Is Sugar the Deadliest White Powder Drug?

Written by Ron Unz on October 31, 2024. Posted in Current News

Although I’ve been reading the New York Times every morning for almost 45 years, I’ve gradually become more and more disgusted with it, and occasionally say so in my articles

For example, back in 2016 I wrote:

For decades I’ve been closely reading several major newspapers every morning, and for the last few years have noticed a striking decline in the quality of their scientific coverage, as exemplified in the weekly Science Section of the New York Times.

Whereas in the past, dramatic discoveries in evolutionary biology or physics might be broken in the pages of that newspaper, these days the coverage seems increasingly skewed toward phone apps and dieting and phone apps for dieting.

I’ve always regarded diet books as the quintessential example of worthless content, regardless of how many millions of copies they might sell, and over the years I’ve seen endless numbers of different fad-diets mentioned in my newspapers—the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, the Beverly Hills diet, the Paleo diet, the Low-Carb diet—without ever having had the slightest interest in reading any of them.

It always seemed rather obvious to me that if you eat too much, you’ll probably get fat, and the correct solution is just to eat less or perhaps exercise more. Meanwhile, better nutritional health can be maintained by eating fewer donuts and sticking closer to the scientifically-backed nutritional food guidelines issued by the government, including that famous food pyramid I remember being taught back in elementary school, probably beginning in the second or third grade.

Bitter battles over conflicting political goals is one thing, but good nutritional guidelines are a simple matter of objective science, about which no one can reasonably disagree.

My views on all these matters only started to change a few months ago when I happened to have lunch with a prominent medical school professor. Most of our discussion was on issues of Covid and vaxxing, but somehow at one point the subject of diets and nutrition came up, and he said something about the shifts in our understanding of those issues that had been taking place over the last decade or two, much of it prompted by the work of a particular science journalist and his books.

The name he mentioned meant nothing to me, but being a little curious about what he had described, I jotted it down. I also half-remembered that some years back I had read something in the Times about that controversy but hadn’t paid much attention.

A day or two later, I browsed around on Amazon and after trying a few possible spellings of the name I located the author in question and his books, ordering a couple of them. When they arrived, they went into a pile along with many others, and I finally got around to reading them a few weeks later.

Ideological revolutions aimed at overturning generations of established orthodoxy are often spearheaded by unknown, uncredentialed individuals and launched from obscure venues, requiring many years of determined effort before they begin to attract any public attention. But sometimes circumstances are different, and that was true in this case.

Gary Taubes graduated Harvard University with a degree in applied physics, then received a masters the following year at Stanford University. Shifting towards journalism, he earned a second masters in that field at Columbia University in 1981 and joined the staff of Discover in 1982, beginning a successful career in science journalism writing for that publication, Science, and various other magazines during the years that followed.

Given his background, his initial focus was on physics and in his first dozen years, he published a couple of well-regarded books on that subject. Along the way, he won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times, becoming the only writer in America having that distinction.

These are obviously strong mainstream credentials, so when he eventually shifted his attention to nutrition and concluded that decades of our conventional wisdom in that field had been severely mistaken, editors took him very seriously.

In the early 2000s, the New York Times was probably close to the peak of its media influence, and in 2002 the Times Sunday Magazine ran “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” as its 8,000 word cover-story, opening with the following rather dramatic paragraph:

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it.

They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ”Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution” and ”Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution,” accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along.

Or maybe it’s this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations — eat less fat and more carbohydrates — are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

As far back as I can remember, government health experts and the media reporting their warnings had informed us that eating fatty foods was bad for your health and led to much higher risks of heart attacks, strokes, obesity, and numerous other ailments.

Although I never paid a great deal of attention to such matters, I always assumed those facts were true, as did most other Americans.

Decades of such media messages told us that the traditional hearty American breakfasts of bacon, sausage, and eggs, often served with gobs of butter—foods overflowing with fat and therefore fattening—needed to be replaced by healthier fare such as granola, fruit, and yogurt. Much of our population eventually heeded those warnings and did exactly that.

Health-conscious Sweden had originally developed the Food Pyramid in 1972 and it was soon promoted in America, so that I remember occasionally seeing it from my elementary school years onward.

Under this nutritional framework, a healthy diet relied upon a basic foundation of grain-based foods, such as bread, rice, and pasta, supplemented by substantial quantities of fruit and vegetables, and taken together these plant-based carbohydrates should supply the bulk of one’s daily calories.

Animal products such as milk, cheese, meat, fish, and eggs were high in protein with substantial fat and they should be eaten in moderation, while servings of fatty foods and sweets should be minimized.

Many of us naturally fell short in adhering to those guidelines, but they represented the lodestar for the healthy lifestyle that all of us were encouraged to pursue.

But according to Taubes’ blockbuster article, this had all been “a Big Fat Lie.” As he told the story, fatty foods were healthy foods and eating them was the best way to keep yourself slim, while fruit and low-fat yogurt were exactly the sort of dangerous foods that promoted obesity.

I’m sure that for those who closely followed such matters, these outlandish claims must have seemed much like declaring that rocks fall upward.

