The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

As the University of California, Berkeley, authority Michael Pollan has so memorably put it, we should “eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” If we do this, we will get as close as we reasonably can to a healthy diet.

But science is about explaining what we observe in nature and doing so with the simplest possible explanation—as Newton suggested, with the simplest explanation that is both true and sufficient. The process of science is then about the conflict between the desire to believe a simple explanation—particularly our simple explanation—and the skepticism required to establish reliably whether it does or does not explain what we observe.

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.

How many cigarettes could be smoked without doing at least some harm to our health, and could thus constitute smoking in moderation? If we say none, we may, indeed, be right, but now we’ve redefined how we’re willing to work with the concept of moderation. The same logic may also apply to sugar. If it takes twenty years of either smoking cigarettes or consuming sugar for the consequences to appear, how can we know whether we’ve smoked or consumed too much before it’s too late? Isn’t it more reasonable to decide early in life (or early in parenting) that not too much is as little as possible?

Trying to consume sugar in moderation, however it’s defined, in such a world is likely to be no more successful for some of us than trying to smoke cigarettes in moderation—just a few cigarettes a day, rather than a pack. Whether or not we can avoid any meaningful chronic effects by doing so, we may not be capable of managing our habits, or managing our habits might become the dominant theme in our lives (just as rationing sweets for our children can seem to be a dominant theme in parenting).

If sugar consumption may be a slippery slope, then advocating moderation is not a meaningful concept.