Grains, begone! Credit: Josy Bloggs Back in 2002, the science writer Gary Taubes was, to much of the medical establishment, a pariah. Taubes had authored an article for The New York Times Magazine called “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” From the piece’s beginning to its end, Taubes cast doubt on the medical orthodoxy that low-fat diets were helpful for weight loss. Low-fat diets, he said, were likely to be partially responsible for America’s ballooning obesity crisis (mirrored here in Britain). The evidence was beginning to indicate, Taubes wrote, that a diet low in carbs and high in fat, however – eggs, bacon, butter and so on – would, counter-intuitively, make its eaters slimmer and longer-lived.