The "Decades-Long Health Catastrophe" From Sugar
(As well as the terribly unhealthy and unscientific advice to eat a low-fat, high-carb diet -- exactly the opposite of the healthy diet I eat: high-fat, very low carb.)
Those are Ian Leslie's words in the quote, in a terrific long read at The Guardian, "The Sugar Conspiracy." It's from back in 2016, but it's as relevant as ever. An excerpt:
Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises 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.
The sugar conspiracy
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."
Yudkin was demonized for years, and guess what:
These sharp fluctuations in Yudkin's stock have had little to do with the scientific method, and a lot to do with the unscientific way in which the field of nutrition has conducted itself over the years. This story, which has begun to emerge in the past decade, has been brought to public attention largely by sceptical outsiders rather than eminent nutritionists. In her painstakingly researched book, The Big Fat Surprise, the journalist Nina Teicholz traces the history of the proposition that saturated fats cause heart disease, and reveals the remarkable extent to which its progress from controversial theory to accepted truth was driven, not by new evidence, but by the influence of a few powerful personalities, one in particular.Teicholz's book also describes how an establishment of senior nutrition scientists, at once insecure about its medical authority and vigilant for threats to it, consistently exaggerated the case for low-fat diets, while turning its guns on those who offered evidence or argument to the contrary. John Yudkin was only its first and most eminent victim.
Today, as nutritionists struggle to comprehend a health disaster they did not predict and may have precipitated, the field is undergoing a painful period of re-evaluation. It is edging away from prohibitions on cholesterol and fat, and hardening its warnings on sugar, without going so far as to perform a reverse turn. But its senior members still retain a collective instinct to malign those who challenge its tattered conventional wisdom too loudly, as Teicholz is now discovering.
Oh, and by the way:
In 2008, researchers from Oxford University undertook a Europe-wide study of the causes of heart disease. Its data shows an inverse correlation between saturated fat and heart disease, across the continent. France, the country with the highest intake of saturated fat, has the lowest rate of heart disease; Ukraine, the country with the lowest intake of saturated fat, has the highest. When the British obesity researcher Zoë Harcombe performed an analysis of the data on cholesterol levels for 192 countries around the world, she found that lower cholesterol correlated with higher rates of death from heart disease.
The only thing consistent about government nutritional advice over my 60+ years on earth is that it's consistently wrong. Most of the time, you'd fare better if you read what they advise and do the exact opposite.
James Armstrong at May 8, 2019 7:13 AM
And in the New York Times today, there is an article about the horrors of serving whole milk in schools, with the dairy industry as the evil corporate overlords encouraging the obesity epidemic.
Joe at May 8, 2019 7:34 AM
The government told me - 11 servings of carbs per day and you'll be healthy. IT IS SCIENCE. Did they lie when they changed from the four food groups to that first food pyramid, or did they lie when they kept iterating that food pyramid? Why did the government give out government cheese to people at the same time as promoting the 11 servings of pasta and bread per day?
Why should any government-approved SCIENCE be accepted - especially as it comes to whether your livelihood should be destroyed because of scientific consensus - when they can't answer a very simple question after decades of taxpayer-funded research - what food should people eat so as not to be obese?
The anti-protein/anti-fat gestapo puts the anthropomorphic global warming true believers to shame. "Boy, let me show you what it means to be a mindless fanatic..."
El Verde Loco at May 8, 2019 8:04 AM
Wait until that very same government provides you health care, El Verde Loco.
I R A Darth Aggie at May 8, 2019 10:50 AM
I wish some entrepreneur would open a specialty grocery for low-sugar, low-carb products only — with the amounts clearly labeled on the shelf.
For convenience alone, I'd patronize it.
Kevin at May 8, 2019 1:19 PM
Fantastic blog post.
Crid at May 8, 2019 5:17 PM
Humans cannot survive in primitive times except as part of a group. This makes us prone to fall in line with our leaders. This does NOT make for good group decision-making, especially about science. For fashion fads it doesn't matter.
When margarine first came out, lobbying by the dairy industry made it illegal for decades to add food coloring, so it was white and not very tasty-looking. For a while, the gov advised eating margarine instead of butter and now it has swung back. Hard to get reliable info.
cc at May 9, 2019 11:54 AM
> Humans cannot survive in
> primitive times except
> as part of a group.
Not in modern times, either.
People just want to imagine that they're daring, lonesome iconoclasts in a world of conspiracy and subterfuge.
Crid at May 9, 2019 7:10 PM
Help Sugar Bear find his insulin
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at May 9, 2019 7:27 PM
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