Try reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. That's as good a place as any to start. You could also read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. Either one will provide a good foundation into our current eating challenges due to not knowing what we don't know.

Still reading the TIME article, the point they make about diet slowing your metabolism so you hold onto fat and can't win is an old diet myth -- or at least an oversimplification.

Skimmed it for obvious signs of BS, found some, nothing to worry about. Basic premise is either genetics, a bit of calories, or the gut. About the gut. It just occurred to me, it rests on an assumption. Wanna guess? It is assumed that the human gut itself is the same across all individuals, therefore we jump straight to gut bacteria where it's obviously different for everybody at least to some degree.

Cool, heh? Well, is that assumption true? Maybe, unlikely, but the degree of likelihood that it is true is likely to be very small. Rather, it's more likely that there are some of us, not many, who have a different gut than the average human. So now we're dealing with genetics specifically for gut physiology. On this point, I agree, genetics is unlikely to be a culprit over such a short time. For humans. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I'm making it up as I go.

On the names mentioned in that article, I find it suspicious that Taubes is not mentioned when he's the single most knowledgable human on this planet on this subject. Even moreso suspicious when Taubes and Hall worked together on the same project through NUSI. Not sure if the research cited in the article (i.e. Hall's research) was funded by NUSI. Insulin not there, red flag. I think it's not a particularly reasoned article, I only get one side of the story from it, reads like a position paper, though vague this position may be, but then I skimmed it so, meh.

Those would be my top two books also. If you want a deeper dive by Gary Taubes, his earlier and longer book, Good calories, Bad calories has one chapter in that book that convinced me to go low carb.

Another new book to add which explains Obesity more from what happens to insulin is The Obesity Code by Dr Jason Fung.

I laughed becasue it's true. Bet when he was in college he never dreamed that would happen!