The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

In 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.

specifying energy or caloric content as the instrument through which foods influence body weight, it implies that a calorie of sugar would be no more or less capable of causing obesity, and thus diabetes, than a calorie of broccoli or olive oil or eggs or any other food. By the 1960s, the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” had become a mantra of the nutrition-and-obesity research community, and it was invoked to make just this argument (as it still is).

what we now call type 2 diabetes is not a disease of insulin deficiency (as type 1 is)—at least not at first—but of insulin resistance.

The hypothesis addressed in this book, for instance, is that sugar is the dietary trigger of obesity and diabetes and, if so, the diseases such as heart disease that associate with them.

The more insulin and IGF in the circulation, the more cancer cells are driven to multiply and tumors to grow.