The Sugar Conspiracy by Ian Leslie (2016)

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The Sugar Conspiracy
By Ian Leslie
April 7, 2016 
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-sugar-conspiracy
In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. 

How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long? 

Robert Lustig
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sugar++the+bitter+truth
Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.
On reading Yudkin’s introduction, he [Lustig] felt a shock of recognition.
“Holy crap,” Lustig thought. “This guy got there 35 years before me.”



Fiddler on the roof - If I were a rich man (with subtitles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc
guru006
Published on Aug 19, 2006


John Yudkin, 1972, 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.” 

After all, it is quite something to choose seven nations [Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, Netherlands, Japan, United States] in Europe and leave out France and what was then West Germany, but then, Keys already knew that the French and Germans had relatively low rates of heart disease, despite living on a diet rich in saturated fats.

Although Keys had shown a correlation between heart disease and saturated fat, he had not excluded the possibility that heart disease was being caused by something else. Years later, the Seven Countries study’s lead Italian researcher, Alessandro Menotti, went back to the data, and found that the food that correlated most closely with deaths from heart disease was not saturated fat, but sugar.

journalist Nina Teicholz, book, The Big Fat Surprise 2014, 
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.

physicist Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective” 

Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat (2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=0
before the second world war, 
1950s. The Europeans were practising physicians and experts in the metabolic system. The Americans were more likely to be epidemiologists, labouring in relative ignorance of biochemistry and endocrinology (the study of hormones). This led to some of the foundational mistakes of modern nutrition.

British obesity researcher Zoë Harcombe
2010, Ronald Krauss, a highly respected researcher and physician at the University of California, stated “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD [coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease]”.
Many nutritionists refused to accept these conclusions. 

Gary Taubes is a physicist by background. “In physics,” he told me, “You look for the anomalous result. Then you have something to explain. In nutrition, the game is to confirm what you and your predecessors have always believed.” 

In 1972, the same year Yudkin published Pure, White and Deadly, a Cornell-trained cardiologist called Robert Atkins published Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution. 

Atkins argued that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet was the only viable route to weight loss.

Sheldon Reiser

2015 edition of the US Dietary Guidelines (they are revised every five years) 
the politics of nutrition science.
It is a gaping omission, inexplicable in scientific terms, but entirely explicable in terms of the politics of nutrition science. If you are seeking to protect your authority, why draw attention to evidence that seems to contradict the assertions on which that authority is founded? Allow a thread like that to be pulled, and a great unravelling might begin.

The scientists reacted angrily, accusing the politicians of being in thrall to the meat and dairy industries (given how many of the scientists depend on research funding from food and pharmaceutical companies, this might be characterised as audacious).

David McCarron

BMJ talk medicine 
How scientific are US dietary guidelines?
https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4962
https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/how-scientific-are-us-dietary-guidelines

David Katz (Dr Katz is the author of four diet books.)

Professor John Yudkin retired from his post at Queen Elizabeth College in 1971, to write Pure, White and Deadly. 


Ian Leslie, the author of Curious: the Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, is a regular contributor to the Long Read. Twitter: @mrianleslie
This post originally appeared on The Guardian. This article is republished here with permission. 

The sugar conspiracy 
The long read 
by Ian Leslie 
Thu 7 Apr 2016 01.00 EDT 
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin