Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine

by Robert H. Lustig

The epic battle between British physiologist John Yudkin and Minnesota epidemiologist Ancel Keys for control of the American Diet, detailed in my book Fat Chance (2012) and Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise (2017), is now sixty years old. Yudkin wrote Pure, White and Deadly (1972) targeting dietary sugar; Keys wrote The Seven Countries Study (1980) targeting dietary saturated fat. Both scientists had correlation but not causation; both had static data (single points in time) rather than longitudinal data (patterns over time). Both used ecologic (population) data, which is much flimsier than individual data. In other words, both had weak cases.