March 11, 2026
Carbs vs Fat - Metabolic Health, Weight Loss & Gold Standard Science | Ep 24
Does eating fat actually make you fat? Or has modern nutrition science gotten the story backwards? In this episode of Unconditional, Norbie Schickel explores one of the biggest debates in modern nutrition: low-carb vs. low-fat diets and whether fat loss really comes down to “calories in, calories out.” The episode revisits the rise of the low-carb movement after Gary Taubes’ influential 2002 article, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”, which challenged decades of dietary advice by arguing...
Does eating fat actually make you fat? Or has modern nutrition science gotten the story backwards?
In this episode of Unconditional, Norbie Schickel explores one of the biggest debates in modern nutrition: low-carb vs. low-fat diets and whether fat loss really comes down to “calories in, calories out.”
The episode revisits the rise of the low-carb movement after Gary Taubes’ influential 2002 article, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”, which challenged decades of dietary advice by arguing that carbohydrates and sugar—not dietary fat—may be the real drivers of obesity and metabolic dysfunction.
But when proponents of the carbohydrate-insulin model put their theory to the ultimate test in a gold-standard randomized controlled trial conducted by NIH researcher Kevin Hall, the results appeared to contradict the low-carb hypothesis. Headlines quickly declared victory for low-fat diets.
Norbie breaks down what the study actually found—and more importantly, how it was designed. From the surprisingly small sample size to the six-day dietary intervention and calculated fat loss measurements, this episode explores the details that rarely make it into headlines.
Along the way, the conversation raises a bigger question: How should we interpret nutrition science—and what counts as real evidence when it comes to health and fat loss?
If you’re interested in nutrition science, metabolic health, keto and low-carb diets, the food pyramid debate, and the limits of “following the science,” this episode is a fascinating deep dive.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro: Fat vs Carbs & Gold Standard Science
06:04 Science & Nutrition - The Stakes & Context
06:42 Calories In Calories Out Is At Stake
07:50 The Role Of Dietary Fat & Weight Gain is at Stake
08:45 The Role of Science in Nutrition is at Stake
11:34 Humans Have Historically NOT Relied On Science For Nutrition
17:29 Gary Tuabes vs Kevin Hall - The Big Fat Debate
27:18 The Actual Study
37:46 The Validity of Fat Burn Measurements
40:09 Study Design and Its Implications
42:22 The Role of Science in Nutrition
#metabolichealth #fatloss #ketodiet #lowcarbdiet #weightloss
RESOURCES
WEBVTT
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Every now and then, a radical idea comes along and completely flips what we know or what we thought we knew upside down.
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The Earth isn't the center of the solar system.
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The world isn't flat.
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Hand washing will prevent childbed fever.
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There are many such examples across the universe of human knowledge.
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In the realm of health and fitness and nutrition, that's no different.
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With the recent inversion of the food pyramid, the rising concern around seed oils and say the emergence of the carnivore diet, you might say that we're living through many such inversions right now.
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What we knew or what we thought we knew has been completely flipped on its head.
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Now there are many takeaways each time one of these revolutions comes along.
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In addition to the specific change, they serve as an important reminder of the need for humility, or of the harm of hubris, and the willingness to hear people diametrically opposed to your perspective.
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As you know, I have been fascinated by all things health and fitness for as long as I can remember.
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And one of the first of these revolutions, these completely inversions, these paradigm flips, if you will, happened with respect to what would appear to be an obvious question.
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Does eating fat make you fat?
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And for most people, including myself at the time, they knew the answer to this question.
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Of course it did.
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In addition to the fact that all of the experts agreed, or at least the ones we heard from, well it's self evident, right?
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It's correct by definition.
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Of course fat makes you fat.
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It's like saying is a dog a dog or is a bird a bird.
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It's true by definition.
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Only for some people, noting what was an early uptick in obesity, despite worldwide knowledge, quote unquote, of what was making us fat, the answer didn't appear to be so obvious.
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And the real truth may have been diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom.
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Eating fat was not only not making us fat, eating fat was quite possibly the only thing that could save us from becoming fat.
