The Sugar Conspiracy [Article Read]

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That will start with next week's episode, and I'll add the link to the mailing list in my bio on Instagram to the episode itself, etc. So you can just add your email and you'll get the transcript as soon as the episode comes out. I've been told by several of you that the generated captions in Spotify don't match up well a lot of the time and that it can be pretty frustrating. So starting next week's episode, episode 12, you'll be able to do that.

And I'm also working on some conversation episodes, so those will be coming soon. I'm excited, and I think you should be too. But enough preamble, let's get into it. You are listening to episode 11 of season two of English with Nate. Hit it. Okay, the article is titled The Sugar Conspiracy and was written by Ian Leslie. I got this from the Guardian website, which has a lot of really great reads and which is free, so ya sabes.

I'm not going to read the whole article, but we're going to read a really big chunk. Buen cacho, a big chunk. I think the article's too long for the podcast, and you would maybe tune out towards the end. But maybe I'm underestimating you, so please let me know. Tell me if you want me to read these um full articles when we do the read-along shows. Send me a message, comment on Spotify. I don't care, but let me know. Alright, let's do this. The Sugar Conspiracy by Ian Leslie.

Robert Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specializes in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar, The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a poison culpable for America's obesity epidemic. Quick note, in American English we say fructose, while in the UK you'll hear fructose.

A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you've read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin said the scientist was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972 in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, wrote Yutkin, that material would promptly or quickly be banned. The book did well, but Yutkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man. Perhaps the Australian scientist intended a friendly warning.

Lustig was certainly putting his academic reputation at risk when he embarked on a high-profile campaign against sugar. But unlike Yutkin, Lustig is backed by a prevailing wind. We read almost every week of new research into deleterious effects, negative effects of sugar on our bodies. A prevailing wind, by the way, is a dominant force, influence, or trend that shapes culture or a specific moment in time. But unlike Yutkin, Lustig is backed by a prevailing wind.

We read almost every week of new research into the deleterious effects of sugar on our bodies. In the US, the latest edition of the government's official dietary guidelines includes a cap, unlimite, a cap, on sugar consumption. In the UK, the Chancellor George Osborne has announced a new tax on sugary drinks. Sugar has become dietary enemy number one. Si algo es dulce, we say sweet, right? Not sugary.

In this case, sugar isn't used to describe, or sugary rather, isn't used to describe the taste, but the quantifiable sugar content, the amount in the drink. So don't go around saying sugary, it's a super uh specific term. Okay, back to it. So sugar has become dietary enemy number one. This represents a dramatic shift in priority. For at least the last three decades, the dietary arch villain has been saturated fat.

When Yutkip was conducting his research into the effects of sugar in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy, ojo a la pronunciation, aunque sea, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself. Its central tenet was that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet. A tenet, like the Christopher Nolan movie, is a belief principle or idea that a group of individuals hold to be true. So in the 1960s, a new nutritional orthodoxy was in the process of asserting itself.

Yotkin led a diminishing band of dissenters, dissidents, who believed that sugar, not fat, was the most likely cause of maladies such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. But by the time he wrote this book, the commanding heights of the field had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. Yutkid found himself fighting a rear guard action and he was defeated. Not just defeated, in fact, but buried enterrado.

When Lustig returned to California, he searched for pure white and deadly in bookstores and online, but to no avail. Eventually he tracked down Concilio a copy after submitting a request to his university library. On reading Yutkin's introduction, he felt a shock of recognition. Holy crap, Lustig thought. This guy got there 35 years before me. Okay, there were a few lines there that were full of military metaphors that might have confused you a tad.

It said, by the time he wrote his book, the commanding heights of the field, and by field he means the battlefield, the campo de batalla, the commanding heights of the field had been seized, habiencido capturadas, had been seized by proponents of the fat hypothesis. In other words, the established narratives and people and institutions behind the whole fat thing being bad for you were already in that advantageous position, right? The high ground.

Then it said that Yotkin was fighting a rear guard action. I looked it up, and a rear guard action is in fact a military term, but it's also used figuratively to describe a kind of defensive last ditch effort to delay or resist something that's probably inevitable. So a last resort. Let's keep going. So holy crap, Lustic thought this guy got there 35 years before me.

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America's most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first dietary guidelines. These guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors based their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US as well. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol. This was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something rather than enough of everything. Consumers dutifully obeyed, dutifully, so duti de deber, and in the suffix fully, so condiligencia, they dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice.

But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker. If you look at a graph of post-war obesity rates, it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until in the early 1980s it takes off like an airplane. Just 12% of Americans were obese in 1950, 15% in 1980, 35% by 2000. In the UK, the line is flat for decades until the mid-1980s, at which point it also turns towards the sky.

Only 6% of Britons were obese in 1980, and in the next 20 years, that figure more than trebled. In American English, we say tripled, but in the UK you'll often hear trebled. Today, two-thirds of Britons are either obese or overweight, making this the fattest country in the EU. Type 2 diabetes, closely related to obesity, has risen in tandem in both countries.

At best, we can conclude that the official guidelines did not achieve their objective, and at worst, they led to a decades-long health catastrophe. Naturally, then, a search for culprits has ensued. If something ensues, it comes after something. Scientists are conventionally apolitical figures, but these days nutrition researchers write editorials and books that resemble liberal activist tracts fizzing or full of righteous denunciations of big sugar and fast food.

