This article really tied together some
of my thoughts about sugar and its effects on our bodies. Six names
that are behind this are Robert Lustig, John Yudkin, Dr Paul Dudley
White, Ancel Keys, Gary Taubes, and Nina Teicholz. There are several
others mentioned, but I admit I am not familiar with them.
Robert Lustig is a pediatric
endocrinologist at the University of California who specializes in
the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009,
titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six
million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that
fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison”
culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.
A year or so before the video was
posted; Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in
Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience
approached him. Surely, the man said, you’ve read Yudkin. Lustig
shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British
professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in
1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.
“If only a small fraction of what
we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to
any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin,
“that material would promptly be banned.” The book did
well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists
combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his
career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely
forgotten man.
Perhaps the Australian scientist
intended a friendly warning. Lustig was certainly putting his
academic reputation at risk when he embarked on a high-profile
campaign against sugar. But, unlike Yudkin, Lustig is backed by a
prevailing wind. We read almost every week of new research into the
deleterious effects of sugar on our bodies. In the US, the latest
edition of the government’s official dietary guidelines includes a
cap on sugar consumption. In the UK, the chancellor George Osborne
has announced a new tax on sugary drinks. Sugar has become dietary
enemy number one.
This represents a dramatic shift in
priority. For at least the last three decades, the dietary
arch-villain has been saturated fat. When Yudkin was conducting his
research into the effects of sugar, in the 1960s, a new nutritional
orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet
was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. Yudkin led a diminishing
band of dissenters who believed that sugar, not fat, was the more
likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the
field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin
found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated.
Not just defeated, in fact, but buried.
When Lustig returned to California, he searched for Pure, White and
Deadly in bookstores and online, to no avail. Eventually, he tracked
down a copy after submitting a request to his university library. On
reading Yudkin’s introduction, he felt a shock of recognition.
“Holy crap,” Lustig thought.
“This guy got there 35 years before me.”
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