Gary Taubes: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

In "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", Gary Taubes wrote this, for the New York Times:

Once upon a time, women took estrogen only to relieve the hot flashes, sweating, vaginal dryness and the other discomforting symptoms of menopause. In the late 1960s, thanks in part to the efforts of Robert Wilson, a Brooklyn gynecologist, and his 1966 best seller, “Feminine Forever,” this began to change, and estrogen therapy evolved into a long-term remedy for the chronic ills of aging. Menopause, Wilson argued, was not a natural age-related condition; it was an illness, akin to diabetes or kidney failure, and one that could be treated by taking estrogen to replace the hormones that a woman’s ovaries secreted in ever diminishing amounts. With this argument estrogen evolved into hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., as it came to be called, and became one of the most popular prescription drug treatments in America.

Read Taubes' NYT piece here. The author was also a guest of NPR's Talk of the Nation in 2007. The podcast of that show is posted/embedded below. See also: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage), Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, The Diet Delusion: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Loss and Disease.