Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It

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He found that the Army had devised a uniform diet for its soldiers in the four British West African colonies (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Nigeria). The inclusion of these additional results is one reason why the new edition (published by Viking in 1986 and by Penguin in 1988) is substantially longer than its predecessor. He began clinical studies at The London Hospital in 1935, while continuing to teach in Cambridge one weekday and at weekends. Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (1974), Advisory Panel on Diet in Relation to Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease.

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. We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. At the time of publication, it was generally accepted that the alarming recent increase in the incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) was due to the excessive consumption of animal fat. But it turned out that millet, although a staple in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, was loathed by soldiers from Sierra Leone, who would not eat it even if they were hungry.They then looked to see what happened to the fields from which these celebrated scientists had unexpectedly departed, by analysing publishing patterns.

He won scholarships to Hackney Downs School (formerly the Grocers' Company's School), and another from there to Chelsea Polytechnic.D. has spent the past sixteen years treating childhood obesity and studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system and metabolism. Teicholz’s book also describes how an establishment of senior nutrition scientists, at once insecure about its medical authority and vigilant for threats to it, consistently exaggerated the case for low-fat diets, while turning its guns on those who offered evidence or argument to the contrary. This induces a condition known as insulin resistance, or metabolic syndrome, which doctors now generally acknowledge to be the major risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and BBC obesity, as well as a possible factor for many cancers. Fourteen years after the first publication of Pure, White and Deadly, Yudkin decided that the book was out of date in important respects, and in 1986 he published a new edition to incorporate more recent experimental results.

Brought up to date by childhood obesity expert Dr Robert Lustig MD, his classic expose on the hidden dangers of sugar is essential reading for anyone interested in their health, the health of their children and the health of modern society. As early as 1967 Yudkin suggested that the excessive consumption of sugar might result in a disturbance in the secretion of insulin, and that this in turn might contribute to atherosclerosis and diabetes.It is a gaping omission, inexplicable in scientific terms, but entirely explicable in terms of the politics of nutrition science. Epidemiological evidence similarly pointed to excess sugar consumption as a contributory factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. In the UK, the 1984 update of the COMA report on diet and cardiovascular disease [22] did not mention Pure, White and Deadly or Yudkin. The last paragraph of Chapter 1 begins "I hope that when you have read this book I shall have convinced you that sugar is really dangerous.

Reticent as they were to discuss the substance of the piece, the scientists were noticeably keener to comment on its author. Experiments with rats showed that the feeding of sucrose led to impaired glucose tolerance (results with human subjects were more equivocal). Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. 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.The president, the physician and the scientist formed a reassuring chain of male authority, and the notion that fatty foods were unhealthy started to take hold with doctors, and the public. Publishing a rejoinder to an article is one thing; requesting its erasure is another, conventionally reserved for cases involving fraudulent data. Thanks to Lustig and the rehabilitation of Yudkin's reputation, Penguin republished Pure, White and Deadly 18 months ago. But by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. The 2012 edition was published by Penguin under the title Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It.