Internetiquette & The Full Email Exchange with Gary Taubes

Warning:  This post contains absolutely no science.  If you are looking for science, please look at 99% of the other content on the blog.  If you are offended by non-science posts on a predominantly science-based blog do not read this.

UPDATE  2/9/11 ~1:30 EST:   I somehow chopped out the emails!  Have edited them in.  Thanks MM for the alert!

It seems Gary Taubes has decided to use his interview to paint me as some sort of confused internet stalker whom he spent 2 weeks trying to deal with but ... you just can't win with "people like" -- rather than addressing the scientific errors and problems with his references I addressed in my interview.  In light of this, I'm going to share the remainder of our email exchange in full here and let you decide for yourselves.  He initially gave me permission to post his emails in full and I'm applying that to the entire exchange.  I am also going to share a bit of History of the Asylum with you.

Believe it or not, I'm actually coming up on my first bloggerversary!  (Feb. 21).  My first post was a rather uneventful bookmarking post to test things out going "live".  I've taken a few minutes to provide some screenshots of what I blogged on this past year to save folks who are interested in what I really do here vs. what is being said about what I do the time of perusing the archives.   Below is the content of my blog from initiation to May 31 when I "dropped the bomb":  Glyceroneogenesis v. Taubes   (As always, you can click to enlarge, "blanks" are drafts).

It was three months later when I made my first post with the GCBC Fact Check and shortly thereafter dropped "the bomb":  Glyceroneogenesis v. Taubes.    Three weeks later James Krieger published Gary Taubes: Bad Calories, or Bad Research?  Before this I had a grand total of 6 comments in mid March on my New Atkins posts and what, like ... one or two followers??  You'll see in red, I've circled the 3 posts out of some 80-odd posts that had received comments at the time.  (The others postdate the GvT "buzz")

You see, if there was anyone stalking here it was Fred Hahn who posted up a storm in the comments over at James' site and followed a link there and/or my profile for comments I had posted here.  For the record, I do not consider Fred's behavior stalking, but I am not the first to note how he trolls the internet shouting down Taubes critics and reporting his findings back to his buddies.  I suppose it's only stalking when a critic does this, because Taubes certainly has a loyal cult following that tends to swamp the comments on any criticism of his faulty science.

So anyway, Fred emailed Gary about the GvT post.  He seemed concerned.   Perhaps had he taken note of how obscure my blog was back then before needlessly alerting his buddy Gary of my troubling post we wouldn't be where we are today.   It's probably going to REALLY upset old Gary when I tell him that the G v. T post had less than like 200 total views at the time,  which I'm sure I don't have to tell him is utterly insignificant.  Yet it was this post that prompted Gary to email Fred to email me in an attempt to initiate phone contact.   Does this sound odd to anyone else?  

So Gary wanted to initiate private communication with some pseudonymous obscure blogger.  Can you say intimidation?  Clever tactic, because later he can call me unreasonable when I react the way most people would to such an invitation.  I mean, yeah, right.  I'm going to call someone to discuss this sort of thing who can't even bring himself to email me directly?   One has to wonder why he didn't just post a comment on the blog:  The 2003 Reshef paper is mostly irrelevant rat studies.  End of story!

I had intended to email him at the time, but as you can see from the screen shots below I had other areas of interest that I blogged on  after that post. 

Does this look like someone who was stalking Taubes?  Really.  I'll cop to an obsession with this science stuff.  I also took time off work this summer to work on or supervise repairs on our former home.  No TV, no husband around, just me & my broadband connection, staying in hotels at times until the home was habitable with a microwave & running water.  So I had some time to kill rather than watching paint dry (literally) at times!  Blog traffic had ticked up a bit and I was no longer getting the feeling I was just talking to myself, but in the scheme of things I was still a small small bite of a fauxtatoes.  Fun times.