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In 2002, a science writer and journalist named Gary Taubs published an article in the New York Times magazine titled What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
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An article which rocked the world of health and nutrition, in which he argued that the conventional understanding and government official dietary recommendations, it should be pointed out, were essentially upside down, that the consumption of dietary fat was not a driver of obesity and heart disease.
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But in fact, sugar and carbohydrates were actually to blame.
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By now, we're used to things like paleo diets, low carb diets, keto diets, even carnivore diets.
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But at the time, I have to impress upon you, this was radical, okay?
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As insane and as upside down as anything you could imagine within the space of health and nutrition.
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And as always, the stakes and the context matters.
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This was a very, very different time, okay, almost 25 years ago.
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I remember.
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Okay, I'm in high school at the time, but keep in mind, very limited early social media, right?
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Probably talk in my space, very limited alternative media.
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You know, we're talking something like blogs, right?
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Maybe the Drudge Report.
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This is a very, very different time.
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But despite the massive pushback from the establishment on this idea, on Taubs' idea, the chorus of the low carb movement started to form, first as a whisper and then as a roar.
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And in the space of about 10 years, this improbably radical idea, one fueled by incredible before and after photos of weight loss stories, of real people, the health turnarounds by millions of Americans, right when it seemed that low carb was poised to take over as the new normal, science stepped in, real science here, gold standard science, and it punched the challenger right in the mouth.
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With that, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Unconditional with Norby Shickle.
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We have a very exciting episode this week.
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This is a topic I've teased a bit in the past.
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And if you are a health and fitness nerd like me, I think this is a conversation you're really going to enjoy.
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Now there is a sentence that gets thrown around a lot in the health, fitness, and nutrition space.
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And it's something like this.
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Where's your study?
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Or show me the science, or something to that effect.
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And while often this can be a legitimate attempt to use the tool of science to get to the truth, it can at times be a means of shuddering debate and discussion.
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There is no debate about the fact that the tool of science and the scientific method has delivered some incredible results for humanity, including within the space of health and fitness.
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But is it the only tool?
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The most appropriate tool?
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Well, even asking the question feels like heresy.
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But it's a question we should ask, because doing so may shed light on some things that are very confusing within the world of health and fitness right now.
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And to further unpack this question, we're going to dive into a single chapter within the history of human health and nutrition, one that happened recently, one involving gold standard science, and a few questions that are as important now as they've ever been.
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Does eating fat make you fat?
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Is fat loss truly as simple as calories in, calories out?
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The law of thermodynamics, if you will.
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And trust me, if you're into health and fitness like I am, you're going to find this very, very fascinating.
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Okay, now always we got to talk stakes, we've got to talk context, we got to talk why does this matter?
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Okay, why is this important?
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And for me, what it really comes down to is the fact that this topic and this study that we're going to talk about, we'll go into some depth on it, have broad implications for a whole lot within the realm of health and fitness.
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Let's just reflect on a few of these for a moment.
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Okay, we'll start specific and then we'll radiate out from there.
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Okay, and I think you'll start to see why I find this small chapter in human health and fitness just so compelling.
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Okay, so first, one of the most important claims from the perspective of science and nutrition, it's at stake here within this chapter.
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Okay, do calories matter?
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Or has the quote law of thermodynamics, as often as invoked in this case, been thrown out?
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Or at a minimum, is it in need of significant revision?
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Again, this would be a major, major departure from the conventional understanding of health, nutrition, and fat loss.
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How often have you heard some form of a calorie is a calorie, calories in, calories out, law of thermodynamics, right?
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Said all the time.
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Not just by those within the scientific community either, but by those in the public, general fitness, bodybuilders, fitness trainers, right, as well.
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If it's possible, as had been claimed by many in the low carb community, that they are able to eat more calories, yet somehow burn more fat, and this is proven out scientifically, this is a massive, massive departure.
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This is enormous.
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We've spoken a bit about the food pyramid before, and we are living through the complete inversion of the food pyramid, or at least from an optics perspective.
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Okay, we did an entire episode on the food pyramid, the new one.
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So if you haven't given that a listen, definitely worth doing.
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Okay, as always, there's a lot missing from the headlines on the new food pyramid.
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And if you want to know the real, real, check out that episode.
