What makes us fat? It’s a contentious debate in the world of health science. Is obesity caused by energy imbalance — consuming too many calories — as has long been conventional thought? Or is obesity caused by the effects of carbohydrates on insulin? My guest on today’s program attended an invite-only global gathering of obesity experts. The resulting paper in Nature Metabolism, co-authored with fifteen other researchers and published this fall, compares the two competing hypotheses side-by-side, as equals. Which, my guest writes, “has never before happened in the century-plus history of meaningful research on the cause of obesity.”

Gary Taubes is an award-winning investigative science and health journalist. His latest book is Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. With the journalist Nina Teicholz, he writes the Substack newsletter Unsettled Science.

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

This past summer was the summer of the divorce memoir. Books glamorizing marital breakdown were everywhere, depicting the act of walking away from a marriage as radical self-empowerment. But I could not find a single memoir about the opposite perspective: staying and working things out and rediscovering love. My guest on today’s program has written the book I’ve been wanting to read, and he’s here to tell us how a dead marriage can live again.

Harrison Scott Key is an American writer. His latest book is How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

There has been a story on the progressive left for some time now that individual actions are largely futile. That for society to change, we must instead focus on systems. Our guest on the program today belongs to a generation that was raised on this message. But now she’s written a powerful piece about the costs that come with such a worldview — and how volunteering in her community helped her to rethink it.

Rachel Cohen is a reporter for vox.com, covering American social policy. Her essay is “Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering.”

You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com