American Pravda: Is Sugar the Deadliest White Powder Drug?
American Pravda: Is Sugar the Deadliest White Powder Drug?
Although I’ve been reading the New York Times every morning for almost 45 years, I’ve gradually become more and more disgusted with it, and occasionally say so in my articles.
For example, back in 2016 I wrote:
For decades I’ve been closely reading several major newspapers every morning, and for the last few years have noticed a striking decline in the quality of their scientific coverage, as exemplified in the weekly Science Section of the New York Times. Whereas in the past, dramatic discoveries in evolutionary biology or physics might be broken in the pages of that newspaper, these days the coverage seems increasingly skewed toward phone apps and dieting and phone apps for dieting.
I’ve always regarded diet books as the quintessential example of worthless content, regardless of how many millions of copies they might sell, and over the years I’ve seen endless numbers of different fad-diets mentioned in my newspapers—the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, the Beverly Hills diet, the Paleo diet, the Low-Carb diet—without ever having had the slightest interest in reading any of them. It always seemed rather obvious to me that if you eat too much, you’ll probably get fat, and the correct solution is just to eat less or perhaps exercise more. Meanwhile, better nutritional health can be maintained by eating fewer donuts and sticking closer to the scientifically-backed nutritional food guidelines issued by the government, including that famous food pyramid I remember being taught back in elementary school, probably beginning in the second or third grade. Bitter battles over conflicting political goals is one thing, but good nutritional guidelines are a simple matter of objective science, about which no one can reasonably disagree.
My views on all these matters only started to change a few months ago when I happened to have lunch with a prominent medical school professor. Most of our discussion was on issues of Covid and vaxxing, but somehow at one point the subject of diets and nutrition came up, and he said something about the shifts in our understanding of those issues that had been taking place over the last decade or two, much of it prompted by the work of a particular science journalist and his books. The name he mentioned meant nothing to me, but being a little curious about what he had described, I jotted it down. I also half-remembered that some years back I had read something in the Times about that controversy but hadn’t paid much attention. A day or two later, I browsed around on Amazon and after trying a few possible spellings of the name I located the author in question and his books, ordering a couple of them. When they arrived, they went into a pile along with many others, and I finally got around to reading them a few weeks later.
Ideological revolutions aimed at overturning generations of established orthodoxy are often spearheaded by unknown, uncredentialed individuals and launched from obscure venues, requiring many years of determined effort before they begin to attract any public attention. But sometimes circumstances are different, and that was true in this case.
Gary Taubes graduated Harvard University with a degree in applied physics, then received a masters the following year at Stanford University. Shifting towards journalism, he earned a second masters in that field at Columbia University in 1981 and joined the staff of Discover in 1982, beginning a successful career in science journalism writing for that publication, Science, and various other magazines during the years that followed. Given his background, his initial focus was on physics and in his first dozen years, he published a couple of well-regarded books on that subject. Along the way, he won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times, becoming the only writer in America having that distinction.
These are obviously strong mainstream credentials, so when he eventually shifted his attention to nutrition and concluded that decades of our conventional wisdom in that field had been severely mistaken, editors took him very seriously. In the early 2000s, the New York Times was probably close to the peak of its media influence, and in 2002 the Times Sunday Magazine ran “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” as its 8,000 word cover-story, opening with the following rather dramatic paragraph:
If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ”Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution” and ”Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution,” accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it’s this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations — eat less fat and more carbohydrates — are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.
- What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • July 7, 2002 • 7,800 Words
As far back as I can remember, government health experts and the media reporting their warnings had informed us that eating fatty foods was bad for your health and led to much higher risks of heart attacks, strokes, obesity, and numerous other ailments. Although I never paid a great deal of attention to such matters, I always assumed those facts were true, as did most other Americans.
Decades of such media messages told us that the traditional hearty American breakfasts of bacon, sausage, and eggs, often served with gobs of butter—foods overflowing with fat and therefore fattening—needed to be replaced by healthier fare such as granola, fruit, and yogurt. Much of our population eventually heeded those warnings and did exactly that.