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Okay, the change is maybe not quite what you think.
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But given that the original food pyramid recommends six to eleven servings of grain, whole grains per day, right?
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It's the very base of the pyramid, and that obesity rates continue to climb despite a reduction in the consumption of dietary fat and saturated fat.
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If Gary Taubs in the low-carb community are right, the official government dietary recommendations for Americans are at least somewhat responsible, right?
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The original ones.
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But as I've said, there's an even bigger question that is at play here.
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And honestly, it's a more meta question.
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And it's what the nerds in the group, no judgment, myself included, would refer to as a question of epistemology.
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How do we know what we know?
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Or more precisely, how do we know what we think we know?
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Now just bear with me for a minute here.
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Okay, if you're thinking I'm about to start going into simulation theory and the multiverse, you know, don't hit the pause button just yet.
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Okay, we're gonna bring this back in.
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We're talking about something much more tangible and much more direct.
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It may be another way to think about it is what do we accept as proof in the case of nutrition, in the case of health and fitness?
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What do we accept as evidence that would support a claim?
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And this is one of those questions that sounds like it has an obvious answer.
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But the more that you start thinking about it, I don't know.
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You might be surprised.
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For most of us, at least in the United States, 2026, and I guess most of the developed world, quote unquote, at this point, I think you could say have a very strong affinity for the scientific method as a means of assessing the validity of a claim.
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Does X drug cure Y disease?
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We've sort of followed the steps of the scientific method in order to establish whether the drug is effective or not effective, right?
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We're all familiar with this.
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For most of us in the developed world, when it comes to questions of food, of nutrition, and of health, we turn to the experts.
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And when we say experts, let's be clear, we mean scientists, right?
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We mean people who perform experiments or at a minimum study the results and review the results.
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That's what we mean.
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We don't, for the most part, we're not out consulting tarot cards, trying to read Oracle Bones or the Bible.
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Other areas of human knowledge, such as history, anthropology, or say religion, these might be interesting.
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They might even present some interesting sort of hypothetical what if type questions.
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But for the most part, for most of us, the final arbiter, it's science.
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And for the record, I'm not saying this is wrong, but it's important to realize that this is certainly not the only system developed by humans for assessing truth from falsity.
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In fact, most humans, throughout all of human history, never looked to science for anything in the realm of health or food or nutrition.
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They ate the way that their parents and their grandparents did.
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Well, let me point something out.
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The study which is most often described as the first study in human nutrition occurred in 1747 by a guy named James Lind.
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Okay, Lind was a Scottish naval surgeon.
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And this study looked into whether the consumption of certain foods might be effective at treating scurvy, right?
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And Lind discovers, lo and behold, it's citrus fruits.
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Now, this is 300 years ago, which seems like an incredibly long time ago.
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But in the grand scheme of human history, that's a blink of an eye, right?
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And that's just one study in one country.
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It would be many, many more years before science had anything meaningful to add on the perspective of nutrition in general.
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And so an obvious question is, well, how did people know what to eat before?
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And how did they assess what was working, promoting vitality and good health, or disease and decline?
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And while we know the answer is varied, right, from religious beliefs to necessity imposed by nature to tradition, the list goes on and on, including things that we likely don't know and maybe never will know.
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But one thing we do know is that it wasn't science.
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I find that just fascinating, right?
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That this paradigm, the ultimate authority that we all look to in order to sort truth from falsehood, it's a very new invention.
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And this is not a negative judgment about the scientific method, again, I will emphasize, or of studies on nutrition or health or any of that, I am very glad to be living in a world with all of the incredible innovations and technologies that have come as a direct result of the scientific method.
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But is it the only way?
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Is it the only tool in the toolbox, so to speak?
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Well, of course not.
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And when you look back at tribal and ancestral people, from, say, the work of Dr.
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Weston A.
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Price, a name that if you listen to the show, you'll be very familiar with, it's very obvious that these people enjoyed incredible health and vitality, all in the absence of science.
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They didn't rely on a study to tell them how to eat or what food would develop and grow healthy bodies.
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And I think you could make the case that they were much more vital as a society than we are today.
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Actually, I think it would be difficult to make the case that they weren't.
