I'm not promoting anything, Greg, except reading & investigating for yourself. You, yourself, wrote that a proportion of the scientific community think... whatever. "Significant" is a wholly subjective word. Proportion... Well, that's only a part of the whole, isn't it? 1%, 99%, they are are both proportions. And when Einstein proposed relativity, he was thoroughly mocked for it, not least because it went against all conventional scientific wisdom. And yet he turned out not only to be right, but also to be wrong...

There are two things I am quite sure of. The first is that calories (and, whilst I am also no scientist, I do know how they're measured) are a poor yardstick for measuring food intake & nutritional value. But they're a simple, convenient, and easily understood marker which most people are not knowledgable enough to know are seriously flawed. Never mind that, as Musket more or less said, there's a huge billions of dollars diet industry out there that has a vested interest in you believing in the calorie & the calories in / calories out paradigm (and also in the balanced diet), despite the fact that there is a considerable body of evidence that suggests it's rather less than watertight.

The second is that agriculture was only invented 12,000-odd years ago. We could not possibly have evolved eating a carb-rich diet because the carb's weren't there. Grains weren't there, starches weren't there, fruit was both seasonal & far less sweet (the crabapple is the ancestor of all modern apples, as far as I am aware, ever bitten into one?). So where did we get all of those carbs from? We don't have a gut that can cope with cellulose, which is why we process & cook. But, of course, we had to evolve far enough to learn HOW to cook first...

I can offer you other reasons why I think there is a powerful argument that the "balanced" diet is so much hokum, but Taubes says it far better than I could. As I said at the outset, his book may not make you want to change your diet, but I do think it's worth reading. He may not be entirely right, but I've yet to see anything other than dogma repeated to refute him (your blicky, by the way, gives me a 404).

I am also reminded of a series that ran some years back on the BBC, called Heretics. I think I used this example a decade or so ago on the 'Cat, too. One programme dealt with a French scientist who was convinced that he'd found a rational scientific basis for homeopathy. One of the "experts" in the series was James Randi, of whom I have no particularly high opinion. The other was the then editor of Nature magazine, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world. His whole attitude boiled down to "It goes against everything I've ever learnt, so it must be wrong".

As it turned out, a couple of years later, it was proved to be wrong. There were fundamental errors in the methodology of the experiments, I believe. But the powerful impression that I was left with at the time was the absolute closed-mindedness of this supposed scientist - "It must be wrong because it goes against everything I know. No, I've got no other explanation, it just has to be wrong." Not a very scientific mind-set, I'm sure you'll agree!

You make your own mind up about things. But maybe it's worth reading a bit more on the subject (whichever subject), before declaring your faith in those that have one vested interest or another in backing the status quo? ;-)