Health-conscious Sweden had originally developed the Food Pyramid in 1972 and it was soon promoted in America, so that I remember occasionally seeing it from my elementary school years onward.
Under this nutritional framework, a healthy diet relied upon a basic foundation of grain-based foods, such as bread, rice, and pasta, supplemented by substantial quantities of fruit and vegetables, and taken together these plant-based carbohydrates should supply the bulk of one’s daily calories. Animal products such as milk, cheese, meat, fish, and eggs were high in protein with substantial fat and they should be eaten in moderation, while servings of fatty foods and sweets should be minimized. Many of us naturally fell short in adhering to those guidelines, but they represented the lodestar for the healthy lifestyle that all of us were encouraged to pursue.
But according to Taubes’ blockbuster article, this had all been “a Big Fat Lie.” As he told the story, fatty foods were healthy foods and eating them was the best way to keep yourself slim, while fruit and low-fat yogurt were exactly the sort of dangerous foods that promoted obesity. I’m sure that for those who closely followed such matters, these outlandish claims must have seemed much like declaring that rocks fall upward.
However, I’d personally never had any interest in those nutrition issues, and when Taubes’ article came out in mid-2002, I was heavily focused on the Afghanistan war prompted by the 9/11 Attacks and the dangerous Neocon effort to promote an attack on Iraq as well, while I was also heavily absorbed in my “English” initiative campaigns in Massachusetts and Colorado. So although I’m sure I must have read Taubes’ Times Magazine cover-story and thought to myself “Hmmm…that’s interesting,” it had never made any deep impression on me and I soon forgot about it.
Others, however, reacted differently. Taubes’ shocking claims got him plenty of airtime on various network television shows and other secondary news coverage, as well as a book contract with a rich $700,000 advance from Knopf, one of the most prestigious American publishers. There were certainly also some naysayers, with the Naderite Center for Science in the Public Interest soon releasing a strong attack on his claims, and a few months after that, a much more conventionally-minded science journalist did the same in Reason magazine. That latter attack sparked a series of exchanges that ran a remarkable 17,000 words, and recently reading those for the first time, I thought that Taubes seemed to get the better of it. But the echoes of the lingering controversy gradually died down, while Taubes devoted himself to five years of scientific and historical research to flesh out the surprising case he had made in the Times.
During this period he seems to have confirmed his suspicion that not only the science of nutrition but the science of health issues generally was far less solid that the physics he had studied in college and investigated during the early stages of his journalistic career. Right around the time that his new book was finally ready for release, the Times Sunday Magazine ran his 8,000 word article on the very weak and vacillating scientific case for the widespread use of hormone replacement therapy and the extremely doubtful nature of the epidemiological studies that had been used to justify it.
- Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • September 16, 2007 • 8,000 Words
Exactly this same story of severely flawed scientific conclusions that may have damaged the lives and health of tens of millions of Americans was the central theme of Good Calories, Bad Calories, which weighed in at a hefty 600 pages, including a bibliography containing well over 1,500 entries across its 67 pages. Given the author’s media visibility and his past notoriety on these issues, his book soon became a best-seller, helpfully propelled by a fairly lengthy extract in the Wall Street Journal.
My last substantial exposure to this subject had been during a few weeks of my 10th grade Health class, so as someone almost totally ignorant I found his analysis extremely interesting. Taubes argued that everything I’d always accepted about the supposedly settled science of nutrition was actually far more complex and contentious than I ever would have imagined.
During my entire life, the mainstream media had always informed me that fatty foods were high in something called cholesterol that greatly increased one’s risk of heart attacks and strokes, and not having any interest nor expertise in such matters, I’d naturally assumed that was true. But Taubes rather convincingly argued that this conclusion was based upon extremely flimsy scientific evidence and might be totally false, with a mountain of that media coverage having been built upon barely a postage stamp of rather doubtful scientific evidence. The Times medical journalist reviewing his book favorably highlighted one of his forceful declarations:
From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day.
This same severe mismatch between minimal factual evidence and enormously widespread belief was also the case with regard to the supposed connection between salt intake and high blood pressure, dietary fiber and colon cancer, and various other health conditions. But the mythology regarding diet and obesity was the worst example of all.
