American Pravda: Dangerous Foods, by Ron Unz

Donald Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services in his new administration, and the latter has declared that his mission will be to “Make America Healthy Again.” But even if Kennedy is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he faces a very stiff challenge in fulfilling that pledge.

Most Americans are probably not fully aware just how dramatically our national health has declined over the last few decades, and until very recently I was certainly included among the uninformed.

Yet much of this decline has been easily visible to our eyes. According to research studies, about 74% of all American adults are now overweight, while almost 42% suffer from clinical obesity, along with nearly 15 million adolescents and children. These rates have skyrocketed during the last half-century.

Our national obesity figures are not only far higher than those of any other developed nation, but they are nearly double those for Germany and almost four times the rates for France.

Obesity is closely associated with diabetes, and nearly 40 million Americans now suffer from that serious medical condition, while another 115 million have prediabetes. Tens of millions have high blood pressure and other related illnesses. Once again, these rates have risen dramatically over the last generation or two.

These are huge numbers, with massive health consequences. Diabetes alone ranks as the eighth leading cause of death, annually killing more than 100,000 Americans, while being a contributing factor in 300,000 additional deaths. By contrast, the combined total of all our drug-overdose fatalities is a little over 100,000.

A study last year indicated that obesity substantially boosted the risk of death, potentially by as much as 91%, and with so many tens of millions of Americans suffering from that condition, the mortality impact has obviously been enormous. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, we spend much more on health care than any other developed nation, yet our life expectancy has generally been much lower, and stagnant rather than rising.

 

Everyone who has looked into these very serious problems agrees that dietary issues are the main culprit. But the complexities of that factor may be seen if we consider two meals, each totaling around 1,000 calories but otherwise quite different, one of them reasonably healthy and the other extremely unhealthy.

Suppose that an employee at a local health-food shop returned from a long day of knocking on doors for Jill Stein. He sat down at the kitchen dinette of his studio apartment for three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small Oats & Honey granola bars from Nature’s Valley, and two tall glasses of delicious all-natural orange juice.

Around the same time, a trucker stopped by a McDonalds on his way home from a Donald Trump rally, and proudly wearing his red MAGA cap ordered a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese along with some fries. Ignoring the soda fountain, he walked to the corner liquor store and bought a Budweiser beer to wash down his greasy fast-food meal, so heavy with animal fat and salt.

The contrast between those two hypothetical meals, one that maintains human health and another that seriously undermines it, played in my mind a few weeks ago after I published an article on nutritional issues, the very first time I’d ever investigated that topic.

Although dietary factors are mostly responsible for our health problems, there are some important aspects to this crisis that are not regularly presented in our media. These greatly surprised me when I discovered them, and I think they would probably surprise many others as well.

Thus, in our hypothetical example it was actually the McDonalds and Budweiser meal of the MAGA trucker that was reasonably healthy, while the dangerous dietary choices made by the Jill Stein supporter placed him at high risk of eventually developing diabetes and considerably shortening his life-span. But I’d suspect that more than 95% of educated Americans might automatically assume the opposite. Such a mistake would be the direct consequence of the last half-century of promotion for extremely damaging nutritional policies, whose total failure has been revealed by our devastating public health trends.

 

I’d originally studied nutrition for a few weeks during my 10th grade Health class in the 1970s, but I hadn’t found the subject interesting and never paid any attention to it in the decades that followed. I would occasionally read high-profile articles on that subject in my daily newspapers, but I wasn’t too sure how seriously to take their often complex and conflicting claims, so all of those usually faded from my memory soon afterward.

However, earlier this year a prominent medical school professor happened to mention to me that our understanding of that subject had undergone a major upheaval over the last twenty years, and that sufficiently piqued my curiosity that I decided to read some of the relevant books and articles. A few weeks ago I’d published a provocatively-titled essay that summarized the very surprising but persuasive analysis that I’d absorbed.

Since I’d never had any interest in dietary or nutritional issues, I’d casually assumed that was equally true of most of the regular visitors to our website and I doubted that my piece would attract much readership. But as has so often been the case, I was entirely mistaken, and it instead drew a good deal of traffic and more than 600 comments, many of them quite long and detailed and far better informed than I had ever been on that topic.

