This blog is overrated.

Two of our greatest dietary contrarians, Seth “Shangri-la Diet” Roberts and Gary “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie” Taubes, have an in-depth conversation of the type you don’t see much of in the mainstream media. Funniest moment: Roberts, a psychology professor whose idiosyncratic self-experimentation led him to believe that swallowing flavorless (or oddly flavored) but caloric food, like vegetable oil, can cause weight loss, trying to explain his theory:

TAUBES: When you talk about flavorless protein, what do you mean? The oils, I understand; the fructose fits with everything I know. The sucrose starts getting tricky. What do you mean by flavorless protein? Give me an example.

[ROBERTS]: Oh, for example, eating chicken holding your nose clipped. It’s flavorless in the sense that you don’t smell it.

Most cringeworthy: Taubes on his fellow Times reporter Gina Kolata’s book on obesity. Throughout most of the interview, Taubes rails against the nutritional (for good reasons, he does not like to call them “scientific”) and media establishments, but this is the only place he really starts to become insufferable.

You can say the difference between my book and Gina Kolata’s book is — not counting whatever difference in intellect we begin with — my book took five years, more than full time, because I wasn’t going to say anything until I was certain that what I was saying was sound. She wrote her book in two years, part-time, while still working full-time as a New York Times reporter.

Yeesh. I’m not sure what Kolata, another rare nonsubscriber to the “stupid lazy glutton” theory of weight, did to deserve that.