As Taubes documented, from the earliest days of nineteenth century nutritional science and for generations afterward, it had been very widely accepted that diets high in carbohydrates such as pasta, bread, potatoes, and especially sugar were generally fattening and the best way of losing weight was to forgo those foods. Yet in the postwar era, rather scanty or misinterpreted scientific evidence convinced some energetic American nutritionists to develop an entirely different understanding of obesity, based upon the assumption that all calories were essentially interchangeable, and since fatty foods were much denser in their caloric content than either carbohydrates or protein, they should be avoided in order to lose weight. As Taubes evocatively put it, their simple argument amounted to the dogma that obesity was caused by the two traditional sins of gluttony—-eating too much—and sloth—exercising too little. This had always seemed intuitively plausible to me, and I’d accepted it as true my entire life.
But Taubes argued that this completely ignored the underlying endocrinological facts and these were far more complex. As he explained, people get fat because their fat cells grow larger, taking on more fat molecules than they release for use in the rest of the body, a process that is regulated by various hormones, especially insulin. When carbohydrates such as starches and sugars are ingested, insulin is released into the bloodstream, leading fat cells to absorb fats rather than release them, while the liver converts excess circulating blood-sugar into molecules of fat for such storage. But eating fatty foods or proteins does not have this same impact upon insulin release, helping to explain the traditional folk-wisdom that carbohydrates are fattening foods.
The simplistic notion that all calories are the same for purposes of weight control fails to consider these crucial hormonal factors. While eating fats or protein assuages our hunger, eating carbohydrates and especially sugar stimulates the release of insulin, which may actually indirectly trigger further sensations of hunger, thereby leading to over-eating.
This was the scientific basis of the eponymous diet promoted by Dr. Robert Atkins, whose hugely best-selling 1972 book made him very wealthy even as it attracted the bitter scorn of nearly the entire American medical establishment. The Atkins Diet and its numerous roughly similar variants allowed the practitioner to eat fatty or protein-rich foods in large or even unlimited quantities, while strictly limiting the consumption of carbohydrates, especially sugars. For generations such notions had been the conventional wisdom among mainstream nutritionists, but that scientific history had been expunged so thoroughly that when Atkins empirically rediscovered it, his views were treated as rank heresy.
Some of the arguments Taubes made initially struck me as wildly counter-intuitive, but they actually became reasonably plausible when carefully considered.
For example, it seemed almost a truism that people grow fat because they eat too much and exercise too little, but Taubes argued that the arrow of causality actually pointed in the opposite direction, suggesting that becoming fat was actually the cause rather than the consequence of over-eating and lack of physical activity. He explained that humans become fat when their faltering hormonal controls caused too much dissolved blood-sugar to be converted into fat and absorbed by fat-cells, which then failed to be properly release them. The resulting lack of such circulating body-fuel available for cellular operation then triggered the hunger reflex while also causing the individual to conserve energy by minimizing physical activity.
In the most extreme examples, the author pointed to the documented case-studies of subjects who were obviously rather fat while simultaneously exhibiting clear symptoms of starvation, with their muscle tissue and other organs being desperately cannibalized for the fuel that their body could not extract from the fat tissue normally intended for that purpose. While it might seem like a logical impossibility for an individual to be both fat and emaciated such a condition did actually exist, and strains of lab rats could be specially bred to display those traits when they were denied sufficient food.
Taubes had clearly invested a great deal of time in studying the scientific and public health history that had produced our current policies, and one surprising aspect of his account was how remarkably contingent many crucial turning points seem to have been.
For example, the battle over whether dietary fat was seriously harmful had raged for a couple of decades by the mid-1970s, with prominent academic nutritional experts on both sides and the anti-fat camp gradually gaining ground but without any clear decision. Indeed, according to Taubes, much of the growing support for that hypothesis had absolutely nothing to do with research studies or even health issues, but was partly carried along by the growing concerns that overpopulation would doom the world to starvation unless diets in wealthy countries shifted from meat to far more efficiently-produced vegetable products, with all of this occurring before the Green Revolution of agronomist Norman Borlaug swept away the threat of world hunger. So once a traditional American diet heavy in meat had become “politically incorrect” for those totally unrelated geopolitical reasons, there was a tendency to conclude that it was also unhealthy even if the actual supporting evidence was rather thin and ambiguous.
