The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

Here we’re back to those few observations that are indisputable and that we have to explain. In the second half of the nineteenth century in Western populations, and far more recently in others, obesity and type 2 diabetes emerged, eventually to become the dominant diseases of modern times. Insulin resistance characterizes both these disorders. And those who are insulin-resistant, who suffer from obesity and type 2 diabetes, are at higher risk of a host of other chronic diseases—the Western diseases, as Burkitt and Trowell described them—and these diseases, too, are associated with insulin resistance. How do we explain these observations? What has changed that could cause the emergence of these diseases worldwide and the insulin resistance that is associated with so many of them? What changes in our diets and our lifestyles can explain these changes in disease patterns? Is a simple hypothesis sufficient to do it? 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.