The Case Against Sugar

This is the third book on diet and nutrition from the journalist Gary Taubes.

His first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories is probably the est summary of the history of the science on diet, weight loss, and heart disease that you are going to find.

His second book, Why We Get Fat is one of my most recommended books.

In his third book he takes special aim at the culprit behind our dietary health woes: sugar.

Here are the notes that I took:

• 1/3 of all adults are obese, and 2/3 are overweight. 1 in 7 have diabetes and 1 of every 4-5 will die of cancer.
• the world health organization reports that obesity rates have doubled worldwide since 1980.
• 6 of every 10 lower limb amputations are due to diabetes.
• Whenever a population adopts a western diet, a diabetes epidemic follows.
• It’s estimated that diabetes killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.
• Obesity usually precedes diabetes, but 1 of every 10 diabetics is neither obese nor overweight
• Those who are obese and diabetic also tend to be hypertensive. They have a greater risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke, and possibly dementia and even alzheimers.
• Some researchers now refer to alzheimers as “type 3 diabetes.”
• History is critical for understanding science and its progression. Physics is already taught in history format. Health and nutrition is usually not taught in light of history, and students are usually told what to believe, not taught about studies and evidence regarding why they should believe.
• Sugar is harder to pin down as a culprit for the diseases of civilization than tobacco was for lung cancer. With tobacco, the world breaks down evenly into smokers and non-smokers. With the ubiquity of sugar, we’ve all consumed tons of it throughout the years. Tobacco leads to one primary disease, sugar potentially leads to a host of diseases. Plus, heavy smokers get lung cancer at a rate of 20-30x higher than non-smokers. Some people don’t consume sugar, but they are often extremely health conscious and differ in significant ways from sugar users.
• There’s an interesting connection between sugar and cigarette smoking: Most people are unable to inhale the alkaline smoke from pipe and cigar tobaccos, but they can inhale the acidic smoke from the sugar-rich flu cured tobacco of cigarettes. This is the first of two roles that sugar has in making cigarettes addictive.
• Barley tobacco leaves are porous and can easily absorb sugar.
• Barley tobacco can absorb up to 50% of its own weight during saucing.
• Sugar production was higher in the great depression than it was in 1925.
• If you bought Coca-Cola before the great depression and sold it at the lowest point of the depression, you would have made a 225% profit.
• Early on it was noted that one of the “benefits” of sugar is that it would put meat on the bones of the emaciated.
• At the time the radioimmunoassay was created, which could help you identify the hormonal response to food, most obesity researchers were psychologists who were trying to curb the eating habits of the obese.
• In the 70’s there was a sugar commercial asking “Which is more fattening?” which pointed out that 3 tsp of sugar has less calories than an apple.
• The assumption that people had with the fitness craze was that calories that were burned would never end up stored as fat.
• The sugar companies would say that hunger is caused by low glucose levels, so sugar can curb your appetite and cause you to lose weight by eating less calories.
• “We now eat in two weeks what people a hundred years ago ate in a year” – an observation on sugar consumption from 1960’s England.
• Elevated triglycerides are more common than elevated cholesterol in hear disease.
• Dietary fat seems to have little or nothing to do with heart disease.
• One possibility for the development of insulin resistance is the accumulation of fat in the liver due to the consumption of fructose.
• The effect of having a diabetic mother dwarfs the effect of having a diabetic father.
• Uterine conditions affect how a child will respond to its external environment.
• The baby will likely not be born diabetic, but will be born producing too much insulin.
• Genes change very slowly, but environment can alter rapidly
• When populations adopt a western diet, the effects are different between populations and between individuals within a population, but the patterns are the same
• Insulin resistance results in an uptake of glucose by pre-cancer cells
• Sugar likely increases the likelihood of having dementia in our future.
• Diabetes is a continuum of disease, a gradual worsening of metabolic functions.
• It is possible that even small amounts of sugar taken over years could be extremely problematic.
• Carbohydrate = carbon + hydrogen
• All sugars end in “ose” and all dissolve in water
• glucose = blood sugar
• sucrose = 50% glucose + 50% fructose
• Fructose is the sweetest of all the sugars.
• Most carbs (except fructose) break down into sucrose alone
• The host common formulation of High-Fructose Corn Syrup is HFCS55: 55% fructose, 45% glucose
• Sucrose and HFCS are called “added sugar” or “caloric sweeteners”
• Our bodies appear to respond in the same way to sucrose and HFCS
• (Domestic production +imports -exports)/population = per capita sugar consumption (really it’s availability, but it’s used to estimate consumption).
• Estimates are that 60% of available sugar is consumed, but that is based on unreliable survey data.
• A pound of sugar cost the equivalent of 360 eggs in the 13th century, but had fallen to two in the early decades of the 20th century.
• Rats are more responsive to sweetness than they are to cocain
• Sugar can be used to ween people off of other drugs
• Instead of “not too much” we should be thinking “as little as possible.”

I listened to the audio, but I’m sure the print version is good as well.

Get it here: