Medicine: Calories Do Count

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Calories Don't Count, promised the book's catchy title, and overweight Americans looking for a painless way to reduce took the promise literally. They ran the book's sales to more than a million copies in less than a year. Last week, in commenting on a default decree, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration blasted the volume as full of false ideas, charged that it had been written and promoted to boost the sales of worthless capsules of safflower oil.

Nominal author of the book is Dr. Herman Taller, 50, a Rumanian-born physician who practiced obstetrics in Brooklyn and recently moved to Manhattan on the strength of his expanding royalties. But, said the FDA, publishers Simon & Schuster sent Taller's manuscript to a freelance sports writer, Roger Kahn, to be revised "in more of a mail-order inspirational technique." The book absolved fat ties of their guilt by crediting them with a metabolic abnormality. It exhorted them to eat as much as they wanted of most fat foods, especially those containing unsaturated fats (see following story). And it prescribed six capsules a day of safflower oil.

What got Taller into trouble with the law was that first printings of the book included an endorsement of a specific manufacturer of safflower oil (CDC capsules), and copies of the book were used to pro mote the capsules. (They are now off the market, following FDA action.) In court proceedings. Dr. Taller refused to answer more than 50 questions about his financial relationship with the corporation that manufactured the capsules.

Said FDA Commissioner George P. Larrick: "This bestselling book was deliberately created and used to promote these worthless safflower oil capsules for the treatment of obesity, cardiovascular diseases and other serious conditions. One of its main purposes was to promote the sale of a commercial product in which Dr. Taller had a financial interest." To this, Simon & Schuster retorted: "There is nothing in the record which could possibly support these vicious and irresponsible innuendoes."

But Commissioner Larrick had more to say: "The book is full of false ideas, as many competent medical and nutritional writers have pointed out. Contrary to the book's basic premise, weight reduction requires the reduction of caloric intake. There is no easy, simple substitute. Unfortunately, calories do count."