So let's fast forward three months and I guess I dropped bomb #2 by using the old $ in place of the s in his name.  This, apparently sent some people into a keto-crazed tizzy.  How dare I speculate that financial interests cloud Taubes' judgment.  I'm still a bit perplexed why this caused such a feather ruffling of such grand proportions.  Here's the post:  Gary Taube$ Shai'ster.  Was it that this Shai analysis he did a blog on is part of the "new evidence" in WWGF?    Did this cut too close to home or something?  That was 9/10/10 and several days later his interview with Jimmy aired where he finally came clean on the G3P issue.  This prompted: Good Science Bad Science ~ Good Schtick Bad Schtick 9/22/10.  This may well have been the second and last post in which I used that dreaded obviously uber-insulinogenic $.   So it was following that post that - at Jimmy's urging - GT emailed me.  This was also the post Jimmy invited me on his podcast to discuss this.  Jimmy sought me out not the other way around.  Gary emailed me, not the other way around.  

The first email and my reply are shared here:    http://carbsanity.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-gary-taubes-email-my-response.html , but below is just his email to read in its entirety w/o my commentary.  Yes.  It was so polite and free of personal attacks said directly to me, not opinions I've expressed on a blog.  There's a difference.

Hi Carb Sane,

I hope you don't mind me taking the liberty of e-mailing you. Jimmy Moore told me that you might be going on his show, which prompted me to try to read a few of your latest blog entries. Occasionally, friends have suggested I read and respond to your critiques (attacks?) , but whenever I try I find them tough going. Your descriptions of what I wrote or said or argued never quite seem to mesh with what I actually wrote or said or argued and your certainty that you are right and that I'm a dishonest sleazeball have made me hesitant to spend time and effort trying to convince you otherwise. 

In this case, though, you asked me a simple question, to "name names", as you put it, once again implying that even on such a simple subject as this I'm bullshitting the innocent public. So, the "biggest expert in the country" (I hope I didn't phrase it like that, but doing a radio show is a different business than writing, so if I did... sigh) was indeed Richard Hanson. If you look in the acknowledgements of GC,BC you'll see Hanson among those thanked for reading the book and critiquing it in draft. You can e-mail him and ask him, if you'd like, although when I contacted him in March after my NIH lecture, he said he was dealing with cancer and would get back to me shortly. He didn't, and I didn't push it for the obvious reason. The two young NIH biophysicists were Kevin Hall and Carson Chow. You can pull up Kevin's papers by searching "Hall kd adipose" in Pubmed. The English guy who agreed with Hall and Chow's take was Keith Frayn at Oxford. 

Feel free to ask any further questions. As I suggested to James Krieger in an e-mail exchange a few months ago I'm all for critical assessments of the evidence and my interpretations. And I make this point in the epilogue of GC,BC. It's absolutely necessary. Science doesn't function without it and I wish the establishment would care as much as you do about shooting me down. (Far more pleasing than being ignored, although ideally they would do more intellectually honest job of it than you do.) If I can help you criticize my work, and do a better job, I'm happy to help. I just ask that you do a better job of describing correctly what I actually wrote and said and argued. As it is you're getting a failing grade and the glass house you're living in when you write your critiques seems awfully fragile. Also the ad hominem shit is beneath you and doesn't help your case any. You seem compelled to attack me for what you perceive as dishonesty and venality (taube$) when scholarly incompetence, time-pressure, stress and the limitations of one admittedly fallible individual would be far more reasonable explanations. Your work would be more compelling and would certainly be taken more seriously if you left your presumption of motive -- something you can know nothing about -- out of it. It’s as though you’re dedicated here not just to proving that you’re smarter than I am, but that you’re morally superior as well. The first ambition is diminished greatly by the second. You say you fear cyberstalkers in your life, and yet you come across like someone who has devoting their life to stalking me. 

Reporting the facts or the strict nature of the disagreement between us would suffice and would actually benefit both your readers and mine. Disagreeing with my interpretation of the facts and the evidence I marshal to support my argument is perfectly valid. I might even learn something from your work (although from what I've read so far, I doubt it.) Assuming that you know what I was thinking while I wrote and that my motives are less pure than yours, other than from what I might have stated explicitly in the book, is not necessary and will be counter productive should any serious reader try to follow your arguments.

I hope this helps.

