The book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" has been read by virtually nobody. You can tell this, because it is widely believed the book is about a low-carb diet, or how bad carbs are. It's a misunderstanding that's understandable between the cover and the name, and heck, even the publisher-provided blurbs on Amazon, but what the book is actually about, by bulk of words, is the story of how the standard nutritional consensus got to be such garbage in the first place. It is primarily a history book, rather than a science work.

There is a very good case to be made that the science never supported what we were told, and that it was sourced in naked political power plays. When, of course, the consensus was still the Standard Consensus, that was not an argument that the body politic could hear, but as it becomes increasingly clear that the Standard Consensus was in fact wrong [1], it becomes an increasingly important book.

Nutrition is hard, and we'll be studying it for decades more. But it is not so hard that it was simply expect that we should be this fundamentally wrong, and more importantly, this wrong for this long. This took effort, and if we refuse to study what happened, we'll learn nothing from it. If indeed it the standard consensus is wrong, the signal telling us it was wrong was STAGGERINGLY ENORMOUS. We call it the "obesity epidemic". The only comparably sized epidemiological signal that comes to mind is the one that said "Lead is bad to put in the air." Those who ignored it are the ones who owe us apologies.

If you're even beginning to suspect that the standard consensus is wrong, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy and reading it. The science is a bit outdated now... the history, as is the nature of history, is not.

[1]: I phrase it that way because I'm still hedged a bit on my bets, though "The standard consensus was very wrong" is getting pretty high on my Bayes-O-Meter, even as I'm not really bought in to any of its replacements yet.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that in previous HN discussions on these sorts of topics I've always been a bit more circumspect; my Bayes-O-Meter was merely in the "highly suspicious" range. But with the announcement from the government that they are actively reversing something previously issues forth as "truth", I've finally tipped over in outright ideologue on the topic. For the record, this is actually a considered decision, not brute emotionality or fad-following. It is also, for what it's worth, the exact reaction that I'm accusing these people of trying to avoid. They are trying to avoid exactly the anger I'm expressing here from becoming widespread, but if I'm correct, the anger would be fully justified, and the only honorable thing for them to do is to go ahead and incur the anger instead of holding us back. As you can see, I'm still hedging a bit with conditional phrases, but at this point I'm having an increasingly difficult time imagining that we're suddenly going to get a spate of (honest) studies re-confirming the standard consensus.

And to be clear... I'm not asking for them to be right. That would be an unfairly large request. I'm asking for them to stop being so aggressively wrong.