The Case Against Sugar

Two books taken together offer adequate evidence that sugar addiction stands out above all other factors among multiple causes of chronic diseases that became epidemic in recent times. Robert Lustig -- THE HACKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND Gary Taubes -- THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR Gary Taubes, as a journalist, demonstrates the best of objective science. Often a journalist makes the facts clearer than a scientist ever does. In his previous books, one stands out for public health relevance. That is WHY WE GET FAT. Taubes makes a case for sugar as the main factor that, far above all else, is the reason we have epidemics of gout, high blood pressure, elevated blood glucose, insulin resistance, diabetes, arterial disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and more. All of these are hormonally related to metabolic syndrome, the topic that put Lustig in the forefront of nutritional science. Taubes gives a historical background of opposing views fairly, with little condemnation, though much activity of sugar industry representatives could have been judged criminal. Opposing views: "Chronic diseases are caused by overeating and under-activity. (more calories in than out.)" "Eat less and exercise more" has a history of failure, but heavily promoted by the industry with massive publicity efforts over many years. Some observers were not fooled, but they were few, and did not have the media presence of Frederick Stare and Ansel Keys. My crude accusation: The industry-government-medical-media complex that tried to make sugar into a health food and denied its role in disease may have caused over 100,000,000 to die short of their normal life span, living their last years in misery. The death count and misery is rapidly growing even now. Taubes quotes a reason for this opposition, other than self (selfish) interest: "As soon as we think we are right about something," as New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz noted in the 2010 book BEING WRONG, we narrow our focus, attending only to details that support our belief, or ceasing to listen altogether." Fortunately, Gary Taubes understands this. This is my understanding of THE HACKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Robert Lustig: Sugar has the same neurohormonal paths in the brain as opiods. Sugar is addictive with brief hits of pleasure, but not satisfying, with long-range health consequences. We want more because a little is not satisfying. We crave more to the point of leaving other nutrients lacking, and food without sugar becomes tasteless. The book is not about sugar, though that may be Lustig's most vital point. It is about addictions, hormones of pleasure and hormones of happiness that do not lead to contentment. Though I have studied nutrition and endocrinology for many years, that is not my main interest. I am interested in what Lustig says about sugar. I am author of an orthomolecular nutrition textbook, but my greater interest is in the health and welfare of many people I know who suffer from chronic diseases, or are heading that way. I have a problem with Lustig's writing about drugs. He overstated the value of psychoactive prescription drugs and seemed unaware of the extent of harm. I have seen too many lives destroyed by these to let that pass. His suggested that cannabanoids and even limited use of LSD may be more effective. They could hardly be worse. I expect Taubes's book to be the one that makes a difference in the world, with Lustig's as vital scientific background, with both giving accounts of how the powers of this world hack the minds of all of us. My conclusion: 1. Sugar excess is the major cause of modern chronic diseases. 2. Sugar is addictive and not satisfying. Excess leads to disappointment, not happiness or contentment. 3. Sugar substitutes have little evidence of benefit. 4. We can benefit greatly in prevention and treatment by reducing sugar to near the level used by our ancestors or non-industrial populations. Skipping deserts is a useless token, not a solution. Fruit is good, not fruit juice. Sweet drinks of all kinds are out. Most processed foods have sugar added, and must be regarded as toxic. 5. We need fat, even saturated fat, a spectrum of natural fats. Coconut oil, fish oil. bacon. Fats add flavor, satisfaction and satiety. 6. We need phytonutrients and minerals which are scarce in modern food. 7. Changing is hard. Changing is scary to anticipate, pleasant to remember. If these two books are too much for you, try a fun but scientific book by Denise Minger: DEATH BY FOOD PYRIMID.

