Gary Taubes’ and Peter Attia’s foundation NuSI.org has raised $40 million and is on track to raise $190 million to discover why people are gaining weight. Taubes and Attia support low-carb diets, but are describing their foundation and its activities as impartial. “NuSI is dedicated to unequivocally establishing the truth.”

I just saw a press release for one of their studies:

Laura And John Arnold Foundation To Fund Groundbreaking Study On A Possible Link Between Sugar And The Nation’s Most Prevalent Obesity-related Disease, 13 April 2015

The Arnold’s are giving NuSI $1 million “to support the first-ever controlled clinical trial that will help determine whether a sugar-free diet can reverse the effects of the country’s most prevalent obesity-related disease, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).”

“Forty adolescents diagnosed with NAFLD will take part in the eight-week study. Half of the participants will be allowed to follow their regular diets, while the remaining participants will eat sugar-free foods.”

Are these isocaloric diets? Will they be eating the same amount of carbohydrate, fat, or protein? Does the sugar found naturally in dairy or fruit count as sugar?

According to the Arnolds, this study “will be more rigorous than all of the nutrition research conducted to date.”

“NuSI has set out to do in less than 10 years what the National Institutes of Health has been unable to do in more than 60 years — determine what we should and should not eat to be healthy,” LJAF President Denis Calabrese explained. “Most of the existing nutrition research amounts to junk science. This NAFLD study and the other NuSI-funded clinical trials will be more rigorous than all of the nutrition research conducted to date. NuSI’s well-designed, high-quality studies will help to produce reliable scientific evidence that is urgently needed in order for us to understand the cause or causes of our nation’s obesity crisis and the steps we can take to improve our health.”