Take, for instance, The Handbook of Obesity, published in 1998 and edited by three of the most influential authorities in the field. Put these two notions together and the result should be a palpable sense of cognitive dissonance. The conventional wisdom has also held, however, that efforts to cure the problem by inducing undereating or a negative energy balance-either by counselling patients to eat less or exercise more-are remarkably ineffective. Since the 1950s, the conventional wisdom on obesity has been simple: it is fundamentally caused by or results from a net positive energy balance-another way of saying that we get fat because we overeat. If we are to make any progress, he says, we have to look again at what really makes us fat Gary Taubes argues that the wrong hypothesis won out and that it is this hypothesis, along with substandard science, that has exacerbated the obesity crisis and the related chronic diseases. The history of obesity research is a history of two competing hypotheses.
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