Review: The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes is a great book if you’re looking to read more into the field of nutrition and its history or even just looking for a great non-fiction book. He tells a grand story about sugar in our society and it gives you an opportunity to look into the past with regards to medical practices, and how sugar came to be so prevalent in present times. Taubes weaves his way through the history of nutrition and various studies regarding sugar as part of our diet. He gives us an important insight into the pressures that a private industry put on the government 30 years ago and frames it in a way such that it is very easy to envision these pressures still being exerted on our government today. And although he seems to favor those standing against the sugar industry he is still able to remain subjective throughout. This book will open your eyes to what is happening in your body when you eat poorly and it will motivate you to change if you happen to be needing a kick in the rear to motivate yourself. Using some basic criteria such as information given and ease of reading, all you can ask out of a non-fiction research book in my opinion, this book exceeds all expectations. This book was very easy to pick up as someone with very little background information on nutrition and I’m sure it’ll be just as easy for anyone else. It is a somewhat simple read; but still packs quite the load of useful information in relation to our health. He allows his arguments to build off each other, starting small with basic topics then building until you will have an almost “aha” moment when his argument is connected fully in your mind. Delivery: I ordered this book from Amazon along with a couple others on a Sunday night and selected free two-day shipping. Somewhere along my ordering process I must have clicked something wrong because instead of sending my package to my college address it instead went to my home address 3 hours away. That aside, the package got to my house on a Tuesday which was surprising to me because that was earlier than what even Amazon expected on their tracking site. My family sent it to me on Wednesday and the USPS went off and got it to me the next day. Apart from all the delivery issues, the book arrived without any bends or rips at all despite being a paper back. I hadn’t ordered a book from Amazon before this so I didn’t know what condition to receive it in but I was content. Overall, don’t expect to have the same issue that I did but expect to have a great delivery and receive it in great condition. Final Thoughts: This book is a great investment as I can see myself picking it up sometime in the future when I’m needing something to read. It is an extremely well written, informational book that will benefit you by making you more cognizant of health hazards in the food that you consume. Expect Amazon’s typically fast and efficient delivery on your order and you’ll be into this book in no time.

This book is a bit different from his other two well known works on nutrition. It's more dry and factual with fewer conclusions explicitly drawn. He gives an exceptional history of sugar and its role in the world. He also outlines the impact sugar's proponents have had on how sugar has been viewed by consumers and on how the sugar oligarchs have fought all attempts to honestly appraise sugar's impact on our health. Taubes traces the rise of modern illnesses with the rise of sugar consumption while acknowledging that definitively putting the blame on sugar is extremely difficult since so much else has changed along with our consumption of sugar. A bright reader might consider to at least cut out most sugar from their and their family's daily diet after reading this.

Gary Taubes is the best investigative science writer around. He traces the long history of views about sugar from ancient times to the present in his analysis of the facts. This is a plea for application of rigorous scientific method into the field of nutrition. Taubes is not selling any miracle supplements or drugs. He takes an objective look at the many poorly supported claims about the function of sugar in our lives. Political pressures from sugar lobbyists have long distorted the truth about the real effects of sugar on the human body. He finds that the effects are toxic, while the truth has been concealed under a large body of theories and arguments about the usefulness of sugar. It was promoted as a source of energy and good health. Absurd claims have been made about sugar from the sugar industry and commercial interests. Unfortunately, generations of physicians concluded that diabetes and obesity were not related to sugar consumption. These conclusions are false and were influenced by sugar industry propaganda, often unconsciously. You probably don't know that tobacco will absorb 50 percent of its weight in liquid sugar, but cigarette makers knew this and used sugar to make tobacco more palatable and even more addictive. New discoveries from studies of blood sugar content established that sugar is the primary cause of diabetes and obesity, as well as a likely contributor to heart disease and cancer. The scientific evidence for the addictive power of sugar is probably irrefutable. Corn syrup, a cheap and harmful additive to processed food, is present almost everything we buy from the supermarket. Coca Cola and the host of sugared soft drinks, candy, sugared cereals, sugared fruit juices and sugared "health foods" have undermined the nation's health. We don't need gyms and workout routines nearly as much as we need a sugar-free diet to reduce obesity. One mistake investigators made was to conclude that all calories are the same--they are not. Poor science was largely based on false assumptions about sugar. Forty percent of the first million American men called to serve in the world war were rejected due to extensive tooth decay, directly attributable to the consumption of large amounts of sugar, usually several hundred pounds a year. From1900, when diabetes and obesity were very rare, until today when they are major and often deadly problems, the public has steadily increased its sugar consumption until sugar has become a major part of every diet. Gary Taubes books (he has written others) may well herald a turning point in our understanding of the toxic and addictive nature of sugar. It is not gluttony and overeating, as once claimed that causes obesity and diabetes nearly as much as it is the flood of sugar that conditions cells to manufacture fat. This is a remarkable and carefully researched book with a large number of references to the scientific and often overlooked evidence of what sugar is doing to our lives.