Taubes pointed to the single day that played the greatest role in setting American nutritional policy and enshrining anti-fat dogma. A Senate select committee on nutrition had been established in 1968 by Sen. George McGovern aimed at eliminating the malnutrition caused by poverty, and on Friday, January 14, 1977, it issued federal dietary guidelines declaring that Americans could improve their health by eating less fat. The author noted that the staff members who made that decision were almost totally ignorant of the underlying scientific debate, and in a lengthy footnote, he even raised the disturbing possibility that they were driven to take that step by their fears that the committee would soon be disbanded unless it could gain publicity from some dramatic public declaration.
Once the government had adopted that position, the verdict naturally influenced the subsequent research of FDA investigators and outside academics dependent upon federal funding, so to some extent the anti-fat doctrine then became a self-fulfilling scientific prophecy. And after a generation of researchers had invested their careers warning of the harmful role of dietary fat, they probably became very reluctant to later admit that they might have been mistaken.
Meanwhile, business interests had also been heavily engaged in this nutritional battle. For example, the corn oil corporations, eager to expand their market-share at the expense of competitors hawking natural butter, had already spent two decades funding public health propaganda in support of their consumer sales efforts.
As Taubes explained, once the public health community firmly accepted the notion that the cholesterol in fatty foods was responsible for very serious health risks such as heart attacks and strokes, that belief automatically impacted unrelated weight control issues. Even if there seemed to be strong empirical evidence that a diet high in fats was a much better means of controlling or losing weight than the low-fat, high-carbohydrate “health foods” usually prescribed, health professionals still regarded fatty foods as so seriously harmful that they came up with various excuses to avoid endorsing that approach. Macronutrients are either fats, proteins, or carbohydrates, and if there was a widespread belief that the first was harmful, carbohydrates necessarily became one of the major replacements.
In reading Taubes’ fascinating narrative history of these developments, my strong sense was that although scientific evidence did occasionally play some role in influencing the public health debate on nutrition, its impact was usually swamped by entirely different factors. Perhaps the academic advocates for one position were more determined or energetic than their rivals on the other side; perhaps the corporations selling carbohydrate-rich foods happened to hire better PR firms than their fatty-food rivals; perhaps a confused and ignorant Congressional staffer short on time happened to read one magazine article rather than a different one. These seem to have been the factors that most influenced the shaping of our nutritional policy, and after its eventual endorsement by government proclamation, that policy became extremely difficult to dislodge or revise, notwithstanding its possibly erroneous roots.
The whole process seemed somewhat akin to the famous case of the nineteenth century selection of the QWERTY layout of the typewriter keyboard, which despite its tremendous ergonomic inefficiency has remained the standard layout of every subsequent keyboard for the 150 years that followed, right down to those found on today’s iPhones.
Although they hardly constitute proof, the American health trends of the last half-century do seem to support the nutritional arguments that Taubes advanced.
It was only in the 1970s that our government firmly put its stamp of approval on replacing fatty foods with carbohydrates in our diet, especially favoring those in the “health food” category such as granolas, fruit, and whole wheat breads. There was a clear shift away from bacon, sausage, and butter to yogurt, fruit juice, and leaner rather than fattier cuts of meat. Around the same time, more and more Americans began embracing regular daily exercise, including jogging and gym workouts, activities that had previously been almost unknown or even considered harmful. So this combination of less fatty food and more regular exercise should have been followed by very noticeable changes in American weight and related health problems. And so they were, but in exactly the opposite direction from what the nutritional framework promoted by the government and the media would have predicted.
Obesity had always been a very minor problem in American society, but it now suddenly skyrocketed. The obese fraction of our population had been relatively static at one in eight or nine, but it now rose to better than one in three during the thirty years that followed. Meanwhile, the number of Americans with diabetes rose even faster, increasing by nearly 300%.
