How to write about science? Many people want to make a career writing about things they believe in. Here is the single best example of a successful science writer I can bring you. author of multiple books, writer of three cover stories for The New York Times Magazine and countless pieces for Discover, Science and more, Gary Taubes brought investigative journalism to science and science reporting has never been the same.
Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher.
David Leite: Marion, today’s topic is right up my alley, and it’s, why do we get fat? As a man of girth, I’ve been trying to answer that question for years. Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University educated author and science writer Gary has written about Americans’ obsession with addiction to and harmful results of consuming sugar and other carbohydrates. His most recent books are The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat. It’s work is controversial. It’s groundbreaking, and yes, I’m going to say this on air, it works because I have lost almost 40 pounds. Welcome Gary.
Gary Taubes: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and I’m delighted to hear that news.
Marion: Oh, isn’t that wonderful? Full disclosure, Gary, we’ve known each other for almost 40 years. We’d been best friends for most of those. Whenever anybody asks me about you, I always say you’re a dogma exploder, which I think would be like, a little superhero, you know, cape you could wear, that kind of glides.
David: Have your own superhero, little icon figure.
Marion: Dogma exploded, you’re the guy who blows up the things that we all thought were sacred and you take on things we seem to take for granted as true, like cold fusion, salt, fat, carbohydrates. The first question has to be, how did this line of questioning and inquiry take root in you?
Gary: Ah, okay. I’ve been told I can’t go back to my childhood and my relationship with my father.
David: We didn’t tell you that. We’re happy to hear.
Marion: Lie down on the couch. Just lie on the couch and talk away.
Gary: Here we go. At some point, all of the science is about establishing reliable knowledge, right? That’s what scientists do. Most science journalists see their job as sort of translating the difficult technical aspects of science and the thrill of the scientific pursuit into something that people without a scientific education can understand and enjoy on some level. That’s what we all have to do.
Gary: But, I had the opportunity, I had a background in hard science. I wasn’t very good at it, which is why I moved into journalism, and as both a journalist and as a reporter of science, you are allowed to question what you hear. I simply had the opportunity early in my career. When I was a a young man and my friendship with you, Marion was new, I had the opportunity to go up to Geneva and live at a physics laboratory, the CERN, the European Center for nuclear research for 10 months, thinking I was going to be following a great discovery and writing about that.
My idea was, there’s a, one of the great books in science is called the Double Helix. It was written by Jim Watson, who won the Nobel Prize, shared the Nobel prize for elucidating the structure of the DNA molecule. It was all about the how they did that and the life of the scientists and all the extraneous mishegoss that went with it. I thought, “Hey, here’s an opportunity to write a book about a great discovery, to be there while it happens, and not have to be a brilliant scientist to do it.”
I got to CERN and I realized after about a month that, what I thought was a great discovery, had some dramatic problems, significant problems. As I followed it for the following nine months, I saw that basically documented this, the researchers learning how they had screwed up. And, the Nobel Laureate who ran the experiment trying to hide from the rest of the world, their revelation that they had screwed up. That Nobel Laureate was a kind of a machiavellian figure who had trouble strictly adhering to the truth in any conversation. He sort of perceived an answer to the question was what he wanted you to believe rather than what he thought the truth might be. I had the opportunity in the course of this research to be lied to repeatedly by a Nobel laureate.
Marion: And, you liked it. That became the addiction.
Gary: Well, it certainly made me realize that there is a place in science for investigative journalism, and that you are allowed to question what you hear, and that part of the job is to always be asking, does this make sense?
Marion: Yeah.
Gary: Often, what you’re reporting about is not something you can judge, you know, quantum optics. I mean, I have no idea what makes sense or not. But, when you get into fields like nutrition and public health, you’re addressing some pretty profound phenomena that we all have experience on. As you’re talking to researchers, you’re allowed to ask yourself as you’re interviewing them, does this make sense? That’s basically what I started doing for my career.
Marion: Yeah, and what you’ve been doing, I mean, all along the way, I’ve watched this being applied, as I said, to things like cold fusion and salt and fat and carbohydrates. You brought up the subject of nutrition, you brought us up right up to what you do these days. You went from this sort of rogue physicist to this field of nutrition. Everybody’s writing a diet book, it seems, you know, except for me.
David: Even I want to write one.
Marion: David wants to write one now. How do you make yourself, you’re writing in a field that everybody seems to be writing about. How do you make yourself stand out from the noise in a field like nutrition? Every single diet book author says, “Hey, I’m the one that’s got the secret cue to lose weight. You shouldn’t read anybody else’s.” What do you do?