All the best,

Gary Taubes

PS. If you want to post this e-mail, feel free. I just ask that you post the whole thing and not part of it. If you want to keep it private, that's fine with me. I'm CC-ing Jimmy Moore, since it was Jimmy who spurred me to try once again to read your posts.

In that email Gary made his first charge of stalking that I laughed at in my response.  So I guess I hurt his feelings or something.  One will also note that ALL these months later, he has yet to address the prime question.

Why might that be?  What did I say that was so different?  I was the first(*)  to call him on a problem with his own research and references.   * I may not have been the first, but I was the first, apparently, to publish the charge where someone picked up on it and at least a perceived audience that might listen.  Otherwise why did such a well established science journalist bother with little old me???

Anyway, since he has misrepresented our email exchange in his recent interview, I am now going to share, "the rest of the story", as the late Paul Harvey would boom,  in the form of the entire unedited email exchange that I'll put at the end of this post.  If you want to go read it now, use your browser search function to search on ****, then again to get back here.

If you read nothing else, read the pink highlighted portion of that one email.  There Gary is trying to shut me up.  Plain and simple.   Only if I can make a compelling argument as to why to share a discussion on the science will he deem something publishable???   

Now any objective reader will see that this is Gary's modus operandi - to take the discussion to a private venue so that others don't get to see what's said and he can characterize things as he wants.  If he wanted to correct my science, what part of that shouldn't be shared?  As highlighted in yellow, the emails up to that point weren't about the science.  And who's fault was that?  I asked him about the science.  He claimed to want to discuss the science and get things right, but I would have to make some sort of compelling argument to share THAT discussion?  What is he afraid of discussing the science?  I don't get that.  (Well actually I do because his own references don't support his hypotheses).

In the end we finally learn in his recent interview with Jimmy that Reshef is just mostly rat studies and irrelevant anyway.  So ALL of this back and forth for what?  How come the first email didn't just state that.  Move on.  Nothing to see here ... I tried repeatedly to get him to address the science, Reshef 2003 in particular.  He seemed more interested in criticizing my blog that he's clearly never read and telling me irrelevant details of his life story.

So anyway, I've  wasted enough time on this.  Folks are going to believe what they're going to believe.  But Gary Taubes still has a lot he should be answering to in terms of his misrepresentation of references.  Not to me.  But to YOU.   This is why I think he's bothered by me.  It's not that I've shared my opinions, used a $, whatever.  It's not that I've accused him of cherry picking, because that charge has been leveled before by many more prominent voices and he's brushed it off.  No, what I did was actually check the man's references and expose where he has misrepresented their content or ignored inconvenient facts in them.  That is a serious problem for a science journalist.    

And I'm a stalker now because I just won't go away.  It's been over 2 months after my interview was taped, Jimmy Moore gave GT 2 hours to "respond".  Did any of you learn anything new there?  Did he yet address, over 6 months after the first post, and in plenty of time after my interview, ANY of the science?   No.

To the extent that any significant portion of this blog concerns you Mr. Taubes is entirely your doing for not simply addressing one point early on.  Yet, this blog is not about you Gary.  It IS about the science, and I will not be intimidated by you and your buddy's smear campaign.

**** "the rest of the story"

Gary Taubes  to me, Jimmy

10/7/10

On Oct 6, 2010, at 6:54 AM, Carb Sane wrote:

Thanks again for these.  I must say that my suspicions on the "English guy" were wrong.  Hence my thinking of why you might not wish to name him at this point.  Still, you now say you were corrected in 2008.  Why did i t take until the most recent lecture to leave out what you knew was obviously wrong from the lectures, and to finally admit you got it wrong in your interview with Jimmy?  Your excuse that you don't have a blog or a platform doesn't pass the smell test.  You've "taken questions" and responded to Dr. Eades' readership before, I've seen him share communications from you on his blog, as have others (e.g. Josef Brandenberg).  If I used a default template I could have had my blog up and running here in 5 minutes, and you know for sure that you would have a hundred followers in a matter of hours.  I'll be looking into Hall and Chow's research to see if it warrants a conclusion that the G3P issue doesn't matter because insulin is such a controlling factor in it all.

