This article reads like a great novel, albeit with a sad ending for British pioneer John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at the University of London's Queen Elizabeth College about the pitfalls of sugar. Sadly, his life was destroyed by the forces of Ancel Keys for suggesting it was sugar, not saturated fats that lead to metabolic diseases.
Can you wonder that one sometimes becomes quite despondent about whether it is worthwhile trying to do scientific research in matters of health? The results may be of great importance in helping people to avoid disease, but you then find they are being misled by propaganda designed to support commercial interests in a way you thought only existed in bad B films.
And this ‘propaganda’ didn't just affect Yudkin. By the end of the [1970s], he had been so discredited that few scientists dared publish anything negative about sugar for fear of being similarly attacked. As a result, the low-fat industry, with its products laden with sugar, boomed.
Dr. Robert Lustig once said, “What's important about Yudkin’s book, Pure, White and Deadly is its historical significance. It helps us understand how a concept can be bastardized by the dark forces of industry.
But the message seems to be getting through. More people are avoiding sugar, and when this happens companies adjust what they're selling. It's criminal that a warning that could have been taken on board 40 years ago went unheeded: Science took a disastrous detour in ignoring Yudkin. It was to the detriment of the health of millions.
Speaking of Dr. Robert Lustig, the man who believes sugar is poison, he is the go-to authority who knows the complete inside out history, especially in terms of sugar in all its forms. A Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, he is a leading public health authority on the impact sugar has on fueling the diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemics, especially and including addressing changes in the food environment to reverse these chronic diseases.
In an interview with Zoe Williams, Dr. Lustig explains sugar’s hold on us, and its metabolic impact in our bodies from his book Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Obesity and Disease:
Lustig argues that sugar creates an appetite for itself by a determinable hormonal mechanism – a cycle, he says, that you could no more break with willpower than you could stop feeling thirsty through sheer strength of character. He argues that the hormone related to stress, cortisol, is partly to blame. When cortisol floods the bloodstream, it raises blood pressure; increases the blood glucose level, which can precipitate diabetes. Human research shows that cortisol specifically increases caloric intake of 'comfort foods'.
Is it any wonder we are fat, sick and inflamed? When the obesity epidemic began in 1980, nobody knew about leptin, a key regulator of satiety and body fat. And nobody knew about insulin resistance until 1984.
Sugar causes diseases: unrelated to their calories and unrelated to the attendant weight gain. It's an independent primary-risk factor…. The problem in obesity is not excess weight. The problem with obesity is that the brain is not seeing the excess weight. The brain can't see it because appetite is determined by a binary system. You're either in anorexigenesis – "I'm not hungry and I can burn energy" – or you're in orexigenesis – "I'm hungry and I want to store energy." The flip switch is your leptin level (the hormone that regulates your body fat) but too much insulin in your system [insulin resistance] blocks the leptin signal. [For more details on leptin please see my earlier blog]
Meanwhile, the food-industry, and their supporters (Big Ag, FDA & ADA) seem to condone making people sick and diseased, while looking the other way denying sugar causes problems because their livelihood depends on it:
What they knew was, when they took the fat out they had to put the sugar in, and when they did that, people bought more. And when they added more, people bought more, and so they kept on doing it. And that's how we got up to current levels of consumption…. Politicians have to come in and reset the playing field, as they have with any substance that is toxic and abused, ubiquitous and with negative consequence for society…. the food industry cannot be given carte blanche. They're allowed to make money, but they're not allowed to make money by making people sick.
Additionally, with the wide use of sugar in virtually all processed foods sanctioned by our own dietary guidelines used in hospitals, nursing homes, schools and other government sanctioned, federally funded institutions - have left us with some pretty sobering statistics:
Approximately 80% of the 600,000 packaged foods you can buy in the US now have added calorific sweeteners (this includes bread, burgers, things you wouldn't add sugar to if you were making them from scratch). Daily fructose consumption has doubled in the past 30 years in the US, a pattern also observable (though not identical) in Canada, Malaysia, India, right across the developed and developing world. World sugar consumption has tripled in the past 50 years, while the population has only doubled; it makes sense of the obesity pandemic.
Is it any wonder many of us are metabolically broken (i.e., compromised with diabetes, autoimmune issues, or neurological problems), or rapidly headed that way?