The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

The section on sugar and heart disease said “conflicting results” were found, and cited fourteen such studies, one of which was Francisco Grande’s chapter in “Sugar in the Diet of Man”;

“Sugar is Safe!” proclaimed a Sugar Association advertisement about the FDA report. “Sugar does not cause death-dealing diseases….There is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease or any other malady.” The ad ended with a caution to the unwary consumer: “The next time you hear a promoter attacking sugar, beware the ripoff. Remember he can’t substantiate his charges. Ask yourself what he’s promoting or what he is seeking to cover up. If you get a chance, ask him about the GRAS Review Report. Odds are you won’t get an answer. Nothing stings a nutritional liar like scientific facts.”

We went from the first half of the 1970s, during which sugar was vilified and per capita sugar consumption actually dipped, to the 1980s, which saw the beginning of the first significant increase in total intake since the Great Depression.

by 1999 we were now eating and/or drinking from two to three times the dose of sucrose and HFCS that Glinsmann and his FDA colleagues had officially defined as safe just thirteen years earlier.

It’s difficult to imagine that we simply failed to realize that the HFCS we were now consuming in our soft drinks and juices and an ever-increasing number of processed foods and baked goods was, indeed, just another form of glucose and fructose and thus, in effect, sugar, but that is what happened. The corn refiners had succeeded in muddying the difference.

Before we get either heart disease or diabetes, we first manifest metabolic syndrome. The CDC now estimates that some seventy-five million adult Americans have metabolic syndrome.

This means that if you’re overweight or obese—as two-thirds of American adults are—there’s a good chance that you have metabolic syndrome; it also means that your blood pressure is likely to be elevated, and you’re glucose-intolerant and thus on the way to becoming diabetic.

Metabolic syndrome ties together a host of disorders that the medical community typically thought of as unrelated, or at least having separate and distinct causes—getting fatter (obesity), high blood pressure (hypertension), high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol (dyslipidemia), heart disease (atherosclerosis), high blood sugar (diabetes), and inflammation (pick your disease)—as products of insulin resistance and high circulating insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia).

heart disease and diabetes are associated with a common set of metabolic and hormonal disruptions, including obesity, and that elevated cholesterol levels may be the least of them. Reaven implicated all carbohydrates in the disease state.

All of these abnormalities happen to be related to the carbohydrate content of the diet, not to the fat content.

The first reports linking fatty liver disease to obesity in humans date to 1950 and a Kansas physician named Samuel Zelman, who suggested that the carbohydrate load consumed by his obese patients might somehow be responsible.

These researchers say the metabolic effects of consuming sugar or fructose can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed huge amounts of it—almost 70 percent of the calories in their diets.

In a 2011 study in which twenty-nine rhesus monkeys were given the opportunity to drink a fructose-sweetened beverage along with their usual monkey chow, every last one of them developed “insulin resistance and many features of the metabolic syndrome” within a year, and four had progressed to type 2 diabetes.

Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are not “acute toxins,” of the kind the FDA typically regulates, and the effects of which can be studied reasonably well over the course of days or months. The question is whether they’re chronic toxins, their effects accumulating over the course of many thousands of meals, not just a few.

Times have changed. The prevalence of diabetes in the United States, as noted earlier, is now closer to one in eleven Americans than to the three or four in a thousand that it appeared to be when Joslin went to Arizona.

The Indian Health Service recorded just eleven deaths attributed to the disease among the entire Native American population of the state in the six years leading up to Joslin’s arrival. Sage Memorial Hospital on the Navajo Reservation, a private institution, reported just a single case of diabetes between 1931 and 1936 (although, as Joslin pointed out, only seventy-five of the patients were past the age of fifty). As late as 1947, a survey of the inpatient records of twenty-five thousand Navajo admitted to the same hospital produced a total of only five cases in sixteen years.

was little controversy about it, and there still isn’t. Western diseases were mostly chronic disorders, not infectious diseases, and they associated with Western diets and lifestyles, common in Europe and the United States and in urban centers elsewhere, and relatively uncommon in indigenous populations isolated from Western influence.

When we consume a lot of salt, our bodies retain more water to dilute the sodium to the right concentration, and this manifests itself as elevations in blood pressure.

These researchers believe that cancer is as much a metabolic disease as a “proliferative” disease, and that for cancer cells to procreate, they have to rewire their metabolic programs—how they fuel themselves—to drive their unfettered growth.

Cancer as a metabolic disorder

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.