“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, that material would promptly be banned,” wrote British professor John Yudkin in his 1972 academic book, Pure, White and Deadly. Its intention was to summarize the evidence that the over-consumption of sugar was leading to a greatly increased incidence of heart disease. In addition, it was certainly involved in dental cavity, in obesity, diabetes and liver disease.
Yudkin ended the first Chapter by writing, “I hope that when you have read this book I shall have convinced you that sugar is really dangerous.
Yudkin expressed a firm belief in putting a ban on sugar and having community interventions to help people resist the temptation created by the food industry and a small band of researchers believed there was a correlation between sugar consumption and heart disease, not dietary fat, as was the prevailing opinion of prominent and celebrity nutritionist, and a known Yudkin disbeliever, Ancel Keys. The United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, known as the McGovern Committee, which only released its “eat less fat” report in 1977, had already condemned Yudkin as a quack.
The British Sugar Bureau even put out a press release dismissing his claims as “emotional assertions” and the World Sugar Research Organization described his book as “science fiction”. According to the scientific thought collective of the time, dietary fat was enemy number one, not sugar.
Eat less fat
The most prominent government recommendation at the time was based on Ancel keys recommending cutting back on saturated fats and cholesterol. There was no stringent recommendation on sugar consumption. The researchers overstated the consistency of the literature on fat and cholesterol while downplaying studies on sugar.
The world did eat less fat, beginning in the US in 1977, with the McGovern guidelines to replace steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or even orange juice, all these items carbohydrate-based, with increasing amounts of added sugar.
There were some dissenters. The UK medical journal, the Lancet, in 1974, considered the possible consequences of recommending reductions in dietary fat, suggesting this was disingenuous to the general public by offering the statement that, “The cure should not be worse than the disease” The classic example is the opioid crisis. In an effort to reduce opioid addiction, doctors are cutting back on pain medication — and sometimes leaving patients to suffer reverberating the medical code, “First, do no harm.”
We grew fatter, diseased
Postwar obesity rates around the world demonstrated a noticeable change after 1980. In the US, for example, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it skyrockets. In The Sugar Conspiracy, written by Ian Leslie for the Guardian in 2016, he reported that just 12 percent of Americans were obese in 1950, 15 percent in 1980, and by 2000, 35 percent. By 2025, 18 percent of the world’s male population and 21 percent of women could be obese. The cost of treating health-related diseases caused by obesity around the world will top $1.2 trillion every year until 2025, at least. In Canada, 34 percent of all adults could be obese by 2025. Alarming?
Obesity, along with smoking are considered the two main drivers behind the increased rates of cancer, heart attacks, strokes and diabetes worldwide. The World Obesity Federation in 2017 predicted there will be 2.7 billion overweight and obese adults by 2025, or a third of the global population, many of who are presently overweight.
When, in 1957, John Yudkin hypothesized that sugar was dangerous to public health, it was taken seriously. By the time Yudkin retired, 14 years later, he was defeated, his work derailed, his reputation destroyed and he became the last person any scientist wanted to be seen with. Yudkin died in 1995. He left behind his body of work which is changing the world, slowly, because today we know more than a small fraction about the effects of sugar on our health.