Author Taubes writes with clarity about the 'history' of sugar, related nutritional issues, and health. As with GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, this book is not a diet book. Rather it is a thoroughly researched history of one of the least understood consumable substances that the human species finds itself enthralled with since ever larger quantities have been made available to the general populations of numerous countries throughout the world. An important part of this history, as with GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, is how industrial and political influences have long been at work to promote sugar and all too frequently quash and distort the true nature of sugars and the negatives of sugar consumption. Part of that story is the development of the academic and private sector 'nutrition industry' which all too often is biased in promoting the interests of one or more clients (usually in agribusiness/or food industries) rather than adhering to an unbiased methodology that holds the well being of individuals and population health as paramount. Part of this 'expose' are the documents and/or interview quotes from influential sugar insiders and lobbyists. Some have criticized this book as it does not end with defined approaches to consumption of sugar but rather raises the basic issue of how much is too much. If you want a simple answer to that question regarding sugar or any other nutrient Taubes is not the author to read. If you want to understand how we as a population of nearly 320 million people have become obese, overweight, diabetic, hypertensive, etc then this book plus his other works are essential building blocks to understanding these problems and thus possible solutions. Interesting points the author raises: -Sugar played a pivotal role in the treatment of cigarette tobaccos that allowed delivery of high nicotine levels to smokers throughout the USA and the World. Thus in the early 1900s Camel cigarettes rapidly became a leading brand followed shortly afterwards by Lucky Strikes. - High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) uses have increased dramatically in foods and drinks due in part to cheap production costs. The effects of fructose (factory produced/refined) versus other sugars is notable and important and likely plays a pivotal role in fat accumulation in the human. - the widespread ABSENCE of chronic/so called Western diseases in peoples around the world and the changes that rather quickly accompany the introduction of Western Civilization and it's practices. This was a part of Taubes other works but is done particularly with a focus on sugar in this book. - the never ending tension and in too many cases outright suppression of alternative theories about how various diseases might occur including obesity and type II diabetes. - This book includes a more complete review of the rather deep science accomplishments regarding the biochemistry and physiology of macro-nutrients (fat, carbohydrates, protein) by German scientists in the pre-WWII era which were effectively lost due to the massive social disruption caused by the Nazis just before and during WWII. - introduces the concepts of how nutritional needs change over the span of a human life and to some extent vary by gender. In closing, this book should be read by those interested in food, nutrition, and health/wellness. It should also be considered by those interested in the public policy in regards to not just public/population health but also in regards to industry and political influences brought to bear that advantage shareholders rather than stakeholders in our society.

Let me start by saying that I have thoroughly enjoyed other work by Gary Taubes and I am fully onboard with the concept that sugar causes suboptimal health. This book disappointed me in that most of it is just about how sugar came to be such a huge part of the western diet and extended globally from there. Following that, there is a small section about the mechanisms through which sugar might cause a number of illnesses. Then the whole last 3rd of the book is pages of references. I was hoping for more science, more examples of the impact of sugar on health. And what about refined carbs? Yes, this book is aimed squarely at sucrose, etc, but as many health experts have stated, refined carbs basically just turn into sugar once they enter your system. Given the huge portion of the western diet that they make up, it seems like a miss to completely (and intentially, as stated in the book) ignore them here. If you're looking for a book about health, read Good Calories, Bad Calories. (I'm thinking about reading it again even as I write this review.). If you're looking for a history lesson, then this will be a great book for you.

After I found myself slipping into metabolic syndrome without obesity a year ago, I decided it was past time to get more information. I read a lot of great books about the risks of carbohydrate over consumption. This is the best of them all, and there are several really good ones. The beginning deals with a review of the corrupting influence of the sugar/carbohydrate food industry on medical and governmental recommendations. The later part is more about the link between our heavy sugar consumption and the evidence that ties it to a host of terrible, chronic diseases. Mr. Taubes' research is obviously extensive and he presents it with very little apparent bias. His style of writing is wonderful, sometimes long sentences but they flow like good poetry. I practiced emergency medicine for 28 years and am ashamed to admit that I pushed the fat causes heart attack theory the whole time. If only I would have read this book before I started my career. I've been on a very low carbohydrate diet now for 10 months and even if I don't live a day longer it's fine since I feel so great. Thank you Gary Taubes.