Gary: Yeah, and it’s funny cause I just finished a book that once again tried to do this. I’m getting the edited manuscript back tomorrow. I’ll find out how well my editor thinks I succeeded at that job. That’s the rub. You look at, and I’ve kind of created this problem myself, which is interesting, because when I started doing this as a journalist, you had diet books.
Diet books say, “I was a doctor who was overweight and I was struggling with my weight and I tried to do what I was supposed to do and it didn’t work, so I delved into the research and lo and behold, I found the secret and it worked for me and it worked for my patients. Now I’m gonna tell you what the secret is and I’m going to make that secret different from all the other secrets, because if it’s the same thing, then there’s no reason to buy my book instead of someone else’s book.” You end up with these sort of cacophony of voices.
Everyone saying, “I’ve got the secret,” and some people do. That’s the joke. Part of my learning experience in doing investigative science journalist on nutrition was that the problem we have is that the academic research scientists did such a lousy job trying to understand what the cause of obesity is, what the cause of the sort of environmental, dietary trigger of heart disease and hypertension and diabetes, and you name a chronic disease, they screwed it up. That, it’s left to physicians and lay people to learn the truth themselves. Some of those people actually discovered things that work for them.
As a journalist, I had a unique opportunity, so I started my research for the journal Science. I was working for Science throughout the ’90s as a correspondent. My editor had faith in me, so when I said I’m going to investigate this idea that salt causes high blood pressure, because I realize there’s a controversy there, and then I spent basically nine months of my life doing one magazine article that paid for about a month and a half. You have to set up your life in such a way that you could get paid for it. It’s like a lawyer, you do corporate work you don’t like to make money, and then you find you finance your pro bono work.
I was able to start my journalistic investigations for Science, which gave me credibility. The reporting is always about trying to establish credibility. The answer to your question, how do you stand out, in my case was to keep hammering on the part that I’m a journalist. I have no, well, I used to have no dog in the race. Now I clearly do, but I started this with an open mind and I functioned as an investigative journalist, which is very much like functioning as a scientist because you are trying to establish reliable knowledge. You’re investigating the unknown, and as long as I played by those games, people might not like what I report, but on some level I would always remain credible for reporting it. I wasn’t a doctor working in Missouri saying-
Marion: Right.
David: The thing that I want to understand is, I read both Sugar and also Why We Get Fat, blown away by the fact that doctors a long time ago, you talked about in hospitals, were actually giving patients saturated fat through meats and a lot of the foods that we’re told to stay away from now. I have followed the book, I have followed other aspects that relate to the book and I’ve lost weight. I told my doctor what I’m doing, and everything just goes crazy in that office when I say I’m following this because they think it’s a bunch of bad science. How do you as a writer now deal with these people who are freaking out and are detractors to your work and your research?
Gary: Well, along the line you have to develop a thick skin. Okay? The pieces I did for Science were, you know, Science, a journal that’s read by the scientific community and I’m concluding that the establishment is wrong, and the established researchers write in, they write a letter to the editor saying Taubes is wrong because he didn’t say this and he got this wrong and he misinterpreted that, and the editors show it to me and I’m allowed to write a response. That’s published in the journal and that’s the end of it. That happened with my salt piece and then it happened with the dietary fat piece. Then, I stepped into the New York Times Magazine, which is a funny story, by the way, if you allow. How do people get started in their work?
David: Their careers, yeah.
Gary: I’m engaged to this wonderful writer, this is back in 2000 and she has a maternal figure, now, her biological mother’s dead, but her maternal figure is a very powerful socialite designer, interior decorator in New York, an amazing personality. My fiance tells me that this woman doesn’t really get what I do as a science writer. She just doesn’t understand that. It doesn’t seem that important to her. Could I do something for The New York Times Magazine so that she’d get it?
Gary: I pitch an article to The New York Times Magazine saying, “Let’s figure out what the beginning of the obesity epidemic is.” I have a friend, it always helps in writing to have friends in high places. As a matter of fact, you guys, Marion definitely you learn, as your friends become editors and they moved from better and better magazines, you move to better and better magazines because they need writers they can trust.
Marion: Absolutely.
David: Yep.
Marion: It’s why you keep your friends.
Gary: Yeah.
David: That’s right.
