The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

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...