The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

One of the common themes in the history of medical research is that a small number of influential authorities, often only a single individual, can sway an entire field of thought.

Cleave had been arguing in the pages of The Lancet since 1940 that the more a food changes from its natural state, the more harmful it’s going to be to the animal that consumes it—in this case, humans—and that sugar and refined flour were the most dramatic examples of this.

what strains the pancreas is what strains any other piece of apparatus,” wrote Cleave, “not so much the total amount of work it is called upon to do, but the rate at which it is called upon to do it.

high triglyceride count—not cholesterol—was the more common abnormality associated with heart disease.

triglycerides in the bloodstream, in particular, remain elevated when we eat carbohydrates, not fat.

medical research community came to recognize that insulin resistance and a condition now known as “metabolic syndrome” is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes.

sugar should be at the top of any list of dietary suspects.

insulin seems to work as the opposite of a diuretic. Rather than promote the production of urine, which is what a diuretic does, it suppresses it, with the ultimate result being very similar to what is supposed to happen when we eat salt-rich foods.

virtually all diet advice suffers from this same complication: whether you’re trying to avoid gluten, trans fats, saturated fats, or refined carbohydrates of all types, or just trying to cut calories—eat less and eat healthy—an end result of this advice is that you’re often avoiding processed foods containing sugar and a host of other ingredients. If we benefit, we cannot say exactly why.

Diet advice that recommends we eat whole foods and avoid processed foods (foodlike substances) removes virtually all refined sugars by definition; diet advice to avoid sugar means, by definition, that we avoid virtually all processed foods.