Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It

"This is an interesting story, a battle between two academics: one in the UK and one in the US. John Yudkin was British academic who made up his mind that the reason people were getting fatter in the 1960s and 1970s was due to our increased use of sugar in foods, and the increased processing of foods. He thought that sugary beverages were the reason that people were getting heart disease—at the time there were various theories about heart disease including ‘executive stress’ and all these other weird ideas we’ve given up on now. Yudkin makes a pretty good case for cutting back on sugar, if you read the book, but no one really heard him because he lost the battle with a guy called Ancel Keys, an American who was famous for creating K rations. He also did studies across the world which correlated heart disease and obesity and diabetes with rates of fat intake. He argued it was nothing to do with sugar, and all to do with fat. Keys won the argument and persuaded the US government to back this and got the food companies on board, who were happy to reformulate their foods because they they could moving away from dairy and other things that were hard to transport, towards margarine, these grey margarines, dyed yellow, that they could say had less saturated fat in them. That battle led us to 20 years of artificial low fat diets, and led to trans fats coming in. They’re nasty, chemically-produced hydrogenated fats that you can’t digest properly, and hang around in your blood and cause heart disease. They came from the food industry and probably led to an extra half-million deaths in the US alone. We still have some trans fats in our food today. So Ancel Keys won the argument, in as much as fat in general was accepted to be bad, and saturated fat in particular. People prefer to blame just one thing, rather than accepting that, well, both sugar and fat are important. So that was a pivotal moment. If Yudkin had won the global argument, we’d be eating different food today. He was ahead of his time. Ancel Keys is the reason we’ve still got low-fat stickers on everything in our supermarkets; it’s very hard still to buy full-fat milk or yoghurt. It’s hard to know what’s real because companies will quote real research papers, which sound genuine. But that paper may be 30 years old and based on a trial of eight people, which wouldn’t stand up today. More worrying, food companies are now using vanity journals. They’ll print anything you want: simply pay the fee and see your paper published in a journal with a nice title. Or they might get researchers to write new articles that sow confusion. A good example of that is that there is increasing evidence that artificial sweeteners aren’t good for you. They’ve been linked to a lot of problems in the gut microbiome. So a company might pay for an ‘independent’ research group that does commercial work to write a literature review that says ‘it’s all very confused, we don’t really understand what’s going on, it’s hard to draw conclusions, there’s no firm evidence that artificial sweeteners are bad.’ That comes from an independent group, they pay for publication in a crummy journal that doesn’t really peer review. Then the company can say, we’re not quite sure what’s going on. It’s exactly the same tactic that the cigarette companies used, and that the oil industry is using for global warming. It’s a tried and tested technique. One reason I’ve been able to do the research that I do is that I don’t work in a nutrition department that’s funded by the food industry. That’s right. The idea has come back. Like Banting’s diet came back as Atkins, some of Yudkin’s ideas have stood the test or time, or with new science have started to make more sense. That’s another point: we shouldn’t abandon old theories; we always need to keep updating our information based on the latest science rather than, as so often happens in this field, sticking rigidly to dogma. That’s what I’m absolutely against."