The very considerable length and heavy scientific and historical focus of Taubes’ book may have been necessary for persuading some medical doctors and nutritional researchers to reconsider their longstanding assumptions, but those same factors obviously limited its popular appeal.
Therefore in 2010, the author drew upon the large body of information he had accumulated to publish Why We Get Fat, a much shorter and less technical discussion of the same issues, running about one-third the length and packaged in a more casual and engaging style intended to make it much more accessible to a broad national audience. Indeed, the quite favorable Times review even described the new book as almost a “Cliff Notes” version of that previous volume, and it also became a national bestseller.
One of the very sensible points made by Taubes was that those foods that have only entered the human diet relatively recently are most likely to cause health problems because evolutionary selective pressure may not have had sufficient time to modify our digestive processes and other biological systems to properly handle them. But the author argues that exactly this concern may apply to nearly all the carbohydrates that we eat—most of our basic foods—given that their widespread adoption as dietary staples only began with the Agricultural Revolution of around 10,000 BC. Prior to that change in life-style, our diet was probably heavily skewed towards the fats and proteins of hunter-gatherers. Taubes noted the huge health problems experienced by the Pima tribesmen of Arizona when they suddenly switched to carbohydrate-rich modern diets.
Twelve millennia is obviously a fairly long time for strong selective-pressure to have made itself felt, considerably sanding away any such metabolic vulnerabilities. But if the negative health consequences of ingesting too many carbohydrates were gradual and came late in life—or were even largely absent for any groups lacking a superabundance of food—they might not have been apparent, leaving modern humans still potentially quite vulnerable. Thus the health risks of over-eating carbohydrates might have remained in our genome, only manifesting themselves during the last century or two when some human populations suddenly gained access to a virtually unlimited daily supply of such carbohydrate products.
But all these general concerns about carbohydrates are hugely magnified in the case of sugar, which only very recently became a major component of our diet. Although sugar had been known for many thousands of years, until the last couple of centuries and the creation of large tropical sugar plantations, it had only been available to the wealthy in very limited quantities, and was often regarded as a medicinal or even semi-magical compound with powerful properties. Thus, it would hardly be surprising if the human digestive system and bodily metabolism had a difficult time handling it in the very large quantities that we currently consume, and Taubes provided quite a lot of scientific evidence supporting that very worrisome possibility.
Although Taubes had discussed these concerns about sugar in both his books, a year after releasing the second one, he published a major new Times article entirely devoted to that topic, which carried an explosive title.
- Is Sugar Toxic?
Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • April 13, 2011 • 6,500 Words
Over the last couple of centuries, sugar has become one of the most ubiquitous components of our ordinary diet, heavily found across an enormous range of foods from cookies to sports drinks to catsup, and the notion that it might actually be a harmful human toxin seems exactly like the sort of nutritional “conspiracy theory” we might expect to find in isolated corners of the Internet, spouted by paranoid health-cranks. Yet that case was instead made by one of our most distinguished science writers in a lengthy cover-story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and he subsequently expanded it into The Case Against Sugar, a heavily-documented 350 page book once again published by Knopf in 2017.
As proof of my own nutritional ignorance, I’d long since forgotten that sucrose—ordinary table sugar—actually consists of paired molecules of glucose—basic blood-sugar—and fructose, a much sweeter type of sugar found in fruit. From the saliva in our mouths to the enzymes in our small intestines, our bodies quickly break down starches and most other carbohydrates into glucose, the molecule that all our cells burn for energy. But fructose falls into an entirely different category, and it can only be metabolized in the liver. Taubes emphasized that forcing that organ to handle too much fructose may result in long-term tissue damage, just like drinking too much alcohol can lead to cirrhosis of the liver.
In addition, he argued that the liver-damage caused by such fructose-processing may lead to the growth of insulin resistance, which he suggests may be the central factor behind both obesity and diabetes. So ingesting large quantities of sugar probably has an impact upon obesity far greater than merely the extra calories provided. He even speculated that the resulting over-production of insulin may increase the risk of cancer, noting that such risks are associated with obesity and diabetes.
