The very person with whom Taubes chose to end his article, Stanfords John Farquhar, was as livid as Reaven. Taubes said that Farquhar had sent Taubes "an e-mail message asking the not-entirely-rhetorical question, Can we get the low-fat proponents to apologize?" On this powerful note, the article ended.As a biological scientist with a major portion of my graduate training in human nutrition/nutritional biology, I have to agree with Farquhar and the author of this article.
But its Taubes whom Farquhar wants to apologize. "I was greatly offended by how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins diet," he wrote in an e-mail he broadcast to reporters and to colleagues who were stunned that Farquhar might actually hold the beliefs Taubes attributed to him. "We are against the Atkins Diet," he wrote, speaking for himself and Reaven. "I told him [Taubes] there is the minor degree of merit" to the idea that "people are getting fatter because too much emphasis is being placed on just cutting fats," Farquhar told me. But "once I gave him that opening -- bingo -- he was off and running, even though I said about six times that this is not the cause of the obesity epidemic."