Gary: One of the problems with being a writer in the middle of nowhere, it’s why it’s better to be in New York because if you’re in New York, you’ll befriend editors and they’ll give you opportunities. I have an editor friend I’m having lunch with regularly at the local French cafe. I pitch him a story on the obesity epidemic. In the course of my research on dietary fat for Science, I had an administrator at the National Institutes Of Health say, “Back in 1984 we put the whole country on a low fat diet and we thought that they would, if nothing else, lose weight because they’re going to stop eating all the dense calories of butter and fat. Lo and behold, we have an obesity epidemic and they start eating all these carbohydrates.”
I pitched him this idea and I say, “Maybe it’s this, maybe the low fat diet made us eat too many carbs. Maybe it’s sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Let me look into it.” I end up in the course of this research, basically writing an article that says that, you know, maybe Atkins was right all along. Maybe the problem was the carbohydrates and we should all be eating high fat diets and not eating carbs.
Marion: The famous piece that ended up on the top cover of The New York Times Magazine with the big steak on it, that said, “What if it’s all been a big fat lie,” right?
David: Exactly.
Marion: How many times have you been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine?
Gary: Ah, three now.
Marion: Let’s talk, no, come on. I need to know, what’s it like? I mean, does it fulfill all that fantasy that we all have? Like, “Oh, if I could just have a piece on the cover of the most powerful magazine in the world, my life would be made.”
David: Did your life change?
Marion: Well, he got married, he did marry the woman.
David: He did, that’s right.
Marion: Apparently her stepmother said, ah, “Okay. He’s good. You could marry him.”
Gary: Yeah. Then I dragged her to California and she stopped saying things like he’s good. Yes. Anyway, yeah, no. I mean, it’s remarkable, and especially if your article was saying everything you thought you knew about diet was wrong. That’s what I mean about, I sort of helped promote this idea that even a journalist could come in and say everything you think you know about diet is wrong. You should all maybe be eating this instead of that. We’ve gotten the wrong advice, Atkins.
I mean, talk about, remember I said earlier that the job is to establish your credibility. That article originally leads with this young pediatric endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School, runs the pediatric obesity clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital, and has kind of concluded himself that the problem is these highly refined carbohydrates and sugars, and he’s putting these kids on something that looks quite a bit like the Atkins Diet. He doesn’t think of it that way, but I could think of it that way. By starting the article with this young Harvard researcher, it’s a way that I could suck readers in without scaring them away, and I could remain credible.
Even the establishment researchers are going to say, “Wow, he’s starting at Harvard with this Harvard researcher. This is all good,” right? I’m thinking, “Credibility, credibility.” The editor’s at the time, Adam Moss, who went on to now has been at New York magazine for a decade and a half, and Hugo Lindgren who was a young editor at the Times Magazine and went on to run The Times Magazine a decade later. They read the article and they say, “You know, you bury this Atkins guide deep in the article. I want him buried where he was out of view and when scare people, I want to be able to soften them up by the time they get to Atkins.” They say, “Atkins is the elephant in the living room. Put them in the lead.”
David: Okay.
Gary: Oh, I write this lead that says if the medical establishment, has this, find yourself standing naked in Time Square type of nightmare, it’s that Robert Adkins of the infamous Atkins Diet revolution was right and everything they’ve been saying was wrong. Something to that effect. It was phrased more colorfully. I show it to my by then wife, because we’ve gotten married during this period. I say to her, “They won’t run this in a million years.” I email it to the Times, and they don’t change a word and that becomes the lede.
Now, when you get that cover story with the picture of the porterhouse steak with the butter, which I learned like 15 years later, they had picked because it was so greasy and disgusting looking. The headline is, “Maybe it’s all been a big fat lie,” not only do you get the cover of The New York Times Magazine, but every publisher in New York wants to publish your books. Then there’s the …
Marion: Pretty wonderful.
Gary: The good news is, yeah, I had wanted to write a book for years, but knew I couldn’t do it because I tend to spend years and years doing research and I would never be able to break even. Now that I was getting married, I had to be able to break even in my life. My father had passed away so I couldn’t borrow money from him, as most writers do when they work on their books.
Marion: Yeah, that freelance life. We’re going to get to that in a minute and talk about life is really like, although I just want to add here that having written a New York Times Magazine piece many, many years ago, and having gone through a very similar experience where I had written a lead that I thought was very kind and gentle and quiet, and it was a magazine piece that introduced the subject of Alzheimer’s disease to people.