This book is not an actual diet/nutrition book. It is more of a historical/political book. I enjoyed reading it and I was surprised, (well, not that surprised) to see how hard the sugar industry works to promote a product that has probable damaging health aspects. This book also talks about the criticisms of sugar that have been around for decades, centuries, and longer. People who study such things have always said, to avoid putting on weight, refrain from sugar. But apparently, that message got lost in the “war on fat,” which is now coming to an end. But not only does sugar tend to make people fatter, the process by which it makes you fat is by the flooding of insulin into the bloodstream, which leads to inflammation, and to the diseases which affect Western Civilization, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and even cancer and Alzheimer's disease. The thing about nutrition is that it is hard to predict with certainty how any one individual will react to any certain diet. Everything is in generalizations. Because this is not a nutritional book, there is no discussion of honey or stevia. Maple syrup, molasses, etc. are mentioned as previous sugars that were used, but the health benefits of all variations of sugars are not discussed. This book is entirely about refined white sugar. The only way sugar substitutes are mentioned is in the story that the sugar industry worked hard to discredit saccharine and cyclamates and succeeded, although these substitutes probably aren’t that bad, and definitely not worse than sugar. People still view these sugar substitutes as dangerous. Most of what we think about sweeteners has been subliminally given to us through the sugar industry and their advertising. The one take away from this book would be that refined sugar is not the innocent ingredient that some may think it to be. Giving someone a sweet treat is a way to show them love, but probably that line of thinking is going to change. The bottom line is to avoid sugar and refined starches, and for anyone who cares anything about nutrition, that message has been around a long time.

Even if you are well read on this topic, this book explores new subjects. Who knew they soaked tobacco in sugar solutions? Great book.

Seit den 1960er Jahren ist man der Auffassung gewesen, dass Fett eine Hauptursache für Herz- und Kreislauferkrankungen ist. Als mehr und mehr Fertiggerichte fettfrei sein sollten, musste man das Problem mit dem Geschmack lösen, weil Fett ein Geschmacksträger ist. Also hat man Zucker hinzugefügt, vor allem das in den 1960er Jahren in Japan entwickelte Hoch-Fruktose Mais-Sirup. Dieses Zucker kostet nur ein Viertel wie normales Zucker schmeckt auch süßer. Ein Problem ist aber, dass Fruktose im Leber so wie Alkohol verarbeitet wird – zur Fett. Gary Taubes verfolgt die Geschichte von Zucker in der westlichen Welt und findet parallelle Entwicklungen mit einer ganzen Reihe von ernsthaften und kostspieligen Krankheiten. Zucker gibt es hier seit etwa 400 Jahren, aber es war erst mit der industriellen Revolution das Zucker erschwinglich wurde für die breite Masse der Bevölkerung. Im 19. Jahrhundert gab es etwa 2 oder 3 Fälle von Diabetes in der Englischen Bevölkerung, gegen Ende des Jahrhunderts stieg diese Zahl aber rapide an. Heute leiden etwa 16% der Amerikaner unter Diabetes und es wird erwartet, dass weitere 30% zu ihrer Lebzeiten damit rechnen können, Diabetiker zu werden. In den 1980er Jahren waren etwa 1% der Chinesen Diabetiker, heute sind es 11% und man rechnet damit, dass eine halbe Milliarde Chinesen als Prä-Diabetiker einzustufen sind. Wo auch immer westliche Essgewohnheiten eingeführt werden kommt eine Explosion von Diabetes, Herz-Kreisluferkrankungen, Leberzirrhose, Gicht und Übergewicht. Auch Krebs und Alzheimers scheint mit Zucker im Zusammenhang zu stehen. Gary Taubes erwartet, wie viele andere Autoren auch, dass eine ähnliche gerichtliche Auseinandersetzung uns bevorsteht, wie wir mit der Tabakindustrie gehabt haben. Diesmal aber mit der Zuckerindustrie. Ähnlich wie die Tabakindustrie behauptet die Zuckerindustrie seit Jahrzehnten, dass Zucker nicht gefährlich ist und sie geben viel Geld aus um Forschungsberichte mit solchen Ergebnissen zu produzieren und Lobbyisten einzusetzen um die gewünschten politischen Beschlüsse zu bekommen. Sehr empfehlenswertes Buch. Hoffentlich erscheint es bald in Deutscher Übersetzung!

There is a lot of research in this masterpiece as Gary Taubes delves to the past and informs us why sugar is responsible for almost all the lifestyle diseases of the 20th and 21st century. This book is a must read for every human, except for remote tribes such as Shompens in the Andaman and Nicobar islands and some in Amazon and Papua New Guinea, who are humanity's only hope as they DO NOT probably suffer from Western diseases. Our tongue is so tuned to sugar that very few manage to live without it. We have made our pets, animals at zoos diabetic as sugar is in every product, including pet food. The highlights were the link between cigarettes and sugar, artificial sweeteners which were demonized, the fight between the good forces (Yudkin, Campbell and Cleave) against evil (Keys, Stare, etc). Two prominent myths such as causes of gout and hypertension are explained in depth, that purines in red meat are not always the culprit for gout, or that excess salt is not the sole antagonist for high blood pressure. This is my fourth book in my anti-sugar collection, which has John Yudkin's Pure, White and Deadly, Robert Lustig's Fat Chance and William Dufty's Sugar Blues.