Hi Carb Sane, 

  The paragraph above from your email is a short example of why I don't think it's worth the time to engage with you. It is indeed time consuming and what you call "for profit" work includes me having to make a living. So you say above that I say I was corrected in 2008 and then much of your accusations of my venality hinge on this two-year time lag, as you call it in another paragraph. The catch is that  I never said I was corrected in 2008.  And this is what I find so distasteful in all this is now, for reasons that are beginning to escape me, I'm going to take the time to clarify for you what you could have known all along by taking the time to ask me. (When issues are clarified on Mike Eades's blog or by Joseph, it's because they seek me out and ask me directly.You could do that. You chose not to.) Ok, so here goes:

   The lecture I gave at NIH was on February 19th, 2010. This past February. Seven and a half months ago. Kevin and Carson were in the audience. We actually had lunch together before the lecture but they didn't bring it up then. They heard me present the glycerol phosphate tale in the lecture, and brought up their issues with it in the Q&A after. Very embarrassing but that's the way it works. We discussed it after the lecture. We exchanged e-mails and a few conversations into March. On March 7th I spoke with Gunther Boden at Temple about it, but he couldn't really resolve the dispute at that level of detail we were working.  On March 8th, I spoke with Frayne. On April 1st, I moved my family of four from New York City to Berkeley California, so the weeks preceding, as you might imagine, were taken up with packing up an entire household, closing sales one one coast, renting apartments and arranging termporary housing on the other, etc. Simply put, I had other things on mind. We arrived in Berkeley and lived in a rental for eight days until our furniture arrived. In the meanwhile, I had two lectures to give at UC Berkeley, but not on this subject and those lectures had to be written and presented. 

   My first talk on this particular subject -- the Why We Get Fat talk -- was the Swedish Hospital Grand Rounds that you may have seen on-line. That was April 15th. (I also gave a talk at the ASBP meeting in Seattle on a different subject -- sugar and cancer (don't laugh) -- and had to prepare that lecture as well. I don't know what you conceive my for profit lifestyle to be, but I have no assistant or secretary and so all this has to be done myself, just like a real person. At the Swedish Hospital  lecture, I addressed the problems with g-3-p and said that my previous understanding had changed. (I don't remember exactly how I dealt with it, only that the slides I used were screwed up. You can see it on-line and maybe have.) 

    Then I returned to Berkeley to try to get my family of four settled in, the older son in school, the house unpacked, baby sitters interviewed and one hired, my work going, etc. I also had a new book to finish, and my publisher's were waiting for it, as well as the book on sugar that I'm being funded to spend half my time researching. Along the way, I discussed how to handle this with several people, but one of the things that also got sidelined with the move was my blog and website. You'll see it's still a work in progress, nine months after it was started. When I did the interview with Jimmy on June 14th -- Jimmy ran it two months later --  I took the opportunity to set the record straight. So it was effectively three months between the time I knew that what I had written in GCBC was wrong (although I still have doubts about the details, but so be it...) and the time I acknowledged it publicly. Yes, I could have asked Mike to do it on his blog and thought about it, but I actually thought it should be on my blog once I got it up. Jimmy gave me the opportunity and I took it.  

   So now I'm taking my time to defend myself to the pseudonymous carb sane, who can't get her facts straight and is ranting about the two years I sat on the truth, when it was, depending on whether you count the Swedish lecture or not, either one month or three. I have other more productive things to do with my time. If you want to ask me specific questions I will do my best to give you specific answers as I did with naming names. You have my e-mail now. If you want me to engage in this kind of lunacy, I'm too busy. If you want to continue to shoot me down, please get your facts straight. 

Best,

Gary

 

My reply to him:   10/10/10

Gary, 

I'm writing to "run" this slightly edited/timelined version of your last email by you before posting it.  Hopefully you'll find this accurately conveys the essentials of the email, but if you prefer, I'll post the whole thing.

