The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

In a decade of unparalleled depression, Orwell observed, sales of what he called “cheap luxuries” had surged. “The peculiar evil is this,” he wrote. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t….When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty.’ There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”

Yup

“To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’ ” he wrote, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’ ”

Ding.

In 1987, Reaven discussed the emerging science of metabolic syndrome at a conference on diabetes prevention hosted by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers and clinicians in attendance acknowledged that the science was compelling, but they also wished, as one NIH administrator said at the time, that “it would go away, because nobody knows how to deal with it.” They had come to believe that fat was bad for the heart and that too much protein could put an unhealthy strain on the kidneys. Now Reaven was bringing back the notion that carbohydrates were bad. “We have to eat something,” the NIH official said, but what would be left?

Seriousy.

In 1988, with five years more to follow these children into adulthood, the NIH researchers reported that 45 percent of the children of diabetic mothers had become diabetic themselves by the time they were in their mid-twenties, more than five times the rate among children of mothers who would go on to become diabetic only after their pregnancy (8.6 percent), and more than thirty times the rate among children of mothers who remained healthy (1.4 percent).

Christ almighty.

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.” It then proceeds to recommend that we all avoid sugar-sweetened beverages to prevent diabetes, adding that we can “save money” by doing so. The organization accepts the role of fat accumulation in the liver as quite possibly a causal factor in the development of insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity, but ignores the evidence building steadily since the 1980s that implicates sugars as the cause of that hepatic fat accumulation.

They've pretty much come around as of June 2019.

As it turns out, a nearly vegetarian diet is likely to have only a very modest effect on uric acid levels—at least compared with a typical American diet—rarely sufficient to return high uric acid levels to normality, and there’s little evidence that such diets reliably reduce the incidence of gouty attacks in those afflicted.

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