When public concerns developed during the late 1970s that our soft drinks and other foods contained too much sugar, industry reacted to that pressure by replacing such ordinary sugar with high fructose corn-syrup (HFCS), a supposedly natural compound that sounded relatively innocuous, was just as sweet, and had the additional benefit of being even cheaper. Yet, ironically enough, HFCS is actually around 55% fructose to 45% glucose, so that substitution may have actually been somewhat more damaging to the liver and other internal organs. And perhaps coincidentally, the gently rising curves of both obesity and diabetes underwent a further inflection point soon afterward, beginning their rapid subsequent increase.
Another point made by Taubes is partly a matter of definition. During the last few hundred years, new “food-drugs” of various types have become widely available to world population for the first time, including coffee, tea, and cocoa, all generally produced on large plantations and all of them had an important effect on personal lifestyles, as did outright drugs such as tobacco, opium, and cocaine. Sugar plantations appeared around the same time, and the author asked the very interesting question of whether sugar should actually be considered a food-drug of a similar type, perhaps mildly addictive and having some seriously negative side-effects, and he argued that it should be.
There’s an additional point that I don’t recall seeing mentioned in any of Taubes’ books. It has long been believed that the easiest way to improve the taste of a food was to add fat, and some scientific studies have supported this notion, which makes perfect sense given human evolutionary history. But with our recent nutritional standards having ruled out applying such a supposedly dangerous additive, food product companies were probably forced to turn to other options, and adding extra sugar may have been the substitute they adopted.
Although it largely drew on the analysis of his previous books and articles, The Case for Keto, published in 2020, directly focused on the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, and carried the endorsements of numerous academic professors of medicine and nutritionists.
During the recent Covid epidemic, it was widely acknowledged that obesity was a major contributing factor to the lethality of a Covid infection, and I published an article noting that on an international basis, there seemed a very strong relationship between the national rates of obesity and the excess death rates in the working-age population. I included a table comparing the two results across the dozens of developed countries whose statistics were available on the HMD website, listed by descending obesity percentages.
| Country | Obesity % | Working-Age Mortality Rates, 2020-2022 |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 36 | Very High |
| New Zealand | 31 | High |
| Australia | 29 | High |
| Canada | 29 | Very High |
| Chile | 28 | Very High |
| England | 28 | Very High |
| Scotland | 28 | Very High |
| Hungary | 26 | Low |
| Israel | 26 | High |
| Lithuania | 26 | Low |
| Bulgaria | 25 | High |
| Greece | 25 | High |
| Croatia | 24 | Low |
| Latvia | 24 | Low |
| Spain | 24 | High |
| Luxembourg | 23 | Flat |
| Norway | 23 | Very Low |
| Poland | 23 | Low |
| Belgium | 22 | Low |
| Finland | 22 | Very Low |
| France | 22 | Very Low |
| Germany | 22 | Flat |
| Iceland | 22 | High |
| Estonia | 21 | Low |
| Portugal | 21 | Flat |
| Sweden | 21 | Very Low |
| Austria | 20 | Flat |
| Denmark | 20 | Very Low |
| Italy | 20 | Flat |
| Netherlands | 20 | Low |
| Slovakia | 20 | Flat |
| Slovenia | 20 | Very Low |
| Switzerland | 19 | Low |
| South Korea | 5 | Low |
Although the match was far from perfect, there did seem to be a strong relationship between the obesity rates of the countries and their relative mortality rates for 2020-2022. All the countries with the highest obesity rates had high or very high mortality rates, while the countries with the lowest obesity rates generally had low or very low mortality rates.
I further noted that on a quantitative basis, comparing the national obesity figures to the working-age excess mortality percentages across those countries yielded moderately strong correlations:
| Time Period | Obesity/Mortality Correlation |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 0.53 |
| 2021 | 0.55 |
| 2022 | 0.45 |
| 2020-22 | 0.56 |
- Obesity and the End of the Vaxxing Debate?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 9, 2023 • 2,800 Words
America’s excess Covid deaths were among the highest in the world, just as we might expect given our position near the top of the global obesity charts.