In any case, I think if you listen to your interview with Jimmy (around the 42 min mark if memory serves), you'll see where I got the 2008 from.  That nobody reading my post (and it has had hundreds of page reads) has challenged this aspect leads me to believe that I was not the only one that interpreted your somewhat disjointed explanation in this manner. 

One question that perseveres is how you could even have included the version of G3P theory in GCBC after reading the Reshef 2003 paper:  Glyceroneogenesis and the Triglyceride/Fatty Acid Cycle.  When Fred Hahn made you aware of myGlyceroneogenesis v. Taubes post, you wanted me to call you.  I had intended to email you at the time to discuss that post, but, this isn't even my job.  You're not the only one who has other things on their plates!  Still, my view was that you had every opportunity to post on my blog or email me (as you've finally done), etc.    I have to say I about fell out of my chair when I searched my GCBC ebook for glycerneogenesis and found that paper in the references.  

I think many of my readers would like an explanation for this if you care to provide one.  If you want to do so in a separate email for me to post in full, I'll gladly give you my "floor".

Regards, CS

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Gary Taubes wrote:

On Oct 6, 2010, at 6:54 AM, Carb Sane wrote:

Thanks again for these.  I must say that my suspicions on the "English guy" were wrong.  Hence my thinking of why you might not wish to name him at this point.  Still, you now say you were corrected in 2008.  Why did i t take until the most recent lecture to leave out what you knew was obviously wrong from the lectures, and to finally admit you got it wrong in your interview with Jimmy?  Your excuse that you don't have a blog or a platform doesn't pass the smell test.  You've "taken questions" and responded to Dr. Eades' readership before, I've seen him share communications from you on his blog, as have others (e.g. Josef Brandenberg).  If I used a default template I could have had my blog up and running here in 5 minutes, and you know for sure that you would have a hundred followers in a matter of hours.  I'll be looking into Hall and Chow's research to see if it warrants a conclusion that the G3P issue doesn't matter because insulin is such a controlling factor in it all.

Hi Carb Sane, 

  The paragraph above from your email is a short example of why I don't think it's worth the time to engage with you. It is indeed time consuming and what you call "for profit" work includes me having to make a living. So you say above that I say I was corrected in 2008 and then much of your accusations of my venality hinge on this two-year time lag, as you call it in another paragraph. The catch is that  I never said I was corrected in 2008.  And this is what I find so distasteful in all this is now, for reasons that are beginning to escape me, I'm going to take the time to clarify for you what you could have known all along by taking the time to ask me. (When issues are clarified on Mike Eades's blog or by Joseph, it's because they seek me out and ask me directly.You could do that. You chose not to.) Ok, so here goes:

Timeline:

2/19/2010 NIH lecture:  Met with Kevin Hall and Carson Chow (the young biophysicists)  who brought up problems with G3P section in the Q&A period.

Email exchange and conversations ensued

3/7/10 Spoke with Gunther Boden at Temple, but "he couldn't really resolve the dispute at that level of detail we were working."

3/8/10 Spoke with Keith Frayn (the English guy)

4/1/10 Moved family cross country.  GT describes how busy he was with other lectures and moving issues (living in a rental temporarily, etc.).

4/15/10  This is verbatim from the email

My first talk on this particular subject -- the Why We Get Fat talk -- was the Swedish Hospital Grand Rounds that you may have seen on-line. That was April 15th. (I also gave a talk at the ASBP meeting in Seattle on a different subject -- sugar and cancer (don't laugh) -- and had to prepare that lecture as well. I don't know what you conceive my for profit lifestyle to be, but I have no assistant or secretary and so all this has to be done myself, just like a real person. At the Swedish Hospital  lecture, I addressed the problems with g-3-p and said that my previous understanding had changed. (I don't remember exactly how I dealt with it, only that the slides I used were screwed up. You can see it on-line and maybe have.) 

  

More discussion of the business of moving, finishing up a new book and researching another book, etc.  Blog and website were sidelined.

6/14/10 Date of the actual interview with Jimmy  "I took the opportunity to set the record straight. So it was effectively three months between the time I knew that what I had written in GCBC was wrong (although I still have doubts about the details, but so be it...) and the time I acknowledged it publicly. Yes, I could have asked Mike to do it on his blog and thought about it, but I actually thought it should be on my blog once I got it up. Jimmy gave me the opportunity and I took it."