Nobody could have predicted, it is said, how the food manufacturers would respond to the injunction against fat, selling us low-fat yogurts bulked up rellenos with sugar and cakes infused with liver-corroding trans fats. Nutrition scientists are angry with the press for distorting their findings, politicians for failing to heed them, to heed means to hacer caso, to heed condoble, politicians for failing to heed the findings, and the rest of us for overeating and under-exercising.

In short, everyone, business, media, politicians, consumers, is to blame. Everyone, that is, except scientists. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine, eggs with muesli, but we still grew fatter. But it was not impossible to foresee that the vilification of fat might be an error. Energy from food comes to us in three forms: fat, carbohydrate, and protein.

Since the proportion of energy we get from protein tends to be stable, whatever our diet, a low-fat diet effectively means a high carbohydrate diet. The most versatile and palatable carbohydrate is sugar, which John Yutkin had already circled in red. In 1974, the UK medical journal, The Lancet, sounded a warning about the possible consequences of recommending reductions in dietary fat. They said the cure should not be worse than the disease.

Still, it would be reasonable to assume that Yutkin lost this argument simply because, in 1980, more evidence had accumulated against fat than against sugar. After all, that's how science works, isn't it? If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, it was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres.

Nor can it be passed off, descartalo como no se puede descartar, it can be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yotkin belies that interpretation. It means to give a false impression of something. So what happened to John Yutkin belies that interpretation. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone else around him turns 180 degrees.

When in 1957 John Yutkin first floated this hypothesis that sugar was a hazard to public health, it was taken seriously, as was its proponent, so John Yutkin. But by the time Yutkin retired, 14 years later, both theory and author had been marginalized and derided. Only now is Yutkin's work being returned posthumously, so after he died, to the scientific mainstream.

These sharp fluctuations in Yutkin's stock, sure, have had little to do with the scientific method and a lot to do with the unscientific way in which the field of nutrition has conducted itself over the years. This story, which has begun to emerge in the past decade, has been brought to public attention largely by skeptical outsiders rather than eminent nutritionists.

It continues and says, To understand how we arrived at this point, we need to go back almost to the beginning of modern nutrition science. On the 23rd of September 1955, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Rather than pretend it hadn't happened, Eisenhower insisted on making details of his illness public.

The next day, his chief physician, Dr. Paul Dudley White, gave a press conference at which he instructed Americans on how to avoid heart disease, stop smoking, and cut down on fat and cholesterol. In a follow-up article, White cited the research of a nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, Ansel Keys.

Heart disease, which had been a relative rarity in the 1920s, was now felling or affecting middle-aged men at a frightening rate, and Americans were casting around, casting around for cause and cure. Ansel Keys provided an answer. The quote diet heart hypothesis. For simplicity's sake, I'm calling it the fat hypothesis.

This is the idea, now familiar, that an excess of saturated fats in the diet from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs raises cholesterol, which congeals on the inside of coronary arteries, causing them to harden, endure, causing them to harden and narrow until the flow of the blood is staunch or stopped and the heart seizes up. Ancel Keys was brilliant, charismatic, and combative.

Combatative combat is a friendly colleague at the University of Minnesota described him as direct to the point of bluntness, critical to the point of skewering. Skewering, so que perforaba, so un skewer is unpinched, una brochetta. So he was critical to the point of skewering. Others were less charitable. He exuded or demonstrated conviction at a time when confidence was most welcome.

The president, the physician, and the scientists formed a reassuring chain, a reassuring chain of male authority, and the notion that fatty foods were unhealthy started to take hold with doctors and the public. Eisenhower himself cut saturated fats and cholesterol from his diet altogether right up until his death in 1969 from heart disease. Many scientists, especially British ones, remained skeptical. The most prominent doubter was John Yutkin, then the UK's leading nutritionist.

When Yutkin looked at the data on heart disease, he was struck by its correlation with the consumption of sugar, not fat. He carried out a series of laboratory experiments on animals and humans and observed, as others had before him, that sugar is processed in the liver where it turns to fat before entering the bloodstream. He noted too that while humans have always been carnivorous, carbohydrates only became a major component of their diet 10,000 years ago with the advent of mass agriculture.

Sugar, a pure carbohydrate with all fiber and nutrition stripped out, has been a part of Western diets for just 300 years. In evolutionary terms, it is as if we just this second had taken our first dose of it. Saturated fats, by contrast, are so intimately bound up at intimately bound up with our evolution that they are abundantly present in breast milk. To Yudkin's thinking, it seemed more likely to be the recent innovation rather than the prehistoric staple making us sick.

The article keeps going, and like I mentioned, the link is in the description of the episode if you want to read the rest. It's really interesting and eye-opening. Well no, I hope the language in the article wasn't too complicated to follow along at times, and that you were able to stay there with me for most of it. If you struggled to keep up, don't beat yourself up about it. It was a pretty challenging read.

But hopefully you were in that perfect spot where you're a bit uncomfortable and having to really use your whole brain, but not so hard that you couldn't manage. That's where you want to be. If you were reading along, I think, I think you were there. Thank you for listening to English with Dane. I hope you got something from it. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know your opinions. Let me know your criticisms. DM me, send me a messenger pigeon. I don't care.

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