The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

Sugar stimulates the release of the same neurotransmitters—dopamine in particular—through which the potent effects of these other drugs are mediated. Because the drugs work this way, humans have learned how to refine their essence into concentrated forms that heighten the rush. Coca leaves, for instance, are mildly stimulating when chewed, but powerfully addictive when refined into cocaine; even

more so taken directly into the lungs when smoked as crack cocaine. Sugar, too, has been refined from its original form to heighten its rush and concentrate its effects, albeit as a nutrient that provides energy as well as a chemical that stimulates pleasure in the brain.

By the 1830s, when the British emancipationists finally put an end to the slave trade, some twelve and a half million Africans had been shipped off as slaves to the New World; two-thirds of them worked and died growing and refining sugar.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, sugar was the equivalent, economically and politically, of oil in the twentieth.

In the sixteenth century, when sugar had become a staple of British royalty, a German traveler to London famously commented that Queen Elizabeth’s teeth were black and that this was “a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar.” He added that the poor in England then seemed healthier than the rich, because sugar was a luxury the poor couldn’t afford. Sugar “rotteth the teeth, making them look blacke, and withal, causeth many times

a loathsome stinking-breath,” one seventeenth-century text suggested. “And therefore let young people especially, beware how they meddle too much with it.” This thinking can be found sprinkled throughout medical opinion ever after.

In 2003, epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control, led by Eugenia Calle, published an analysis in The

New England Journal of Medicine reporting that cancer mortality in the United States was clearly associated with obesity and overweight. The heaviest men and women, they reported, were 50 and 60 percent more likely, respectively, to die from cancer than the lean. This increased risk of death held true for a host of common cancers—esophageal, colorectal, liver, gallbladder, pancreatic, and kidney cancers, as well as, in women, cancers of the breast, uterus, cervix, and ovary. In 2004, the CDC followed up with an analysis linking cancer to diabetes, particularly pancreatic, colorectal, liver, bladder, and breast cancers. Cancer researchers trying to make sense of this association would later say that something about cancer seems to thrive on the metabolic environment of the obese and the diabetic.

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.