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" …Sugar has become an ingredient avoidable in prepared and packaged foods only by concerted and determined effort, effectively ubiquitous. Not just in the obvious sweet foods (candy bars, cookies, ice creams, chocolates, sodas, juices, sports and energy drinks, sweetened iced tea, jams, jellies, and breakfast cereals both cold and hot), but also in peanut butter, salad dressings, ketchup, BBQ sauces, canned soups, cold cuts, luncheon meats, bacon, hot dogs, pretzels, chips, roasted peanuts, spaghetti sauces, canned tomatoes, and breads. From the 1980's onward manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat…not to mention gluten free, no MSG, and zero grams trans fat per serving, took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally…palatable and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty plus names, by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat was removed from candy bars sugar added, or at least kept, so that they became health food bars. Fat was removed from yogurts and sugars added and these became heart healthy snacks, breakfasts, and lunches. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" One danger here, of course, is that once we insist or pretend that we know the answer based on premature or incomplete evidence (even if we’re pushed against our will to take such stands), we’re likely to continue to insist we’re right, even when evidence accumulates to the contrary. This is a risk in any human endeavor. When Francis Bacon pioneered the scientific method almost four hundred years ago, he was hoping to create a methodology of critical or rational thinking that would minimize this all-too-human characteristic of avoiding evidence that disagrees with any preconceptions we might have formed.*1 Without rigorous tests, as many as necessary, beliefs and preconceptions will persevere because it’s always easier to believe that a single test has been flawed, or even a few of them, than it is to accept that our belief had been incorrect. The scientific method protects against this tendency; it does not eradicate it. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" The second development, in 1960, was the development of a new technology that allowed researchers for the first time ever to measure accurately the level of hormones circulating in the bloodstream. It was the invention of Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist, and Solomon Berson, a physician, and was called the radioimmunoassay. When Yalow won the Nobel Prize for the work in 1977 (Berson by then was not alive to share it), the Nobel Foundation would describe it aptly as bringing about “a revolution in biological and medical research.” Those interested in obesity could now finally answer the questions about which the pre–World War II European clinicians could only speculate: which hormones were regulating the storage of fat in fat cells and its use for fuel by the rest of the body? Answers began coming with the very first publications out of Yalow and Berson’s laboratory and were swiftly confirmed by others. As it turns out, virtually all hormones work to mobilize fat from fat cells so that it can then be used for fuel. Hormones are signaling our bodies to act—flee or fight, reproduce, grow—and they also signal the fat cells to make available the fuel necessary for these actions. The one dominant exception to this fuel-mobilization signaling is insulin, the same hormone that researchers still assumed in the early 1960s to be deficient in all cases of diabetes. Insulin, Yalow and Berson reported, can be thought of as orchestrating how the body uses or “partitions” the fuel it takes in. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" When blood-sugar (glucose) levels rise, the pancreas secretes insulin in response, which then signals the muscle cells to take up and burn more glucose. Insulin also signals the fat cells to take up fat and hold on to it. Only when the rising tide of blood sugar begins to ebb will insulin levels ebb as well, at which point the fat cells will release their stored fuel into the circulation (in the form of fatty acids); the cells of muscles and organs now burn this fat rather than glucose. Blood sugar is controlled within a healthy range, and fat flows in and out of fat cells as needed. The one biological factor necessary to get fat out of fat cells and have it used for fuel, as Yalow and Berson noted in 1965, is “the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency.” These revelations on the various actions of insulin led Yalow and Berson to call it the most “lipogenic” hormone, meaning fat-forming. And this lipogenic signal has to be turned down, muted significantly, for the fat cells to release their stored fat and the body to use it for fuel. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" So the real question for me as an educator is, if I go out and tell people that I think they are eating too much sugar, if I go out and tell mothers I think they should stop their kids from eating so much sugar because it is bad for them, am I going to get flak from the scientists? Or am I going to be allowed to make that statement without travail, on the grounds that even though we do not have hard evidence to link sugar with a specific disease, we do know that a dietary pattern containing considerably less sugar, in which sugar is replaced by a complex carbohydrate, would be a much healthier diet? JOAN GUSSOW, chairman, Columbia University nutrition department, 1975 I "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" The conditions in the womb—in the intrauterine environment—influence the development of the fetus, so that subtly different conditions will lead, in effect, to the birth of newborns who respond differently to the environment they face outside the womb. In particular, the nutrients that the developing child receives in the womb—including the supply of glucose—pass across the placenta in proportion to the nutrient concentration in the mother’s circulation. The higher the mother’s blood sugar, the greater the supply of glucose to the fetus. The developing pancreas responds by overproducing insulin-secreting cells. “The baby is not diabetic,” says Boyd Metzger, who studies diabetes and pregnancy at Northwestern University, “but the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are stimulated to function and grow in size and number by the environment they’re in. So they start overfunctioning. That in turn leads to a baby laying down more fat, which is why the baby of a diabetic mother is typified by being a fat baby. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" The medical research community came to recognize that insulin resistance and a condition now known as “metabolic syndrome” is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes. Before we get either heart disease or diabetes, we first manifest metabolic syndrome. The CDC now estimates that some seventy-five million adult Americans have metabolic syndrome. The very first symptom or diagnostic criterion that doctors are told to look for in diagnosing metabolic syndrome is an expanding waistline. This means that if you’re overweight or obese—as two-thirds of American adults are—there’s a good chance that you have metabolic syndrome; it also means that your blood pressure is likely to be elevated, and you’re glucose-intolerant and thus on the way to becoming diabetic. This is why you’re more likely to have a heart attack than a lean individual—although lean individuals can also have metabolic syndrome, and those who do are more likely to have heart disease and diabetes than lean individuals without it. Metabolic syndrome ties together a host of disorders that the medical community typically thought of as unrelated, or at least having separate and distinct causes—getting fatter (obesity), high blood pressure (hypertension), high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol (dyslipidemia), heart disease (atherosclerosis), high blood sugar (diabetes), and inflammation (pick your disease)—as products of insulin resistance and high circulating insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia). It’s a kind of homeostatic disruption in which regulatory systems throughout the body are misbehaving with slow, chronic, pathological consequences everywhere. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" Metabolic syndrome changes the vocabulary that physicians use when they discuss a patient’s risk of heart disease. High cholesterol isn’t among the cluster of metabolic abnormalities, nor is elevated LDL cholesterol, the “bad” cholesterol. Rather, the key factors are high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, overweight, glucose intolerance, and, more than anything, the condition of being insulin-resistant and thus oversecreting insulin, day in and day out. All of these abnormalities happen to be related to the carbohydrate content of the diet, not to the fat content. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
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" this salt/hypertension hypothesis has resolutely resisted confirmation in clinical trials. For those not hopelessly wedded to the hypothesis, it has become increasingly difficult to believe that consuming too much salt is why we become hypertensive and why our blood pressure rises inexorably with age. Systematic reviews of the evidence from these trials invariably conclude that reducing our average salt intake by half, for instance, which is difficult to accomplish in the real world, will decrease blood pressure by 4 to 5 mm Hg mercury, on average, in those with hypertension, and perhaps 2 mm Hg in those without (known as normotensives). But even stage 1 hypertension, the less severe form of the condition, is defined by having a blood pressure elevated by at least 20 mm Hg over what’s considered healthy. Stage 2 is defined as blood pressure elevated by at least 40 mm Hg over healthy levels. Hence, the fact that halving our salt consumption will result in a decrease of only 4 to 5 mm Hg suggests that the salt we eat is not the primary dietary driver of this disorder. "
― Gary Taubes , The Case Against Sugar