‘Medicine is mostly taught untethered from its history,’ asserts Gary Taubes at the beginning of this book. ‘Students are taught what to believe, but not always the evidence on which their beliefs are based.’ This book is a much needed history of sugar. I can think of nowhere else where failure to look at the evidence on which medical beliefs are based has had, and continues to have, such tragic consequences. The leading authority who dominated the teaching about diabetes during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century was a dedicated doctor called Elliott Joslin. His textbook, ‘The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus was first published in 1916. Revered as a bible, its most recent edition appeared in 2005, forty-three years after his death. Joslin argued that fats, and not sugar, were the cause of diabetes. This belief was supported by Harold Himsworth, a very influential diabetes researcher based in London, who in 1931 proposed that a diet rich in carbohydrate should be recommended to diabetics. Both Joslin and Himsworth pointed to Japan as a country where the diet was rich in carbohydrate and low in fat, and where there was very little diabetes. What both men ignored was that sugar consumption in Japan at that time was comparable to that in England and America in the nineteenth century, when diabetes was very rare. They both assumed that sugar and other carbohydrates were equivalent in their effects on the human body. Sugar (sucrose) is formed in plants by the condensation of two simpler sugars – glucose and fructose. Glucose, the molecule into which starches are digested, is used to provide energy. Any surplus is converted, in the liver and muscles, to glycogen (‘animal starch’) for storage until needed. Conversion of glucose to glycogen is under the control of the hormone insulin. Fructose, by contrast, is converted by the liver into fat. Its fat-forming effects seem to be enhanced when glucose is present. Joslin’s and Himsworth’s misconception might have been challenged by the research on metabolism, endocrinology, genetics and nutrition which was taking place in Germany and Austria before the Second World War. Post 1939 this very valuable work was lost to the scientific community. Nutritionists in the English-speaking world focussed on energy balance. A calorie was a calorie no matter where it came from. Putting on weight was simply a matter of consuming more calories than could be expended. Excess weight caused both diabetes and obesity. Diet and exercise were the solutions. When the technique of radioimmunoassay was developed in the 1960s, it brought with it the possibility of measuring hormone levels, and the problem of insulin resistance came to light. Unexpectedly, high insulin levels could accompany high levels of sugar in the blood. Insulin was no longer effective in moving glucose out of the blood and into cells. This pattern was found in people suffering from obesity, and in those who developed diabetes later in life. What caused insulin resistance was then a mystery. It has since been linked to sugar consumption. By the 1950s it was recognised that heart disease was associated with both diabetes and obesity. Whether too much fat or too much sugar caused heart disease was still an open question, and researchers were highly motivated to find an answer. The hypothesis that fat was the murder weapon was supported by the very wealthy and powerful Sugar Association with its Food and Nutrition Advisory Committee. The American Heart Association also came down on the side of fat. It advocated low fat diets for every American, while its researchers were admitting that the dietary fat/heart disease hypothesis needed much more investigation. Those who favoured the sugar hypothesis like John Yudkin in England faced ridicule and the charge of being quacks. In the 1960s Yudkin fed human subjects sugar-rich diets and reported that this increased their cholesterol and triglyceride levels. It seemed to ratchet up their insulin levels and even make their blood platelets sticky. Clinical trials were set up in the US and in Europe to test the fat, but not the sugar hypothesis. To date they have failed to show that high levels of dietary fat cause heart disease, obesity or diabetes. Nevertheless, in 1986 the American government and health organisations committed themselves to getting Americans to eat a low fat diet. Everyone else followed suit. The epidemic of diseases included in metabolic syndrome has only worsened. Gary Taubes cannot prove that sugar is the cause of Western chronic diseases, but the evidence he gives is overwhelming. I have concentrated on some of the scientific aspects, but this book contains much more. It is also as riveting as a good novel. Taubes’ clarity of vision is very rare, and a book like this is worth its weight in gold.

Great book! Falarei em português: Este livro deveria ser lido por todos! Desvenda muitas falácias sobre o que foi dito como verdade na questão de alimentação desde muito tempo.