However, I’d personally never had any interest in those nutrition issues, and when Taubes’ article came out in mid-2002, I was heavily focused on the Afghanistan war prompted by the 9/11 Attacks and the dangerous Neocon effort to promote an attack on Iraq as well, while I was also heavily absorbed in my “English” initiative campaigns in Massachusetts and Colorado.

So although I’m sure I must have read Taubes’ Times Magazine cover-story and thought to myself “Hmmm…that’s interesting,” it had never made any deep impression on me and I soon forgot about it.

Others, however, reacted differently. Taubes’ shocking claims got him plenty of airtime on various network television shows and other secondary news coverage, as well as a book contract with a rich $700,000 advance from Knopf, one of the most prestigious American publishers.

There were certainly also some naysayers, with the Naderite Center for Science in the Public Interest soon releasing a strong attack on his claims, and a few months after that, a much more conventionally-minded science journalist did the same in Reason magazine.

That latter attack sparked a series of exchanges that ran a remarkable 17,000 words, and recently reading those for the first time, I thought that Taubes seemed to get the better of it. But the echoes of the lingering controversy gradually died down, while Taubes devoted himself to five years of scientific and historical research to flesh out the surprising case he had made in the Times.

During this period he seems to have confirmed his suspicion that not only the science of nutrition but the science of health issues generally was far less solid that the physics he had studied in college and investigated during the early stages of his journalistic career.

Right around the time that his new book was finally ready for release, the Times Sunday Magazine ran his 8,000 word article on the very weak and vacillating scientific case for the widespread use of hormone replacement therapy and the extremely doubtful nature of the epidemiological studies that had been used to justify it.

Exactly this same story of severely flawed scientific conclusions that may have damaged the lives and health of tens of millions of Americans was the central theme of Good Calories, Bad Calories, which weighed in at a hefty 600 pages, including a bibliography containing well over 1,500 entries across its 67 pages.

Given the author’s media visibility and his past notoriety on these issues, his book soon became a best-seller, helpfully propelled by a fairly lengthy extract in the Wall Street Journal.

My last substantial exposure to this subject had been during a few weeks of my 10th grade Health class, so as someone almost totally ignorant I found his analysis extremely interesting.

Taubes argued that everything I’d always accepted about the supposedly settled science of nutrition was actually far more complex and contentious than I ever would have imagined.

During my entire life, the mainstream media had always informed me that fatty foods were high in something called cholesterol that greatly increased one’s risk of heart attacks and strokes, and not having any interest nor expertise in such matters, I’d naturally assumed that was true.

But Taubes rather convincingly argued that this conclusion was based upon extremely flimsy scientific evidence and might be totally false, with a mountain of that media coverage having been built upon barely a postage stamp of rather doubtful scientific evidence.

The Times medical journalist reviewing his book favorably highlighted one of his forceful declarations:

From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day.

This same severe mismatch between minimal factual evidence and enormously widespread belief was also the case with regard to the supposed connection between salt intake and high blood pressure, dietary fiber and colon cancer, and various other health conditions.

But the mythology regarding diet and obesity was the worst example of all.

As Taubes documented, from the earliest days of nineteenth century nutritional science and for generations afterward, it had been very widely accepted that diets high in carbohydrates such as pasta, bread, potatoes, and especially sugar were generally fattening and the best way of losing weight was to forgo those foods.

Yet in the postwar era, rather scanty or misinterpreted scientific evidence convinced some energetic American nutritionists to develop an entirely different understanding of obesity, based upon the assumption that all calories were essentially interchangeable, and since fatty foods were much denser in their caloric content than either carbohydrates or protein, they should be avoided in order to lose weight.

As Taubes evocatively put it, their simple argument amounted to the dogma that obesity was caused by the two traditional sins of gluttony—eating too much—and sloth—exercising too little.

This had always seemed intuitively plausible to me, and I’d accepted it as true my entire life.

But Taubes argued that this completely ignored the underlying endocrinological facts and these were far more complex. As he explained, people get fat because their fat cells grow larger, taking on more fat molecules than they release for use in the rest of the body, a process that is regulated by various hormones, especially insulin.

When carbohydrates such as starches and sugars are ingested, insulin is released into the bloodstream, leading fat cells to absorb fats rather than release them, while the liver converts excess circulating blood-sugar into molecules of fat for such storage.

But eating fatty foods or proteins does not have this same impact upon insulin release, helping to explain the traditional folk-wisdom that carbohydrates are fattening foods.

The simplistic notion that all calories are the same for purposes of weight control fails to consider these crucial hormonal factors. While eating fats or protein assuages our hunger, eating carbohydrates and especially sugar stimulates the release of insulin, which may actually indirectly trigger further sensations of hunger, thereby leading to over-eating.

This was the scientific basis of the eponymous diet promoted by Dr. Robert Atkins, whose hugely best-selling 1972 book made him very wealthy even as it attracted the bitter scorn of nearly the entire American medical establishment.

The Atkins Diet and its numerous roughly similar variants allowed the practitioner to eat fatty or protein-rich foods in large or even unlimited quantities, while strictly limiting the consumption of carbohydrates, especially sugars.

For generations such notions had been the conventional wisdom among mainstream nutritionists, but that scientific history had been expunged so thoroughly that when Atkins empirically rediscovered it, his views were treated as rank heresy.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here unz.com

Header image: Shutterstock

Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Trackback from your site.