  

   So now I'm taking my time to defend myself to the pseudonymous carb sane, who can't get her facts straight and is ranting about the two years I sat on the truth, when it was, depending on whether you count the Swedish lecture or not, either one month or three. I have other more productive things to do with my time. If you want to ask me specific questions I will do my best to give you specific answers as I did with naming names. You have my e-mail now. If you want me to engage in this kind of lunacy, I'm too busy. If you want to continue to shoot me down, please get your facts straight. 

Best,

Gary

From: Gary Taubes     Sun, Oct 10, 2010 

CS,

  This is why I wanted to speak with you on the telephone. I'm not a fan in any way of having private discussions, even about science, posted on a website. I'd like to respond to this e-mail and clarify your understanding of the science, but I'd like to do it privately to you. If you promise that's the case, then I will respond. If you then argue persuasively that there is a good reason why your readers would benefit from reading my e-mail, I will agree but I reserve the right to decide what's persuasive or not and what's a good reason. I will do my best to be fair. If you cant' make that promise and live by it, then I'm going to end the discussion here. Although if you insist on running my previous e-mail anyway, please do it again in its entirety. Do not use your edited version. 

I'm cc-ing Jimmy Moore on this just e-mail, but I won't on further e-mails if you agree to my request.

Best,

Gary

'

From: Carb Sane
Date: Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:59 AM
Subject: Re: Email
To: Gary Taubes 


If it's about getting the science correct, then there's no purpose in exchanging private emails.  Frankly, if my understanding of the science is faulty, I prefer to be educated by someone with at LEAST the background in biochemistry and physiology as I have.   Which is substantial on both the undergraduate and graduate level.  Your interpretation of the science doesn't match your own references.

You complained that I didn't "seek you out" like others have, and yet now you want to keep  the discussion private?  What gives there??

To exchange private emails without giving me permission to share them is a clever way to try to shut me up.  I'm not allowed to convey anything you said?   You granted permission to share the first email, or I would never have bothered responding.  Now you want to recind that with the follow-up reply?  

Comments on my blog are open and unmoderated if you care to respond publicly, or you could get your own blog going if you feel your reputation is being diminished because of something some pseudononymous biotch wrote about you on the internet, and correct the record.

I'll can simply post to my blog that you clarified that you didn't know about the faulty theory of G3P until earlier this year at which point you removed that from the most recent lectures.   I'll also present additional evidence that you did know, or should have back when you wrote GCBC and let my readers decide.   I think you'll disappoint many of them by going this route as many are interested in what you have to say ... many who support you BTW.

The choice is yours.  

CS

Gary Taubes  to Jimmy, me

10/11/10

I believe in private e-mails because at the moment we're not discussing the science in these e-mails, We're discussing the mistakes you've made, and I would rather not do that publicly. When we're discussing the mistakes I've made, as I said, we can do that publicly and I'll allow it. 

And I didn't say you couldn't report on what we concluded. I said I would like the e-mails themselves to be private. 

At the moment, we're done. Choice made.

  My final reply 10/11/10

First you say I can share the emails if shared in their entirety.  How do I know what can and cannot be shared?  This is nonsense.  

I'll correct the record on my blog because I got wrong what you stated in your interview with Jimmy.  That was why I thought to cut down your reply in the first place taking out some of the personal stuff irrelevant to the discussion of where I got my facts wrong.  If we clear up this misunderstanding have I gotten anything else wrong?  On YOUR presentation of the science.  (My opinions on your motivations are just that, opinions).   I think if you listen to the relevant part of the interview you could probably see why I got 2008 wrong, but, FWIW you badly misrepresented the "state of the science" circa 2005-2007 STILL in that interview.  

Don't bother emailing me unless I can share the content of the science.   I can do without the personal shit anyway.  If your response to my criticisms and opinions is to attack me, I'm going to share that and let folks decide for themselves the content of your character.

CS