The Saccharine Disease

"Thomas Cleave was a British naval surgeon who travelled around the world and ran the British naval research laboratory in the UK for a while. He wrote letters to hospitals all over the world, and asked: “What kind of diseases are you seeing in your patients? Tell me what kind of foods they’re eating.” He came to the conclusion that everywhere in the world, where people were eating sugar and white flour they were getting very specific Western diseases, and these are diseases that also tend to cluster together in patients – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, ulcers. The argument he was making is that there is an evolutionary element to all of this. We evolved to eat certain foods, over two million years during the Paleolithic era. We were mostly living on animal products and some tubers and very hard-to-digest carbohydrates. Then agriculture came along, and we start eating grains and refining grains. Then with the industrial revolution in the late 19th century we are machine-refining everything. White flour and sugar explodes over the world, and wherever people eat these you see the same kinds of chronic diseases. Cleave and his colleague Campbell get the credit for nailing it. They had a primitive understanding of the mechanisms, but the gist of what they’re arguing is: You take these foods that in their native state are very hard to digest and take the human body a long time to break down. As a result, the carbohydrates enter the bloodstream very slowly and the body responds to them very slowly. But now you refine them and you make them very easy to digest. For instance, in the case of apple juice you can consume the sugar equivalent of eight or 10 apples in a minute. All the sugar is dumped in your bloodstream, and it creates hormonal havoc. All these diseases and their variations are the result of this havoc. It’s a very compelling read. Cleave of course was perceived by most people as quackish but Sir Richard Doll, the most famous British epidemiologist – he was knighted for linking cigarettes to lung cancer – wrote the introduction to the earlier edition of his book. He said at the time that he thought Cleave was brilliant and that there was a lot to it. I actually interviewed Sir Richard Doll a few years before he passed away, and he told me that maybe Cleave had been right all along, and we just got away from this line of research, which is what I’ve been arguing. Basically, you want to avoid highly refined grains and sugars. Then it just depends on how severe the problem is. If you’re 20-30 pounds overweight and you want to lose weight, you get rid of the refined grains and sugars, and the same foods that my mother’s generation believed were fattening – pasta, bread, beer, sweets, et cetera. When I lived in Europe in the mid-1980s, no self-respecting woman I knew would eat the bread that they brought to the table at a restaurant, because they knew it was fattening. If you’re a little bit overweight, those are the foods you don’t want. But I’m also writing to people who are 200-300 pounds overweight. They might have to live on the equivalent of a virtually all-meat diet if they want to be anything even close to lean. I’m arguing that a virtually all-meat diet is actually a healthy diet."