11 December 2016 — Dr Mercola
Few would argue that excess refined sugar is pernicious to our health. However, hardly anyone is aware of the manipulation and deceit initiated and perpetuated by the sugar industry to insulate us from this truth.
Gary Taubes, an investigative journalist with a strong science background, has written an excellent book, “The Case Against Sugar,” which expertly documents how the manipulation of facts occurred.
“Beginning in the early ’90s, I started reporting on public health and, indeed, a lot of the rigorous methodology that I have been told was absolutely fundamentally necessary to get a reliable result was considered sort of a luxury that you didn’t have to do in public health research.
It’s too hard. It’s too expensive, so you don’t have to do it. As a result … a lot of the fundamental tenets — our belief system about what constitutes a healthy diet — is based on very shaky evidence,” Taubes says.
By the late ’90s, Taubes was investigating the ideas that salt causes high blood pressure and dietary fat causes heart disease, which resulted in a pair of award-winning reports for the Journal of Science. In 2001, he published The New York Times Magazine cover story, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?“
In the years since, Taubes has been wholly focused on nutrition research, which resulted in three books. The two preceding “The Case Against Sugar” were “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health,” and “Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It.“
“Now I’m just focusing in on sugar and why we probably should consider it the primary evil in our diets,” he says.
Taubes was also kind enough to be one of the two dozen professional reviewers for my new book “Fat for Fuel” that comes out in May, and I deeply appreciate the many helpful and thoughtful edits and suggestions he provided.
The Early Slave Trade
In his book, Taubes makes a strong argument that excess sugar is the foundational cause of diabetes, obesity and most chronic degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
He also notes the incredible similarities between the sugar industry and the tobacco industry. It’s déjà vu all over again, with the same type of flawed science used to defend tobacco now being applied to sugar. He also reveals the historical background that led to sugar becoming a dietary staple, opposed to a rare treat.
“One of the things we tend to forget [is] that sugar was 1 of 3 or 4 different sort of drugs, for lack of a better word, that came out of the tropics with the colonization of the Americas … and then changed the world.
Sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol and to some extent various drugs like opium … were the trade on which empires were built. Sugar was particularly unique because cultivating sugar is an unbelievably arduous, painful, difficult job.
As such, you couldn’t really pay anyone enough to do it … Instead … they started using slaves to cultivate sugar. When we started cultivating sugar in the Americas … they imported slaves to the Tulum … 12 million slaves lived and died working in the sugar fields.”
The New Dark Age 
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