Enlarge Courtesy of the John and Laura Arnold Foundation

Billionaires John and Laura Arnold are betting that the country's top nutrition researchers can get to the bottom of the obesity epidemic.

Billionaires John and Laura Arnold are betting that the country's top nutrition researchers can get to the bottom of the obesity epidemic.

Why would a billionaire energy trader-turned-philanthropist throw his foundation's dough behind a new think tank that wants to challenge scientific assumptions about obesity?

John Arnold, 38, whose move from Enron to a spectacularly successful hedge fund got him on the list of wealthiest Americans, isn't crazy about talking to the press. But certainly his decision with his wife Laura to back a newly launched operation called the Nutrition Science Initiative, or NuSI, is an intriguing one.

Obesity, and all the dietary confusion that swirls around it, is clearly a problem that isn't going away. But NuSI says large-scale scientific studies that tackle fundamental questions like how food really affects fat, hormones and the brain are what's needed to solve it more than anything else.

We're told by NuSI's president, Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins-trained doctor, that Arnold's interest in the cause started with a podcast featuring science journalist and NuSI co-founder, Gary Taubes.

Taubes has been arguing for the last several years in books and articles in the New York Times Magazine that current dietary guidelines and beliefs about what has caused the obesity epidemic are wrong and based on poor science. Attia says Arnold approached Taubes after Arnold realized he could bring resources to bear on the problem $5 million in seed money to fund "good" studies that are usually prohibitively expensive.

"In ... nutrition science, the research is inadequate, so our guiding information is not based on rigorous science," Meredith Johnson, a spokeswoman for the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, told The Salt in an email.

One reason Attia agrees it's inadequate is that "it's really quite difficult to study nutrition in humans at the level of precision that scientists in other fields can get."

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Billionaires Fund A 'Manhattan Project' For Nutrition And Obesity