The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

In fact, 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.

In science, young researchers are taught to challenge authority and to be skeptical of all they’re taught, but this isn’t the case in medicine, where the opinion of figures of authority carry undue weight.

Instead of the billion-dollar test of the dietary-fat hypothesis, the NIH invested a quarter-billion dollars in two trials that tested variations on the same theme, or links in a hypothetical chain of reasoning. The first trial would test the supposition that men with high cholesterol levels who were told to eat a low-fat diet (and also took blood-pressure medication and received counseling to quit smoking, if either of these was necessary) would live longer than men who weren’t. The results of this study were published in 1982 and failed to confirm the hypothesis. The men on the low-fat diet suffered more deaths than the men who were left to their own devices. (The investigators refused to believe that a low-fat diet could be harmful, and certainly not the smoking cessation, so they concluded, questionably, that the blood-pressure medication had unforeseen side effects and caused more deaths than it prevented.) The second trial tested the hypothesis that a cholesterol-lowering medication given to men with very high levels of cholesterol would lengthen their lives, compared with men who took no such medication. The results of this study, published in 1984, indicated that the medication helped, albeit just barely. The authorities at the National Institutes of Health then took what amounts to a leap of faith. (“It’s an imperfect world,” as one of the NIH administrators later phrased it. “The data that would be definitive are ungettable, so you do your best with what is avail...

As Cantley has said, sugar “scares” him, for precisely this reason. If the sugars we consume—sucrose and HFCS specifically—cause insulin resistance, then they are prime suspects for causing cancer as well, or at the very least promoting its growth. Even if the details of the mechanism should turn out to be wrong, the association between obesity, diabetes, and cancer, and the specific association between insulin, IGF, and cancer, suggests that whatever is causing insulin resistance is increasing the likelihood that we will get cancer. 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.

By now, the message should be clear: if insulin is involved in a disease process, then insulin resistance—i.e., metabolic syndrome—is likely to make it worse, and perhaps even initiate the disease process to begin with. This directly implicates sugar as a potential cause, a dietary trigger of the disease.