(public).sospep.subjects ~ view article ~ the-sugar-conspiracy

<h1 style="text-align: center;">The sugar conspiracy</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;by Ian Leslie @theguardian.com - Leslie tells the story of US doctor Robert Lustig who gave a talk on the problems of consuming too much sugar. Leslie discovers that another researcher Boris Yudkin, had discovered many of the same issues with sugar, 35 years prior.&nbsp;Yudkin's&nbsp;findings were ridiculed and he&nbsp;was ostrasized from the community&nbsp;of nutritional&nbsp;scientists at the time. The community was set on theory that "saturated fat" was the root of all dietary evil in an unscientific like behaviour was unwilling to consider another hpothesis.&nbsp; The findings of the community led to the dietary recommendations/guidelines which the US (and many other countries) adopted. Food manufacturers replaced Fat with Sugar.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHY]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
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<li>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</li>
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<li>]&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin</a>&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
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<li>] 2016-01-0d</li>
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<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar &ndash; and not fat &ndash; was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world&rsquo;s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?&nbsp;
Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a &ldquo;poison&rdquo; culpable for America&rsquo;s obesity epidemic
A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you&rsquo;ve read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.
&ldquo;If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,&rdquo; wrote Yudkin, &ldquo;that material would promptly be banned.&rdquo; The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man.
Perhaps the Australian scientist intended a friendly warning. Lustig was certainly putting his academic reputation at risk when he embarked on a high-profile campaign against sugar. But, unlike Yudkin, Lustig is backed by a prevailing wind.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/sugar" target="_blank" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="auto-linked-tag">Sugar</a> has become dietary enemy number one.
For at least the last three decades, the dietary arch-villain has been saturated fat
When Yudkin was conducting his research into the effects of sugar, in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. Yudkin led a diminishing band of dissenters who believed that sugar, not fat, was the more likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yudkin found himself fighting a rearguard action, and he was defeated.
Listig (On reading Yudkin&rsquo;s introduction), he felt a shock of recognition. &ldquo;Holy crap,&rdquo; Lustig thought. &ldquo;This guy got there 35 years before me.&rdquo;
1980, after long consultation with some of America&rsquo;s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. (these are also used by other countries including UK, Canada, ...)
The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed.
Look at a graph of postwar obesity rates and it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it takes off like an aeroplane. Just 12% of Americans were obese in 1950, 15% in 1980, 35% by 2000. In the UK, the line is flat for decades until the mid-1980s, at which point it also turns towards the sky. Only 6% of Britons were obese in 1980. In the next 20 years that figure more than trebled.
Type 2 diabetes, closely related to obesity, has risen in tandem in both countries.
At best, we can conclude that the official guidelines did not achieve their objective; at worst, they led to a decades-long health catastrophe.
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/nutrition" target="_blank" data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="auto-linked-tag">Nutrition</a> scientists are angry with the press for distorting their findings, politicians for failing to heed them, and the rest of us for overeating and under-exercising. In short, everyone &ndash; business, media, politicians, consumers &ndash; is to blame. Everyone, that is, except scientists.
Energy from food comes to us in three forms: fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Since the proportion of energy we get from protein tends to stay stable, whatever our diet, a low-fat diet effectively means a high-carbohydrate diet. The most versatile and palatable carbohydrate is sugar, which John Yudkin had already circled in red.
This story, which has begun to emerge in the past decade, has been brought to public attention largely by sceptical outsiders rather than eminent nutritionists. In her painstakingly researched book, The Big Fat Surprise, the journalist Nina Teicholz traces the history of the proposition that saturated fats cause heart disease, and reveals the remarkable extent to which its progress from controversial theory to accepted truth was driven, not by new evidence, but by the influence of a few powerful personalities, one in particular.
Today, as nutritionists struggle to comprehend a health disaster they did not predict and may have precipitated, the field is undergoing a painful period of re-evaluation. It is edging away from prohibitions on cholesterol and fat, and hardening its warnings on sugar, without going so far as to perform a reverse turn. But its senior members still retain a collective instinct to malign those who challenge its tattered conventional wisdom too loudly, as Teicholz is now discovering.
the &ldquo;diet-heart hypothesis&rdquo; (for simplicity&rsquo;s sake, I am calling it the &ldquo;fat hypothesis&rdquo;). This is the idea, now familiar, that an excess of saturated fats in the diet, from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs, raises cholesterol, which congeals on the inside of coronary arteries, causing them to harden and narrow, until the flow of blood is staunched and the heart seizes up.
When Yudkin looked at the data on heart disease, he was struck by its correlation with the consumption of sugar, not fat. He carried out a series of laboratory experiments on animals and humans, and observed, as others had before him, that sugar is processed in the liver, where it turns to fat, before entering the bloodstream.
&nbsp;Sugar &ndash; a pure carbohydrate, with all fibre and nutrition stripped out &ndash; has been part of western diets for just 300 years; in evolutionary terms, it is as if we have, just this second, taken our first dose of it. Saturated fats, by contrast, are so intimately bound up with our evolution that they are abundantly present in breast milk. To Yudkin&rsquo;s thinking, it seemed more likely to be the recent innovation, rather than the prehistoric staple, making us sick.
Although Keys had shown a correlation between heart disease and saturated fat, he had not excluded the possibility that heart disease was being caused by something else. Years later, the Seven Countries study&rsquo;s lead Italian researcher, Alessandro Menotti, went back to the data, and found that the food that correlated most closely with deaths from heart disease was not saturated fat, but sugar.
Throughout the 1960s, Keys accumulated institutional power. He secured places for himself and his allies on the boards of the most influential bodies in American healthcare, including the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health. From these strongholds, they directed funds to like-minded researchers, and issued authoritative advice to the nation. &ldquo;People should know the facts,&rdquo; Keys told Time magazine. &ldquo;Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them.&rdquo;
This apparent certainty was unwarranted: even some supporters of the fat hypothesis admitted that the evidence for it was still inconclusive.
The Seven Countries Study was finally published as a 211-page monograph in 1970. It showed a correlation between intake of saturated fats and deaths from heart disease, just as Keys had predicted. The scientific debate swung decisively behind the fat hypothesis.
Despite its monumental stature, however, the Seven Countries Study, which was the basis for a cascade of subsequent papers by its original authors, was a rickety construction. There was no objective basis for the countries chosen by Keys, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he picked only those he suspected would support his hypothesis
In a series of densely argued articles and books, including Why We Get Fat (2010), the science writer Gary Taubes has assembled a critique of contemporary nutrition science, powerful enough to compel the field to listen. 
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<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
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<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
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<li>] SRC = HN, comments</li>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

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