The editor finally turned to me one night when we were editing together and he said, “How did this thing start?” I said, “Well, I thought my mother,” who was the subject of the piece, “I thought my mother was going mad when she killed the cats.” He took that line, put it at the top of the piece, and I can tell you that the same sort of thing happened to me, that startling awareness and thinking, “Oh, they’ll never run a piece that opens with I thought my mother was going mad when she killed the cats,” but they did. It changed, for me, everything I’ve ever known about how to open a piece. Right?
David: There’s nothing like an incredible lede to bring people into a piece, and also to make you stand out from other writers.
Marion: That’s it.
Gary: Well, and it’s true. First of all, I want to say when I met Marion, clearly I know the first sentence to her piece better than the first sentence to mine, you know, I was mouthing the word with her as she went along.
Marion: That’s so sweet.
Gary: That piece was so shocking, that I met her, we were neighbors in New York, so a long and one time romantic story, but I remembered her piece like I had read it the day before instead of, I think, maybe a year and a half before. I had written a piece in Playboy about my ill-fated boxing career that Marion had read. Our first discussion-
Marion: Yeah, it was one of those wonderful New York stories. We’re walking down the street, I had just read your piece in Playboy and I’m walking down the street and you’re walking down the street. We’ve never met, and we start talking. I’m looking at you and I’m thinking, “Wait a minute, I think this is the guy whose piece I just read,” and five minutes into the conversation you said, “Wait a minute, aren’t you the girl that wrote that piece in The New York Times Magazine?” Those stories do happen in a writing life. I’ve always loved that story. I love to tell it to people.
David: I somehow feel like I should leave my office and let you two just carry on.
Marion: Like a little Woody Allen story.
David: Yeah.
Gary: Getting back to ledes and writing, when I’m doing a piece, and again and now I am kind of trapped at the time in this nutrition world and obesity and I want people to understand that. It’s one of the things I miss about my professional career the most, is that rush of getting to take on a new story. I feel like this is how dogs must feel in the hunt when they pick up the smell of the fox. But, when I’m doing the reporting, the moment I know the story’s going to work is when I, when I know what the lede is.
Marion: Oh.
David: Yeah. I’m with you. Yep, once I get that first few sentences and I know that it works and it sparkles, I know that I got the piece. Until that point, I really can’t continue writing.
Gary: Yeah, and it also defines where the rest of the article’s going to go.
Marion: Absolutely.
Gary: It’s got to, so I just read this wonderful piece by another of our old friends, Natalie Angier in the Times about a Nobel Laureate chemist at Cal Tech. You could see this woman was famous for taking, I mean famous for many things, but among her character traits is that she can take something that should be this amazing story like meeting Obama for the first time and getting a presidential medal of science of some form, and turn it into a hilarious sort of self effacing story. Natalie just starts her article with this sort of couple of these woman’s, Nobel Laureate Cal Tech professor’s stories about fiascos that are also hilarious in the telling. It’s sort of, you can feel her as she’s hearing these stories saying, “I can’t do better than this. I’m going to put those in the lead,” and that captures who this woman is.
David: That’s interesting, because I think a great lead will not only tell you where you’re going, it’s like a directional, it will also give the reader enough information about voice and personality of the writer. You know you’re hooked with that voice.
Marion: Which, gets back to that whole idea of being reliable and being somebody who’s hands we really want to be in, even if you’re making us question what it is that we’ve previously believed about salt or fat or whatever.
David: That’s a great freelancer.
Marion: It is a great freelancer. I want to talk about that, because so many of the people that may be listening would like to live this freelance life. I mean the Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z generations have the sense that they’re going to live without working for the man. This life as a freelancer, how does it go these days? Can you still do it? Is it nonstop discipline, or like me, do you have to sort of barter with yourself to get to the work every day? Are you able to find enough sources? Can you just sort of talk to us about what the life is like being a freelance writer?
Gary: One of the great mistakes I ever made was becoming a freelance writer. I barely survived it. First thing you need is parents who can borrow money from, because the checks, you know, come in sporadically. I had a friend in the 90s who basically taught me how to run my freelance career as a business, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for that. That’s how he did it, and so I had different, in order to stay freelance, and I didn’t … I did it more or less out of choice. The advantage of being a freelancer is I could write the articles I wanted for the publications I wanted.
Marion: Right.
Gary: If I wanted to do an article for Science to speak about the subject at a level that scientists were interested in, which was often the level in science that I’m interested in. When we talked about science writing, one of the great gifts of science writing is being able to get all the science out of it so people can understand the story without getting tripped over the, you know, very complex subjects. The less science in it, the better. But, the stuff I did best, I was fascinated by the science. I didn’t want to have to dumb it down for anyone.
