The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

We are, beyond question, the greatest sugar-consumers in the world, and many of our diseases may be attributed to too free a use of sweet food. The New York Times, May 22, 1857

the per capita consumption of candy in the United States doubled with the beginning of Prohibition in 1919, as Americans apparently turned en masse from alcohol to sweets.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, sugar was the equivalent, economically and politically, of oil in the twentieth. It was the stuff over which wars were fought, empires built, and fortunes made and lost.