Champaign IL – The American Meat Science Association (AMSA) is excited to announce Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (Knopf 2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007), will kick off the AMSA 65th Reciprocal Meat Conference (RMC) on Monday morning June 18th with his in-depth presentation on “Why We Get Fat: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity.”
Since the 1950s, being overweight and obesity have been perceived as “energy balance” disorders, caused specifically by overeating and sedentary behavior. Virtually all research in obesity and related fields is predicated on this energy balance paradigm, as is the conventional wisdom. Taubes believes the accepted solution – consume fewer calories than expended and we will become lean – has little to no efficacy, suggesting the underlying hypothesis might be incorrect.
Gary Taubes is a contributing correspondent to Science, the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Public Health. He studied applied physics at Harvard as an undergraduate and has an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981). Taubes began writing and reporting on science and medicine for Discover magazine in 1982. As a free-lance journalist, he’s written for the Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and a host of other publications.
Taubes has won numerous awards for his reporting including the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. He is the only print journalist to win the award three times.
Since the mid-1980s, Taubes has focused his reporting on controversial science, on the excruciatingly difficult job of establishing reliable knowledge in any field of inquiry, and on the scientific tools and methodology needed to do so. He is also the author of Nobel Dreams (Random House 1987), and Bad Science (Random House, 1993), a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards.
For more information regarding the AMSA 65th RMC please visit: http://www.meatscience.org/rmc or contact Deidrea Mabry 1-800-517-AMSA ext. 12 or dmabry@meatscience.org.
AMSA fosters community and professional development among individuals who create and apply science to efficiently provide safe and high quality meat defined as red meat (beef, pork and lamb), poultry, fish/seafood and meat from other managed species.
Source: American Meat Science Association (AMSA)