Non Fiction

THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR

Gary Taubes

Published: 2017Publisher: Portobello Books

Language: English

Pages: 365, paperback

 

 

Used to heaping two teaspoons of sugar in your coffee every morning? Guilty of having an entire bar of chocolate for lunch? Or are you one of those people who like a scoop of ice cream after din­ner? Then don’t read Gary Taubes’ ‘The Case Against Sugar’. You will be left questioning your life choices and fretting how much harm you have done to your body. But if you constantly wonder why you don’t lose weight despite eating clean and exercising or have a family history of diabetes and hypertension and want to lead a healthy life to prevent these conditions then Taubes’ book, a result of six years of research, could very well be an eye-opener. The Case Against Sugar starts by questioning whether sugar should be called a food or a drug. Then Taubes argues why it should be the latter. With a detailed and infor­mative history of sugar and the sugar industry, Taubes points out that our addiction to the sweet stuff leads to a lot of health problems we have come to ‘wrongly’ attri­bute to saturated fat. He talks about how sugar has “a unique physiolog­ical, metabolic and hormonal effect on our bodies” and how that has far-reaching health implications.

 

He also provides a history of sugar usage in the tobacco industry and how that might have contributed to the rise of smoking. He goes on to narrate how sugar triggers a genetic predisposition to obesity by lead­ing to insulin resistance, a condi­tion that contributes to diabetes, gout, and irritable bowel syndrome, among others health problems, and paints a picture of how sugar ulti­mately kills far more people than cigarettes. But while Taubes excels at making his point with detailed his­torical narrative as his backup, many of his claims also seem one-sided.

 

For instance, Taubes recounts an old struggle between American researcher Ancel Keys (who believed saturated fat was the primary cause of coronary heart diseases) and Brit­ish researcher John Yudkin (who thought sugar was the culprit). He says Keys was funded by the sugar industry and portrays Yud­kin as a moral person who was telling the ‘truth’. A little research will tell you that Yudkin was funded by the dairy, egg, and edible oil industries, all of which wanted to pin the blame on sugar. Taubes neglects to mention this. He relies on incomplete historical narrative rather than facts and evidence to present his case and that kind of writing is something that you will find throughout the book.

 

But Taubes also doesn’t conclude that sugar is bad for our health based on a superficial understand­ing of the subject, though in some places it feels like he is looking at the issue through glasses heavily tinted by his own beliefs. However, he has done a lot of research and left few stones unturned. We recom­mend you read the book to allow the information to improve your eating habits, whether by removing sugar completely, reducing its consump­tion, or by making dietary modifica­tions. Because that’s definitely what you will be tempted to do.