Book 28: The Case against Sugar – Gary Taubes

With a title like ‘The Case against Sugar’ you might expect a tabloid-style expose but instead what you get here is a balanced, careful analysis of everything we know about sugar.

Investigative journalist Gary Taubes details the cultural/political history of sugar, the ways it has become a central part of our diet and the numerous ways it may be killing us.

Taubes is a measured, thoughtful writer — he doesn’t rush to conclusions and even states early on that he is unable to conclusively prove his claims and in fact they may in some way be ‘unprovable’ — but the evidence and research he presents is overwhelming.

This is a highly persuasive book that may change the way you think about food. It will at least make you question what you have been taught about nutrition and perhaps rethink advice you’ve received regarding your own health and wellness.

I’ve written on The Sugar Association and the salt/hypertension hypothesis in the last few days, and I’ve found this topic deeply interesting. It’s remarkable to think how effectively the food industry has been subverted by sugar and how hard it is too avoid. More difficult to consider is the damage it’s surely causing us over time.

Taubes sets up his ‘if/then hypothesis’ half way through the book. It should seem logical to most readers:

So here’s the if/then hypothesis: If these Western diseases are associated with obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome, which many of them are, then whatever causes insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome is likely to be the necessary dietary trigger for the diseases, or at least a key player in the causal pathway. Because there is significant reason to believe that sugars—sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup in particular, the nearly fifty-fifty combinations of glucose and fructose—are the dietary trigger of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, it’s quite likely they are a primary cause of all these Western diseases, including, as we’ll discuss, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Without these sugars in the diet, these chronic diseases would be relatively rare, if not, in some cases, virtually nonexistent.

Gary Taubes ‘The Case against Sugar’ P.288

The consumption of added sugar in each of our diets has gone from a few pounds a year three hundred years ago to 156 pounds a year in the US — could it be a coincidence that a whole catalogue of previously uncommon ‘diseases of western civilisation’ have followed this same curve? Or could sugar be the main causal factor?

We may have to wait for some time for definitive answers to these questions. The time and money required to scientifically test these claims is almost prohibitive and Taubes doesn’t offer firm guidelines on how much sugar we should be eating in the meantime. He does however compare the idea of ‘eating sugar in moderation’ to ‘smoking cigarettes in moderation’ so it’s probably a case of ‘the less, the better’.

‘The Case against Sugar’ is a meticulously researched, clear-headed deep dive into sugar. It’s a book everyone should read — sooner rather than later.

Highly recommended.