one of the interesting issues here is that the thing that separates sugar from white flour is the fructose in the sugar. The fructose makes it sweet or sweeter. As I understand it, fructose does not get into the brain; it does not cross the blood-brain barrier.

GARY C: Yeah, that is how I understand it too.

G. TAUBES: If that’s the case, what’s prompting the addiction? There’s only one group that did significant research on this, at Princeton University.

GARY C: That was in research with rats, correct?

G. TAUBES: Yes, and when I asked them about this, it was like they never thought of it. It never crossed their minds. So I don’t have any answer. With other drugs of addiction, we got the molecules, cocaine, nicotine and whatever getting into the brain and directly stimulating dopamine receptors. But if this isn’t happening with fructose, what’s causing the addiction? Is it creating metabolic conditions in the body that could induce a physiological craving, and the brain is responding to that? I don’t think you need a lot of scientific research here to establish that it’s working as some kind of drug, though. You just need children. I see how sugar affects my children and think, how can this possibly be good for them? I remember one post-Halloween binge with my then three-year-old—four small pieces of candy—and he ran around the house naked for 20 minutes before collapsing in a tantrum when told it was time to go to bed. I turned to my wife and said, if we had given him cocaine his behavior probably would not have been any weirder, or any more extreme. And yet somehow because it is sugar, it is fine.

GARY C: I think I remember acting just like that as a kid wired on sugar. I remember one time my sister and me running around the backyard naked like wild animals, high as a kite on Kool-Aid and cookies.

GARY C: One thing I hear quite often—not only from parents, but what I have read in articles and research—is how over and over they say sugar does not affect the mood or energy level of children. It doesn’t make them hyper or erratic. And I’m thinking, okay, I have been around


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thousands of children and families over my life and every time they give them sugar they lose their mind. It is like a switch is turned on with sugar.

GARY C: Have you run across any research on the relationship between sugar and child hyperactivity?

G. TAUBES: I have, and you know, it is kind of classic bad science—not the research, but the point I just made about my son. It’s why you don’t want to depend on anecdotal observations. It is quite possible that my kid would act just as bazaar on days that he does not have sugar, and I’m not paying attention to those days. It is possible. And the only way to know for sure is to do an experiment—a randomized controlled trial. I believe that I only get a 20-minute tantrum from my sons’ post-sugar ingestion. And we have to spell rather than say the names of foods with sugar, because we are afraid that if my youngest, for instance, even hears a word like “lollipop,” or “popsicle,” then we are going to have this sudden demand for that food and that will provoke a tantrum and a 20-minute altercation. But again, there are studies out there from the 1980s that purport to demonstrate that this is a misconception. That the interpretation is that I am deluded and have been fooled by this anecdotal observation. And it could be true. I should probably spend more time reading those studies. But just from observing my children, I’m pretty convinced that sugar acts like a drug. The addiction doesn’t appear to be identical to other addictions in its actions, but whatever it is, it’s a powerful phenomenon. I also don’t really need a body of scientific research to tell me whether or not I was addicted to sugar. And I am pretty confident that I don’t need one to tell you my son is. If that is an unscientific attitude then I apologize.

GARY C: I think what has happened is the medical community thinks it is easier to diagnose them with ADHD and prescribe drugs.

G. TAUBES: Possibly.

GARY C: It is easier just to give him or her a pill that completely zones them out instead of actually cutting out their sugar intake.

G. TAUBES: Well I don’t know if that is true or not, I mean probably in some cases when that is the reason behind it. Here’s an obvious question or experiment to do: take kids who are diagnosed with ADHD and get them off sugar entirely and, okay, maybe refined carbs too, and see if the ADHD goes away. The question is how to do this as a controlled trial, but I’d love to see it done.

GARY C: That would be interesting.

G. TAUBES: I don’t know, I mean I have always wanted to do that experiment in my family. Let’s give them no sugar for a week, and see if their mood swings are less severe. Then we can put them back on sugar and see what happens. Is a week long enough? And ideally the person making the decision about the mood swings is unaware of whether the kids are on a sugar week or a no-sugar week. Ideally, the kids would be videotaped for the period of the experiment—all interactions—and then some independent observer would judge. But it’s even more complicated


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than that. I might change how I react to the kids based on whether it’s a sugar week or not, so ideally I can’t even know, nor could my wife, so we react to the children in what medical researchers call a “blinded” fashion. And then, well, maybe the week they’re on sugar happens to coincide with a bad week in school or a bug going around, so they respond poorly that week, but it’s not because of the sugar. So that’s why you need a lot of kids and a random assignment, to try to control for these external factors. The more you think about the doing these experiments right, the harder they become.

