Worth Books - Summary and Analysis of The Case Against Sugar: Based on the Book by Gary Taubes

Summary and Analysis of

The Case Against Sugar

Based on the Book by Gary Taubes

Contents

Context

A journalist with a background in physics and engineering, Gary Taubes first became interested in nutrition in 1997 when his editors at Science magazine assigned him to cover a medical study on a new protocol for lowering blood pressure without restricting salt. Taubes, who had previously authored two books on the history of physics, became engrossed in the research for his article The (Political) Science of Salt that challenged conventional wisdom on the relationship between salt and blood pressure. If everything we thought we knew about salt was wrong, Taubes wondered, what other nutritional misinformation were we basing our eating and medical decisions on?

This question brought him to sugar, which he came to believe was responsible for a host of Western diseases that were previously blamed on overconsumption of fat, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even cancer and Alzheimers disease. Taubes became known for his reporting on sugar with his provocative 2002 New York Times Magazine article, What if Its All Been a Big Fat Lie? After Taubess article ran counter to mainstream medical research, he has been criticized in Reason and Newsweek magazines, and on The Dr. Oz Show .

Taubes has since published three books Good Calories, Bad Calories in 2007, Why We Get Fat in 2011, and now The Case Against Sugar in 2016continuing to build his argument that sugar is killing us. All three have been national bestsellers. The Case Against Sugar traces the history of medical research on sugar, presents the scientific evidence that supports his case, and reveals the lengths the sugar industry went to promote studies that take the blame off sugar. He looks at how populations around the world were introduced to a Western diet and began to develop the associated diseasesall linked to eating more sugar.

The Case Against Sugar , published more than a decade after Taubess first revolutionary New York Times article, comes at a time when more than half a billion people on the planet are obese, including one in three Americans. In addition, 1214% of American adults have diabetes. If sugar is indeed behind cancer, heart disease, and other leading causes of death in modern societyas the evidence strongly suggeststhen Taubess book is a necessary and prescient read that may save lives.

Overview

Taubes opens The Case Against Sugar with the story of how doctors first noticed the rising rate of diabetes in the late 19th century, and then points to the staggering statistics on obesity and diabetes in the United States and around the world today. He aims to debunk the prevailing wisdom that overeatingespecially eating too much fatis to blame for this problem, and to prove that sugar is actually the root cause of Western diseases including heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimers.

The history of sugar begins around ten thousand years ago when the sugarcane plant was first cultivated in New Guinea. When Europeans colonized the New World, they found the climate of the Caribbean was ideal for growing sugarcane, and they put African slaves to work cultivating sugar. As sugar dropped in price, it became available to people of all class levels in Europe and the United States. Sugar has become part of our culture and can be found in nearly all processed foods. But despite its prevalence in our diet, studies in animals have shown it may be as addictive as cocaine or heroin.

Early research on nutrition was based on what could easily be measured. And in the 1860s, with the invention of the calorimeter in Germany, that meant calories. Sugar contains four calories per gram (versus the nine in fat) so scientists assumed fat was responsible for obesity and ensuing diseases. Early diabetes researchers were proponents of this theory, and their ideas influenced decades of medical opinion on the disease. It wasnt until the 1960s that scientists had the technology to study how insulina hormone produced in response to high blood sugaraffects the body. Excess insulin signals fat cells to hold on to fat, leading to weight gain, and individuals who consume more sugar can become resistant to insulin, causing their bodies to release even more. This was significant evidence that insulin resistance could actually cause obesity.

Meanwhile, the sugar industry worked tirelessly to convince the public that sugar was safe. The industry group Sugar Association Inc. spent millions of dollars funding researchers to conduct studies shifting the blame for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity from sugar to fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. The industry also lobbied the FDA to ban artificial sweeteners using studies that showed how consuming large amounts of them (more than a person could reasonably eat in a lifetime) caused cancer in mice.

Yet studies around the world on populations that adopted a Western diet, relatively recently, revealed a similar pattern of increases in diseases that could be traced to eating more sugar. Taubes presents evidence that all of these diseases can be linked to the insulin resistance our bodies develop in response to eating too much sugar.

Summary

Introduction: Why Diabetes?

Historically, diabetes has been a relatively rare disease. According to an 1898 study by Elliott Joslin (a doctor who would go on to become one of the most influential diabetes specialists) and pathologist Reginald Fitz, only 172 out of 48,000 patients seen at Massachusetts General Hospital since 1824 had been diagnosed with diabetes, but this number was on the rise. Joslin and Fitz found that there were as many cases of diabetes seen in the hospital in the 13 years from 18851898 as there were in the previous 61 years. In 1934, Elliot concluded that only two to three Americans in every thousand had diabetes. Today, that figure stands at around 1214% or one in every seven to eight Americans. Similar patterns have emerged around the globe. Countries that have adopted a Western diet have also seen a sharp rise in diabeteseven among populations like the Chinese and Inuit where, previously, the disease barely existed.

While some early researchers cited the link between sugar and diabetes, the blame shifted to fat and saturated fat in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite growing evidence that sugar, instead of fat, was to blame, these beliefs stuckpartly under pressure from the sugar industry, and partly because of the medical establishments hesitancy to challenge its established doctrine. As obesity rates soared, scientists and doctors argued the epidemic wasnt caused by eating a specific food, but by eating too much food in general. Because fat contains nine calories per gram (versus four in carbohydrates and protein), it became an easy scapegoat in the calories-in/ calories-out theory (also known as energy balance). This hypothesis benefitted the sugar industry; it could place the blame for diabetes on obesity in generalnot their product.

But author Gary Taubes argues that sugar, specifically, in all its forms (sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, etc.), is responsible for changes in the human body that trigger not just diabetes, but obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimers disease, as well. As a group, these diseases represent the leading cause of death in Western countries and all have been linked to a condition called insulin resistance, which is present in type 2 diabetics. Taubes sets out to prove that the explosion of sugar consumption around the world, rather than consuming too many calories and exercising too little, is the source of these problems.