The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

We’ve grown accustomed, if not inured, to reading about the ongoing epidemic of obesity. Fifty years ago, one in eight American adults was obese; today the number is greater than one in three. The World Health Organization reports that obesity rates have doubled worldwide since 1980; in 2014, more than half a billion adults on the planet were obese, and more than forty million children under the age of five were overweight or obese.

Frightening

diabetes was rapidly becoming a common disease, but only by the standards of the day. He conservatively estimated—based on what he considered careful studies done in New York, Massachusetts, and elsewhere—that only two to three Americans in every thousand had diabetes. — Times have certainly changed. In 2012, the latest year for which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have provided estimates, one in every seven to eight adults in this country had diabetes—12 to 14 percent, depending on the criteria used to diagnose it.

anywhere populations begin eating Western diets and living Western lifestyles—whenever and wherever they’re acculturated or urbanized, as West noted in 1978—diabetes epidemics follow.

By the late 1970s, though, sugar had mostly vanished from the discussion. Dietary fat had been implicated as a cause of heart disease. Nutritionists and public-health authorities responded by rejecting the idea that sugar could be responsible for the diseases that associated with heart disease, which included both obesity and diabetes.

This book makes a different argument: that sugars like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup are fundamental causes of diabetes and obesity, using the same simple concept of causality that we employ when we say smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. It’s not because we eat too much of these sugars—although that is implied merely by the terms “overconsumption” and “overeating”—but because they have unique physiological, metabolic, and endocrinological (i.e., hormonal) effects in the human body that directly trigger these disorders.

The more common usage of “sugar” refers to sucrose, the white crystalline variety that we put in our coffee or tea or sprinkle on our morning cereal. Sucrose in turn is composed of equal parts glucose and fructose, the two smaller sugars (monosaccharides, in the chemical lingo) bonded together to make the larger one (a disaccharide). Fructose, found naturally in fruits and honey, is the sweetest of all these sugars, and it’s the fructose that makes sucrose particularly sweet.

HFCS-55, because it’s 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.*3 In sucrose, the ratio is 50-50.

both the British and U.S. governments came to be vigorous promoters of the sugar industry because of the revenues they could garner by taxing it.

By 1929, U.S. tobacco growers were saucing Burley tobacco with fifty million pounds of sugar a year and using it in over 120 billion cigarettes.*3 The sugar balanced out the tobacco’s naturally alkaline smoke, maximizing its inhalability and delivering even more nicotine into the lungs. The sugars in the tobacco also “caramelize” as they burn (technically, during the process of pyrolysis) and the caramelization of the smoke provides a sweet flavor and an agreeable smell that made cigarettes more attractive to women smokers and to adolescents as well. (“This [caramelization] process adds as much to the flavor and smoking enjoyment of cigarettes as it does to the arena of confectionary and bakery products,

1937, C. W. Barron, then the owner of The Wall Street Journal, made the pithy observation that if we want to make money in the stock market, we should invest in companies that provide us with our vices. “In hard times [consumers] will give up a lot of necessities,” he said, “but the last thing they will give up is their vices.

An investor who purchased Coca-Cola stock at its highest price in the summer of 1929, held it through the Crash and the ensuing Depression, and then sold it in 1938 at its lowest price, as Barron’s reported at the time, would have made a profit of 225 percent.

National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco).

Who knew

some with half their calories derived from sugar.

The greatest advertising minds in the country would not only create animated characters to sell the cereals to children—Tony the Tiger, Mr. MaGoo, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted, the Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle—but give them entire Saturday-morning television shows dedicated to the task of doing so.

This is kind of like a previous generations version of Zynga, flying sheep, and other things that not advancing our society.

The magazine Consumer Reports may have captured this logic perfectly in 1986 when it claimed, “Eating any of the cereals would certainly provide better nutrition than eating no breakfast at all.

Amazing

in an era when malnutrition and undernutrition were pervasive problems throughout Europe, sugar’s ability to put fat on the lean or emaciated was widely perceived as one of its beneficial qualities.

The legendary British climber George Mallory said that in his 1923 attempt on Mount Everest, he succeeded in making it within two thousand feet of the summit by living on sugar for the last few days of the ascent: almost exclusively lemon drops, peppermint candies, and chocolate. “At great elevations no one has any strength to waste on unnecessary processes of digestion,” Mallory said; “sugar…can be digested quickly and easily converted into muscular energy. It has also a much-needed stimulating effect.

Crazy

To the sugar industry, it has been the gift that keeps on giving, the ultimate defense against all arguments and evidence that sugar is uniquely toxic. This is the idea that we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete. By this thinking, researchers and public-health authorities think of obesity as a disorder of “energy balance,” a concept that has become so ingrained in conventional thinking, so widespread, that arguments to the contrary have typically been treated as quackery, if not a willful disavowal of the laws of physics.

Amazing - in searches online now you still see this.

Which is LESS FATTENING?” a Domino Sugar advertisement asked in 1953. “3 Teaspoons of Pure Domino Sugar Contain Fewer Calories than one medium Apple.

“It is true that dental caries was not a major health and economic hazard until refined sugar was made available,

Hence, the “ultimate aim” of the industry’s research, according to the SAI’s annual report in 1950, was to “discover effective means of controlling tooth decay by methods other than restricting carbohydrate intake.

Amazing how much capitalism has controlled

In 1951, the American Sugar Refining Company launched an intensive advertising campaign—the goal was nine hundred million messages, delivered in three hundred daily newspapers, Sunday supplements, and farm journals—stressing how important it was for children, in particular, to benefit from the energy contained in pure sugar.

Omg

Roosevelt’s perspective on sugar and saccharin, however, was different. He was fat and in danger of getting fatter, and his personal physician, or so Roosevelt told Wiley, had counseled him to use saccharin daily. Hence, “anybody who says saccharin is injurious is an idiot.” That was the end of the argument.

