Sunday Reading--Prosecuting Sugar
By
May 1, 2016
Gary Taubes is at it again. He was the first of the mainstream media to bring to light many of the problems with the FDAs nutritional guidelines, raise the warning against excessive carbohydrates, and give us hope that dietary fat might not be the evil we had been led to believe.
It took six years and countless reclusive hours for investigative science journalist and best-selling author Gary Taubes to finish his latest book: “The Case Against Sugar.” He calls it “a prosecutor’s argument.” The work opens by examining whether sugar should be perceived as a food or a drug. Taubes is now fact-checking the book before publication. The 59-year-old native New Yorker who today lives in Oakland, California, also penned the oft-cited “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and “Why We Get Fat.” He’s won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times and was awarded an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97.
Here is an excerpt to get whet your appetite:
“There’s no point at which I will say, ‘I’ve had enough (sugar).’ You’ll stop eating it either when you feel guilty or you feel sick.” I compare it to cigarettes and I said, “The problem is we don’t know.” First of all, if it is addictive— we can talk about that in a second—then as long as you’re eating it, you’re gonna want more. As long as you’re drinking it, you’re gonna want more. So you keep your sweet tooth alive. Like, I could not have quit smoking by trying to smoke in moderation. Matter of fact, I tried to smoke in moderation my whole life. It’s a failure. As soon as life gets a little stressful, moderation goes out the door and you’re back up to whatever you were before. If somebody had said, “Gary, you can smoke two cigarettes a day. It’s not gonna increase your risk of cancer or heart disease. You won’t even have bad breath in the morning when you wake up,” I still wouldn’t have been able to stay at two cigarettes a day. And I would have thought about cigarettes all the time. At least anecdotally there’s a similar phenomenon with sugar."--Gary Taubes
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