GARY C: It is incredible that the medical community has not tried something like this. Because it is a pretty straightforward experiment. Instead we want to fund the effects of alcohol on the decision-making abilities of prostitutes in China. I remember reading something like that not too long ago. It just makes you wonder what the hell we are doing with our research dollars anymore.

GARY C: If you could give anyone one piece of advice on how to lose weight, what would it be?

G. TAUBES: Well, get rid of the sugar, refined carbs and the easily digestible carbs in the diet. And replace it with mostly fat and some protein.

GARY C: Eating fat is the hard part for them to understand. I have clients fight me tooth and nail about consuming more fat in their diet because they have been brainwashed it is bad for you.

G. TAUBES: But not only that, it’s the heart disease thing. I mean, can you really eat butter and put cream in your coffee and not get heart disease. And that is the hardest struggle, the hardest battle to get over.

GARY C: I notice that when you explain the research to people they kind of glaze over. When I give them my personal experience, it sinks in a little better even though the personal experience directly reflects the research that I just explained to them.

(Screaming from children and door slams downstairs)

GARY C: (Chuckling) It must be the sugar.

GARY C: Well, on that note, I better let you get down there and make sure the house isn’t on fire. I want to thank you for the interview and had a great time chatting with you.

G. TAUBES: You are welcome and good luck with your projects.

This concludes my interview with Gary Taubes. Make sure to check back for more health expert related interviews and to purchase my book the Primal Power Method: Change Your Body. Change Your Life. The Modern Caveman Lifestyle, Simplified on my blog at www.primalpowermethod.com


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ABOUT GARY COLLINS

Gary Collins, MS was born in Southern California and raised in the High Desert at the basin of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. He has been involved in organized sports, nutrition and fitness for over 30 years.

A self-declared sports junkie, he participated and excelled in various organized sports since the age of seven. He is extremely passionate about the pursuit of optimal health in mind, body and soul. Collins has two goals: To make being healthy as simple and enjoyable as possible and to give people the truth.

Collins’ background is very unique and brings a much-needed perspective to today’s fields of both health and nutrition. He holds an AS degree in Exercise Science, BS in Criminal Justice and a MS in Forensic Science.

After an exciting career in military intelligence Collins worked for the U.S. State Department, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a Special Agent. His career took him around the world and gave him a unique perspective on not only how the United States, but the world is affected by our food, drug and healthcare policies.

The highlights of his career took him from protecting some of the most powerful people in the world to investigations involving the biggest tainted pet food death case in the U.S. to the intricate dealings of one of the largest counterfeit prescription drug rings in the world. He has often said, “If Americans really knew what was going on in the area of healthcare and nutrition in this country, they would be appalled.”

It can be safely said no one in the health and fitness industry has the inside knowledge and background that Collins has. He is a hybrid of a high intensity health expert and an investigator rolled into one.

An author and college professor, Mr. Collins advises and is a consultant for high-level organized sports programs and gyms. He is currently an exercise and nutrition consultant for the San Diego City College Men’s Basketball team, one of the most successful Junior College sports programs in California. Some of his other clients include college football players for high profile programs such as Purdue and Kansas State University.


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In addition to his published articles the Primal Power Method Series blows the lid off of conventional wellness expectations and is essential for every American seeking better health.

Collins is a Master level personal trainer (few people hold such a designation) with specialized training in nutrition, exercise therapy, strength and conditioning, youth fitness, and senior fitness.

He is a CrossFit member, a member of the International Sports Science Association, International Mountain Bicycling Association, Nutritional Therapy Association, National Association for Nutrition Professionals, IDEA Health and Fitness Association, and the Weston A. Price and Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

With his unique background, Collins is in demand worldwide as a guest speaker at wellness conferences, colleges, and Fortune 500 companies.

For more information on speaking engagements please send your request to [email protected].

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CARBOHYDRATE MYTHS DEBUNKED - The Simple Life · 2020. 11. 10. · Gary Taubes is an award-winning science and health journalist, and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science