Marion: Right.
Gary: I wanted to discuss it at the level at which I found that interesting, so often I wanted to work for Science, but often it wasn’t suitable for science and I wanted to work, you know, I had connections at Discover, so I could tell my stuff to Discover. Or, sometimes you just, you know, the story is so good, that you’ll want to be wanted in the biggest possible venue, so you want it in The New York Times Magazine or you want it, you know, to this day, not getting into the New Yorker is one of my great heartbreaks.
Marion: Not yet. Not yet.
Gary: Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen at this point.
Marion: Well, you got the flexibility to write where you want to get it published. You run it like a business. We also know about you because we interviewed your wife on here on QWERTY a few episodes ago, the great novelist Sloan Tanen. We also know that you’ve got this two- household writer household. You’re living in a place where nobody’s got a regular job. We assume, of course, it’s just nonstop intelligent literary conversation at your house.
David: Oh yeah, Nick and Nora, the witty chatter.
Marion: Just Nick and Nora every day. But, is it a good life? Is it something that you would recommend to people at this point, writing full time, especially two people under the same house?
Gary: Well, again, it always comes down to you have to be able to afford it, financially and emotionally. The financial part is not easy. I was just, the other day, I’ll read a writer’s work and I’ll think, “Boy he or she is good. I’d like to learn more about them,” so I’ll Google them. I was googling a writer the other day who, freelance writer, lives in Boston, looks to be maybe in his late twenties and I’m thinking, how does he afford to do what he does?
Gary: Because, I know how hard it is, and I afforded it in part, I was working for the IBM magazine. Then, through the IBM people I met the public relations director of IBM, so the pieces that sort of defined my career at Science, these investigations into diet and health were tremendous money losers, but simultaneously, I was writing speeches and press releases for IBM, which I considered doctor’s money. I hated it, hated doing it, but it would pay for a month of my life in one week of work.
Marion: Yep.
Gary: I could spend the other three weeks working on my pro bono stuff, which was these investigations for Science. You have to be able to afford it. The other problem, at least with me, is if I can’t afford it, it’s hard. If you’re worried about money, it’s hard to focus on the work. The flip side, by the way is, if you don’t need the money at all, it’s hard to get motivated to finish the work. It’s a sort of delicate balance between paying the bills and being desperate enough that you actually do the job, finish it and hand it in. Maybe not everybody is as neurotic as I am, but that’s, through the ’90s, and once I started writing about nutrition, I was fine.
Like I said, you write a book saying everybody is wrong about diet except me, and you’ve got The New York Times, the soap box you could stand on. Yeah, I was okay. There were still rough patches where I was being saved by a grant here or a part time job there. But, you know, it’s just difficult. Magazines, if I were to write for a magazine like Discover today, I would be paid less per word than I was making in 1986 when I was 30 years old, and I could write two or three times as fast back then, which I can’t explain. But, an article back then that took me three weeks would take me three months today.
Marion: Quickly, as we wrap this up today, your book that you’re waiting to get the word on from your editor, what is it, when is it out? Let’s get our readers, our listeners, excited about that.
David: Yeah, what can you tell us about it?
Gary: Well, it’s arguing, making the same arguments I’ve been making in my three previous books on nutrition, because I have to get these arguments understood. Remember, the fundamental conclusion of my first book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is, we don’t get fat because we eat too much. We get fat because of a hormonal regulatory defect, the dietary trigger of which is the carbohydrates in our diets. If you’re one of these people who fatten easily …
David: As I am.
Gary: As you are and I used to be, not quite as easily, but then the only solution, only long-term solution is to remove carbs, because it’s the carbohydrates that drive that fattening process. I have to get that message understood, and the obesity and diabetes epidemics are so profound that I don’t feel like I can walk away and do something else. And, I don’t know if I could afford to walk away and do something else.
Marion: It’s a continuing theme. Well, thank you and I hope the message gets understood because we love your books. I have lived on the lifestyle since you first started writing about it, and I’m deeply grateful for that. But, we’re really deeply grateful for you coming on today.
David: And, we hope to have you won again and I will have lost another 40 or 50 pounds and we can talk more about that.
Marion: Gary’s latest books, The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It, can be found wherever books or audio books are sold. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Remember, there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you, as the great Maya Angelou you told us, so tell your story.
Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page.
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