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But either way, there's no denying that science and those connected to science, say doctors, medical professionals, nutrition scientists, etc., are held in an elevated position in society.
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And of course, you might say this is for good reason.
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But it's also important to remember that this is only one method of attempting to get to what will build health and vitality in our own lives.
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And of course, science is not static.
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It's ever changing.
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And it's important to remind ourselves that is a feature, not a bug.
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Science evolves and should evolve.
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But these two factors, right, the high esteem, the sometimes unquestioning, uncritical attitude that we adopt towards quote science, I'm speaking very generally here, and the fact that the state of current scientific knowledge can and will change.
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In my opinion, it helps to explain these times in history when we look back and think to ourselves, how could they not see it?
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How did anyone go for that?
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Let's talk about the harm of seed oils for a second, something that's becoming increasingly mainstream.
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You know, there are people alive today who grew up as children eating butter.
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And at some point in time, they were informed that butter was the cause of heart disease, of obesity, of a whole host of other diseases, and they should switch to vegetable oils, to margarines, and they did, right, out of trust, respect, and competence for those in science.
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And even though many of them started to develop health issues, even the very conditions that the switch was supposed to prevent, most continued to pay for their own poison, so to speak.
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If you buy that seed oils are toxic and harmful, as I know many of you do, there's an obvious question.
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How did these people, many of whom you know, how did they not see it?
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Especially when their parents and their grandparents never ate that way, never consumed any of these seed oils or margarines or vegetable oils, and never had any of those problems.
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And I think that we have an answer.
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And it has to do with faith in science.
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Now, am I painting with a broad brush here?
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Of course I am.
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The debate around seed oils in the scientific community and research community, it's ongoing.
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And this is just one example, right?
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There are many that we could point to, from the benefits of a glass of wine per day, something I certainly heard as a child, to the lack of evidence between smoking and lung cancer, right?
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Something that our parents probably heard as children, if you're around my age, or the six to eleven servings of grain recommended in the food pyramid, which we've seen within the past few months has been completely flipped upside down.
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If you are simply attempting to follow the science, the science has and will continue to change.
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Which, of course, is why we cannot, as individuals, simply outsource our rational faculties, no matter how compelling, powerful the track record, to anybody else.
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Okay, it's just my two cents here.
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And that is at the core of this episode.
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Okay, so we, as always, have beaten the context of this episode to death.
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We have the stakes, we've got why this is important.
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I've given you my perspective as to why this small chapter in the history of human nutrition is just so compelling.
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And so we should go ahead and get into it.
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Now, to tee up this study correctly, let's recall the setting, right?
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The conventional wisdom, as evidenced by the food pyramid, is that the primary food at the base of the pyramid that we should be consuming as Americans, let's just say six to eleven servings of grain per day.
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That consuming fat, dietary fat, is what's making us fat, and that reductions in fat consumption and saturated fats, especially, will lead to better health outcomes for all Americans.
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Now, of course, there's this radical guy named Atkins, you know, and he made some kind of wild claims about carbohydrates and that sort of thing.
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But for the most part, he was ignored.
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But along comes this guy, Gary Taubs.
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And this time, you know, this low carb thing, it really starts to stick, right?
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It goes mainstream.
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And I remember this very well.
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Okay, I was in college at the time, right?
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The article came out in 2002.
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I think I started college in 2004.
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And certainly by the time I was partway through college, it was in full swing.
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Okay.
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It really became big.
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And for those who were not around or weren't just paying as close to attention at the time, the way that I would describe it is it was very similar to the hype that we're living through right now with GOP ones.
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Right?
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Social media wasn't quite the same.
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You still had Facebook, you know, you had other people that you knew.
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And it seemed like everybody knew someone or multiple people who had struggled with weight for years, only to hear about and then to do the exact opposite of what the official dietary guidelines suggested, and finally see the weight melt away.
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All while seeming to eat more food, no counting calories, no exercise in many cases.
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I mean, this is a complete revolution with Gary Taubs, the chief revolutionary, and riding high on the success.
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In fact, Taubes was so confident that he had discovered the truth, that he discovered the root cause of what today we might describe as metabolic dysfunction and obesity.
