The Case Against Sugar

by Gary Taubes

Medicine today, though, as with related fields such as nutrition, is taught mostly untethered from its history. Students are taught what to believe but not always the evidence on which these beliefs are based, and so oftentimes the beliefs cannot be questioned.

Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward center”—technically, the nucleus accumbens—as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Addiction researchers have come to believe that behaviors required for the survival of a species—specifically, eating and sex—are experienced as pleasurable in this part of the brain, and so we do them again and again.

The more we use these substances, the less dopamine we produce naturally in the brain, and the more habituated our brain cells become to the dopamine that is produced—the number of “dopamine receptors” declines. The result is a phenomenon known as dopamine down-regulation: we need more of the drug to get the same pleasurable response, while natural pleasures, such as sex and eating, please us less and less.

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

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.

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).

This implies, of course, that if insulin-resistant, obese, and/or diabetic mothers give birth to children who are more predisposed to being insulin-resistant, obese, and diabetic when they, in turn, are of childbearing age, the problem will get worse with each successive generation—

PROVISIONAL LIST OF WESTERN DISEASES Metabolic and cardiovascular: essential hypertension, obesity, diabetes mellitus (type II), cholesterol gallstones, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, coronary heart disease, varicose veins, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism Colonic: constipation, appendicitis, diverticular disease, haemorrhoids; cancer and polyp of large bowel Other diseases: dental caries, renal stone, hyperuricaemia and gout, thyroidtoxicosis, pernicious anaemia, subacute combined degeneration, also other forms of cancer such as breast and lung HUGH TROWELL AND DENIS BURKITT, Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention, 1981

Since tooth decay was caused by refined grains and perhaps sugar most of all, Cleave argued, didn’t that imply that the same would be true of all these Western diseases? “It would be an extraordinary coincidence,” he wrote, “if these refined carbohydrates, which are known to wreak such havoc on the teeth, did not also have profound repercussions on other parts of the alimentary canal during their passage along it, and on other parts of the body after absorption from the canal.”

When Isaac Newton paraphrased the concept of Occam’s Razor, he did so by saying, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” This was rule number one of Newton’s “rules of reasoning in natural philosophy” in his Principia.