Re:Nutrition, yes. Exercise, no. (Score 2, Informative)

I'm reading the book right now. He's not denying thermodynamics, in fact he has a whole chapter dealing with calories and the conservation of energy. The research suggests that exercise increases appetite in proportion to the number of calories burned. The body likes to stay at equilibrium. Someone who is 300lbs and holding steady is at equilibrium - just a non-optimal equilibrium. Taubes may be wrong, but if you read what he writes, he's certainly not a quack. Science writers tend not to be quacks. In general the book is incredibly well-written. It's a review of basically all the pertinent diet research over the last 100 years, and is very careful to state what is hypothesis, what has been confirmed by facts, and what is correlation vice causation.