Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder and president of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of The Case Against Sugar (2016), Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (2007), published as The Diet Delusion in the UK. Taubes began writing and reporting on science and medicine for Discover magazine in 1982. As a free-lance journalist, he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Science, Nature, the British Medical Journal, and a host of other publications. 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. (He was the first print journalist to win this award three times.) His journalism has been included in numerous Best of anthologies, and his books have been translated into two dozen languages.
Taubes has focused his reporting on controversial science and, specifically, the confluence of research in nutrition, obesity, chronic disease and public health policy. He is also the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), and Bad Science (1993). Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard as an undergraduate and has an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981). He lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two sons.