But as I had analyzed that important public health issue, I was very surprised to discover that across all these developed countries, the highest national obesity rates were found not only in the U.S. but also in the other English-speaking nations such as England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which together monopolized six of the seven top spots. And if Taubes is correct and the American government and media spent the last half-century promoting the totally wrong-headed nutritional policies that have been mostly to blame for our own epidemic of obesity, it would make sense that these might have had the greatest impact upon the other English-speaking societies most strongly under our cultural influence.
According to CDC estimates, more than 100 million Americans currently suffer from obesity along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children, leading to annual medical costs of over $250 billion, while about 74% of all American adults are overweight. Obesity is a crucial factor leading to diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans have that serious medical condition, while well over another 115 million have prediabetes.
These are absolutely enormous numbers, with huge health consequences even now that the threat of the Covid virus has largely faded. Diabetes ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths. Meanwhile, a study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted risk of death, potentially by as much as 91%, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact is obviously enormous. By contrast, the combined total of all drug-overdose deaths combined is a little over 100,000.
So if Taubes is correct and sugar is the primary factor behind this huge epidemic of obesity and diabetes, the death toll it has produced would far surpass that of any prescription or illegal drug, and very likely all of them combined. So for all the talk of the dangerous impact of opioids or cocaine, the deadliest “white powder” drug of all is probably the one we eat in our Snickers bars or drink in our cans of Coca-Cola.
The public health policies of a large society operate like an enormous ocean liner, whose existing course can only be gradually shifted over time. I think that Gary Taubes has made a strong case that around a half-century ago our own national policies were set in exactly the wrong direction, eventually leading to the extremely serious health problems faced by so much of our population.
Taubes is a very highly-regarded science journalist and for more than two decades he has strongly promoted his unorthodox views on these nutritional issues, publishing several national bestsellers with one of our leading presses, as well as a number of lengthy, high-profile articles in the New York Times, our most influential news outlet. Given his long, ground-breaking effort to overturn our established nutritional orthodoxy by synthesizing and publicizing an enormous quantity of important research on the role of fats, carbohydrates, and sugars, I think it would be fair to characterize his package of alternative views on these matters as the Taubes Hypothesis. But I really wonder how much of a public impact any of his work has actually had, at least if my own personal awareness provides an indication.
As someone who has carefully read the newspapers and followed the media but had never paid much attention to nutritional issues, I had become vaguely aware of rising criticism that our national diet contained too much sugar and high-fructose corn-syrup, but had never been sure how seriously to take those complaints. Meanwhile, over the last dozen years I don’t recall seeing any articles in respectable, prestigious media outlets advocating a high-fat diet for reasons of personal health, and until recently reading Taubes’ own books I would have rejected any such suggestions as totally crackpot notions. Moreover, during that same period of time, I have noticed an apparent rise in obesity and even extreme obesity in my own city of Palo Alto, which had previously seemed relatively immune from that condition. So despite the considerable efforts of Taubes and his medical allies, I think their twenty years of effort have at best only had a moderate impact upon the situation.
Given our massive, unprecedented rise in obesity, diabetes, and related health problems I think we are faced with the very real possibility that roughly a half-century of America’s officially-endorsed nutritional policies may have not merely been incorrect but entirely upside-down and backwards, leading to severe health problems for perhaps a hundred million Americans, with many millions of these individuals probably suffering premature death as a consequence. This is hardly a comforting notion to accept and surely raises serious questions about the basic competence and objectivity of our academic scientists and researchers in such public health matters.
In reading the Taubes books, I had a strong sense that exactly those same thoughts had often crossed his mind as he carefully explained how a gigantic, decades-long public health policy that may have impacted a billion people worldwide had been originally formulated based upon little if any solid scientific evidence. Taubes’ undergraduate degree at Harvard had been in applied physics, his brother currently holds an endowed chair in mathematics at that same elite university, and his first two books had dealt with physics issues, including the successful research of a Nobel Laureate. So I suspect that the lack of competence he had discovered in the fields of public health and nutrition must have utterly appalled him.
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Source: The Unz Review
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