Most of my newly acquired knowledge had come from the books and long articles of Gary Taubes, a very distinguished science journalist with academic roots in physics who had eventually developed an interest in nutrition. Beginning more than two decades ago, his major cover stories in the New York Times Sunday Magazine had heavily challenged our long-established official dogma on that topic, bringing the work of dissenting researchers and medical doctors to much wider attention. This played a crucial role in launching a major scientific debate on those important public health matters, all of which took place while I remained blissfully ignorant and unaware.

Among his most surprising claims that that contrary to everything I’d always been told, fatty foods were neither harmful to our health nor caused obesity, but instead the true culprits were the carbohydrates that our medical experts had always encouraged us to eat in their place, with ordinary sugar being especially harmful.

So if Taubes and his many scientific allies were correct, for roughly the last half-century our official nutritional policies had been entirely upside-down and backwards. During all those decades, our government and our media had been urging us to replace relatively harmless high fat foods such as sausage, bacon, and eggs with far more damaging fare, including such supposed health foods as yogurt, granola, and fruit juice.

Although these striking claims almost seemed like something out of a satirical Monty Python sketch, Taubes’ credibility and that of his scientific sources appeared very solid, and the 67 page bibliography of his thick 2007 national bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories contained some 1,500 entries. As an ignorant layman encountering those surprising ideas for the first time, I hardly put great faith in my own judgment, but as far as I could tell, the case he made seemed a very solid and persuasive one, especially his arguments about the dangers of sugar.

 

Taubes’ book had been reviewed in the Times by Gina Kolata, the newspaper’s longtime medical reporter, and while not entirely negative, her verdict was very mixed. The journalist was so casually skeptical of some of his sweeping conclusions that she even closed her piece with the dismissive sentence “I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced.” The byline mentioned that she herself had published Rethinking Thin earlier that same year, so I decided to read it in order to get her side of the story.

I wasn’t terribly impressed. Whereas Taubes had provided an exhaustive, massively-documented discussion of the history and science of nutrition issues, Kolata’s rather thin volume—perhaps one-quarter as long—was mostly just casual reportorial journalism. She told the personal stories of a group of volunteers trying to lose weight as participants in a scientific test comparing the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet with the standard low-calorie approach favored by the medical establishment, a test that ultimately yielded inconclusive results.

I did find some interest in her scanty coverage of the broader issues, especially her mention that Taubes’ original 2002 Times Magazine cover-story had provoked enormous secondary media coverage, producing a huge if temporary wave of renewed popularity for that Atkins diet. But I doubted that her book had attracted more than a small fraction of the publishing advance, sales, or attention of Taubes’ own, released that same year, so her criticism of the latter might have partly been driven by the professional jealousy that some had suggested. I also happened to notice that one of her very recent Times articles reported new findings that vindicated Taubes’ sugar analysis, so perhaps after a dozen years she had now substantially shifted over to his once-controversial position.

Taubes’ article had heavily discussed the eponymous diet of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, whose enormously popular regimen based upon a low-carb, high-fat approach had directly challenged the low-fat orthodoxy of our nutritional establishment during the 1970s and 1980s. So I decided to read the original Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which had sold a mammoth 6 million copies after its 1972 release, and found it much better than I expected given how heavily it had always been ridiculed and condemned by the medical establishment at the time it appeared.

Roughly one-third of Atkins’ pages were taken up with suggested meal-plans and I skipped those, leaving just a couple of hundred paperback pages of main text. These hardly provided the detail of Taubes’ thick volume, and the book lacked a bibliography or almost any source-notes. But it did provide much of the same scientific and historical narrative, explaining where and when our academic establishment had supposedly gone so terribly wrong, and Taubes’ exhaustive later research seemed to confirm nearly all of the trailblazing claims that Atkins had made 35 years earlier.

Much like Atkins, Taubes in his original 2002 Times Magazine article had warned of carbohydrates in general, comparing their potentially harmful impact on insulin secretion with that of relatively innocuous fats. But the science journalist then spent additional years of research before publishing his 2007 book, and by that point his focus had somewhat shifted to the particularly pernicious role of sugar, arguing that its fructose molecules might damage the liver, thereby leading to the disruption of insulin regulation and possible diabetes.

Taubes’ shift in emphasis became much more forceful in 2011 when he published another long cover-story in the Times Magazine focused entirely upon sugar. He drew upon the scientific findings of various medical experts to make the shocking case that this simple, common carbohydrate was actually a chronic toxin, whose widespread heavy use in processed foods probably explained many of our growing public health problems, notably including both obesity and diabetes.

