By Rachel Lapidos for Well+Good
Imagine if people thought you were crazy for saying
sugar is bad for you.
British scientist John Yudkin knew the feeling: He
died a pariah in the 1970s because he held the unpopular idea that sugar was
the number-one health threat, The Guardian reports. Yudkin’s findings from more
than a decade of research—published in 1972’s Pure, White, and Deadly: How
Sugar is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It—had unfortunate timing,
according to the Guardian. At the time, the idea that saturated fat was the
number-one health threat was so widespread that Yudkin’s findings were
ridiculed and his reputation was ruined.
Today, however, he’s being celebrated by a new breed
of “sugar is the devil“ nutritional experts. His ahead-of-his-time claims (last
year the US issued guidelines on curbing sugar for the first time) are being
championed by people like journalist Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat
Surprise, and science writer Gary Taubes, who wrote Why We Get Fat, according
to the Guardian.
How did Yudkin get overlooked to begin with? He
began floating a theory that sugar was a public health hazard in the late
1950s, around the same time that President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart
attack in office. His doctor treated him with a low-cholesterol regimen (which
US health authorities have since backed off from)—an approach that Yudkin was
very publicly critical of, the Guardian reports. A bit of a scientific pissing
match resulted, and Yudkin lost.
“They took him down so severely—so severely—that
nobody wanted to attempt it on their own,” Robert Lustig, a pediatric
endocrinologist at the University of California who specializes in the
treatment of childhood obesity, told the Guardian.
But posthumously, Yudkin’s findings are back in the
scientific mainstream—guiding a new generation of scientists (not to mention
documentarians and dessert lovers!). Sweet irony. But a bitter pill for those
of us who were careful about cholesterol and saturated fat—ignoring sugar
grams—for years.
Are You Addicted To Sugar Without Knowing It?
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