00:20:09.599 --> 00:20:12.079
He and the co-founder of his company, Dr.
00:20:12.160 --> 00:20:20.480
Peter Atia, yes, same Peter Atia, longevity guy, Epstein guy, yep, the very same.
00:20:21.039 --> 00:20:28.160
They recruited one of the most influential and well-respected skeptics of the low carb movements, right?
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One of their critics, to put their ideas to the test in the gold standard of scientific inquiry, a randomized controlled trial.
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It's just incredible.
00:20:39.200 --> 00:20:43.279
And the guy that they recruit is a man by the name of Kevin Hall.
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And he's arguably the most important researcher on nutrition at the National Institutes of Health.
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He's been the lead author on what are considered to be some of the most important studies on nutrition of our lifetime.
00:20:56.640 --> 00:21:10.720
Marion Nestle, a professor in nutrition at NYU, called Hall's studies on ultra-processed foods, one that we'll talk about in a future episode, quote, the most important concept to come in nutrition since vitamins, end quote.
00:21:11.920 --> 00:21:16.720
So this guy is no lightweight, okay, and he's a critic of low carb diets.
00:21:17.279 --> 00:21:24.160
And to Taub's and Atias credit, despite the forward momentum of the low carb movement, they are not punching down.
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They are putting this model, what's referred to as the carbohydrate insulin model, right up against the stiffest competition they could possibly face.
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And I believe they even funded some of the research, maybe even all of it.
00:21:37.119 --> 00:21:39.359
Okay, that's how confident that they were.
00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:53.519
And when the results of the study finally came in, I think it's fair to say the results were devastating for the proponents of the carbohydrate insulin model for Tabs and ATIA.
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Despite the millions of people who'd lost weight following a low carb diet, despite the literal cottage industry.
00:22:00.319 --> 00:22:03.200
Of food products, supplements, cookbooks.
00:22:03.680 --> 00:22:15.119
When this model was finally put to the test using the gold standard of science, randomized control trial, using a study design that was signed off on by Taubes and ATIA.
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The study found that when protein and calories were equalized, people actually lost more fat on a high carbohydrate diet than a low carbohydrate diet by quite a bit.
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Absolutely devastating for the low carb advocates.
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Hall's paper is titled Calorie for Calorie Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity.
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And for anyone interested, it's publicly available for free download.
00:22:46.799 --> 00:22:51.200
But let's be honest, most people never read the study directly.
00:22:51.440 --> 00:23:21.440
They learned about the results from articles like this, which ran in the BBC, August 14th, 2015, titled Low Fat Diets Better Than Cutting Carbs for Weight Loss, in which the article says that the study found, quote, those reducing fat intake lost an average 463 grams of body fat, 80% more than those cutting on carbs, whose average loss was 245 grams.
00:23:23.519 --> 00:23:27.119
The article goes on devastatingly to say, quote, Dr.
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Hall said there was no metabolic reason to choose a low carb diet, end quote.
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So what now?
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On the one hand, you've got millions of people who've reported substantial weight loss following a low carb diet, including many people you know.
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But on the other hand, you've got the gold standard of science stepping in, arguably the most important and influential nutrition researcher the country has to offer.
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Saying no, there's nothing there.
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And in fact, if you want to actually lose weight, six to eleven servings of grain is probably where you want to be.
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What are we to believe?
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How do we make sense of this?
00:24:13.519 --> 00:24:18.480
Now we've discussed briefly the conclusion of the study, the punchline, if you will.
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And like me, although you're probably not a nutrition researcher, you probably have some ideas in your head about how the researchers came to these conclusions, right?
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What the study looked like.
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Or maybe said differently, let's say you decided as a lay person that you were going to try to assess this question.
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You know, how would you do it?
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How would you assess whether people lost more weight following a low-carb diet or a low fat diet?
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Just in your own head.
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And if I had to bet, I'd bet it looks something like this.
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Take two groups of people, similar body weights, similar body composition.
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At the beginning of the study, let's measure their body fat percentage, maybe a few other biomarkers.
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We'll split the group, we'll put one group on a low carb diet for a period of time, and we'll put another group on a low fat diet for a period of time, right?
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