It wasn’t a fair fight. Human personality and Big Sugar played a outsized role in falsely framing ‘Fats’ and letting deadly Sugar getaway scot free. Then decades later even after science corrected its understanding and reversed course, Fat remains suspect and deadly Sugar falsely above suspicion in popular thought.
This is an outstanding article from three years ago published by ‘The Guardian.’ Please consider it MUST READ! Jim
“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…
“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…
“Holy crap,” Lustig thought. ‘This guy got there 35 years before me.'”