Lol

For children, Mayer suggested, sugar is quite possibly as addictive as tobacco. “The limited bill against sucrose which can be documented is sufficient to justify a drastic decrease in our consumption,” Mayer had written.

more Americans died of heart disease than from any other illness.

By 1952, the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys was arguing that high blood levels of cholesterol caused heart disease, and that it was the fat in our diets that drove up cholesterol levels. Keys had a conflict of interest: his research had been funded by the sugar industry—the Sugar Research Foundation and then the Sugar Association—since 1944,

The Yemenites who had been in Israel since the 1930s, according to Cohen’s research, had diabetes rates very similar to those of other Israelis and of populations documented in New York and elsewhere. This rate was fifty times higher than that of the Yemenites who had arrived in Operation Magic Carpet and had been in the country for only half a dozen years when Cohen began his research. Cohen noted that similar disparities in disease rates for hypertension and heart disease had been reported between these two waves of Yemenite immigrants. He and his colleagues then systematically queried the Yemenites about their original diets in Yemen and what they were eating in Israel, and the singular difference was not in their fat consumption. “The quantity of sugar used in the Yemen had been negligible,” Cohen reported; “almost no sugar was consumed.

of all the various dietary factors measured in these populations, the two that tracked best with heart disease—as Yudkin might have predicted—were sugar and saturated fat.

When researchers realized that the French had relatively low rates of heart disease despite a diet that was rich in saturated fats, they wrote it off as an inexplicable “paradox,” and ignored the fact that the French traditionally consumed far less sugar than did populations—the Americans and British, most notably—in which coronary disease seemed to be a scourge. At the end of the eighteenth century, French per capita sugar consumption was less than a fifth of what it was in England. At the end of the nineteenth century, even after the beet-sugar revolution, France was still lagging far behind both the British and the Americans—thirty-three pounds for the French compared with eighty-eight for the English and sixty-six for Americans.

As with Stare’s placement on radio and TV shows, the Sugar Association’s role in preparing and funding the document were kept well in the background.

In 1984, attended by considerable controversy, they initiated a massive public-relations campaign to induce every American over the age of two to eat a low-fat diet. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since.

So the answer to the question of whether sugar, in the form of sucrose and HFCS, is the primary cause of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome and therefore obesity, diabetes, and heart disease is: it certainly could be.

The prevalence of diabetes in the United States, as noted earlier, is now closer to one in eleven Americans than to the three or four in a thousand that it appeared to be when Joslin went to Arizona.

As for the Native Americans in that state, by the 1960s researchers were reporting a prevalence of type 2 diabetes in adults surpassing 50 percent, the highest rate then (and perhaps since) recorded in the world.

One obvious possible explanation for the epidemics of obesity and diabetes in these Native Americans, and thus elsewhere, is that as the amount of sugar consumed per capita increases, and perhaps sugary beverages particularly, a greater proportion of the population becomes insulin-resistant. They pass over the threshold at which they can no longer tolerate the sugar they’re consuming—some of us can only tolerate a little sugar; some of us can tolerate a lot—and they manifest metabolic syndrome and then obesity and diabetes.

Women who are glucose-intolerant during their pregnancies will have children who are born larger and fatter than women who aren’t, and those children will carry a greater risk of obesity and diabetes as they themselves reach adulthood. This includes not just women who are diabetic before pregnancy or become diabetic during pregnancy—a condition known as gestational diabetes—but obese women or women who gain a lot of weight in pregnancy.

The ADA, for instance, calls it a “myth” that sugar causes type 2 diabetes, because that’s caused by “genetics and lifestyle factors” that make us fat—i.e., “calories from any source.

For fifty years, the consensus of opinion in the medical community has been that the dietary trigger of hypertension is salt consumption. Eating too much salt raises blood pressure; hypertension is the pathological, chronic state that in turn increases risk of both heart disease and cerebrovascular disease (strokes). It’s a simple hypothesis and a concise one—and it’s all too likely wrong.

“All those groups which showed no increase of mean blood-pressures with age during adult life represent relatively small homogeneous populations living under primitive conditions in relative isolation, more or less undisturbed by their contacts with civilization…and they live almost entirely on the natural foods of their environment.

the possibility that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are cancer promoters, and thus that abnormally elevated levels of insulin—caused by insulin resistance, for instance—would increase our cancer risk.

cancer cells require insulin to propagate;

From this perspective of cancer as a metabolic disease, insulin and IGF promote the cancer process through a series of steps. First, insulin resistance and elevated levels of insulin trigger an increased uptake of blood sugar (glucose) as fuel for precancerous cells.

Once cancer cells make this conversion, they burn enormous amounts of glucose as fuel, providing them, apparently, with the necessary raw materials to proliferate.

free radicals

I thought this was a bond term

And the more DNA damage, the more mutations are generated, and the more likely it is that one of those mutations will bestow on the cells the ability to proliferate without being held in check by the cellular processes that work to prevent this pathological process in healthy cells. The result is a feed-forward acceleration of tumor growth.

Statistcs

If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that sugar causes cancer, radical as this may seem, and even though this suggestion is rarely if ever voiced publicly.

Logic seems sound. So why is this suggestion rarely voiced?

The risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease roughly doubles every five years past the age of sixty—or at least it does in modern Western societies—and so, the longer a population lives, the greater the burden or prevalence of Alzheimer

Why it will be so hard to live forever biologically.

type 2 diabetics have from one and a half to two times the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia of nondiabetics, suggesting

Is it that we’re all simply eating too much and exercising too little, which is the one simple answer that the nutritional establishment will embrace in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? Another simple answer, and a more likely one, is sugar.