The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

As the German and Austrian medical-research communities evaporated with the rise of Hitler and the devastation of the Second World War, the notion of obesity as a hormonal regulatory disorder effectively evaporated with it. The primary German textbook on endocrinology and internal medicine in the 1950s still included a discussion of this thinking, but that textbook never saw an English translation, which is significant, since the lingua franca of medical science had now shifted from German prewar to English afterward. The German-language journals from the prewar era, and with them the best scientific thinking of the era in all the disciplines relevant to both obesity and diabetes—including metabolism, endocrinology, nutrition, and genetics—would no longer be read, nor would they be referenced.