• Is Sugar Toxic?
  Gary Taubes • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • April 13, 2011 • 6,500 Words

A few years later, he published The Case Against Sugar, his 2017 follow up volume on that subject, which I once again found very detailed and comprehensive, and I strongly concurred with his change in focus.

Following Atkins, his original article had suggested that our 10,000 year history of agriculture had probably been insufficient to adjust our digestive system to handle the large quantities of carbohydrates that had become the mainstay of our diet, and this explained so many of our dietary problems. But while I considered that theory possible, I was somewhat skeptical since 400 generations seemed a reasonably long time to produce the necessary digestive adaptations, and indeed half that length had been sufficient to spread the genes for lactose tolerance across most of Europe’s population.

But our heavy consumption of sugar was entirely different. Although that simple foodstuff had only become a significant component of our diet in the last couple of centuries, it now provided some 15-20% of all our daily calories, rendering it an obvious suspect as something that might injure our health.

Indeed, in one of his interviews, he suggested that sugar was likely more harmful than tobacco, and had probably killed more Americans than smoking ever had.

The notion that ordinary sugar was actually a chronic metabolic toxin seemed absolutely shocking to me. But the case Taubes made was so strikingly plausible and solidly documented that it became the central theme of my own article on nutrition.

 

After I published my piece on the possibly harmful effects of sugar, several individuals pointed me towards a classic book from a half-century ago making exactly that same argument, prompting me to order and read it. Sugar Blues by William Dufty was released in 1975 and with 1.6 million copies in print had apparently become wildly popular and influential in certain nutritional circles, so much so that it has its own Wikipedia page. But my own careful reading left me very unimpressed.

The text only ran a couple of hundred short paperback pages, and much of it consisted of exactly the sort of nutritional crankery that I had always assumed dominated this subject. Dufty began by explaining that sugar consumption had terribly injured his own health, then suggested that sugar was responsible for a laundry list of various human ailments, including schizophrenia and other forms of insanity, the bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cancer, and scurvy, even identifying having a sweet tooth with heroin addiction.

Dufty was a musician by profession, with no medical nor scientific training, and none of his extreme claims had any solid evidence behind them. So if I’d read this book months or years ago, I simply would have rolled my eyes at the early chapters of his jeremiad and automatically dismissed all of his later material, much of which actually seemed to be correct and reasonable. Those flaws were so serious that despite the enormous sales, I wonder if his book actually did more harm than good by filling the public health case against sugar with so much nonsense that it alienated any medical experts who considered it.

Towards the end of his text, the author briefly mentioned a book entitled Sweet and Deadly originally published several years earlier by British physician John Yudkin, a longtime professor of nutrition at London University, and Dufty devoted a couple of pages to the latter’s claim that sugar consumption might be related to ulcers. But although Yudkin’s book—released in America as Pure, White, and Deadly—apparently sold only a small fraction of Dufty’s copies and had been out of print for decades, I discovered that it made exactly the evidentiary case that its much more popular counterpart had badly botched.

Prof. Yudkin had already become somewhat familiar to me from the articles and books written by Gary Taubes, who told his story. Yudkin had been one of the earliest important figures warning of the dangers of sugar, but despite his considerable academic stature and expertise, his analysis had largely been disregarded and his work ultimately forgotten. Reading Yudkin’s short but trailblazing book certainly confirmed his prescience on that vital subject, with so much of his material anticipating the same arguments much later made by his epigones, including his suggestion that the fructose component of sugar was probably responsible for the health problems.

Yudkin emphasized the enormous growth in sugar usage in the West and the rest of the world, noting that global production had increased by nearly a factor of 50 between 1800 and 1900, and then grew by almost another factor of 10 by 1982. If worldwide consumption of a food product rose nearly 500-fold over a couple of centuries and a variety of strange new health problems suddenly appeared, suspecting that those two trends might be connected hardly seemed unreasonable.

In the Introduction to his revised 1986 edition, Yudkin quoted a scientist strongly supportive of the sugar industry who explained that sugar now provided 10-30% of an American’s total daily calories, averaging around 15-20%, but characterized that as “moderate” consumption. According to a later study, most Americans got 18% of their calories from sugar but the figure was as high as 40% among Iowa teenagers. So a food product almost never previously eaten in significant quantities had suddenly become a very large part of our daily diet, surely rendering it a prime suspect in any new ailments.

Yudkin certainly believed that such high levels of sugar consumption were dangerous, citing various epidemiological and research studies suggesting that it resulted in liver and kidney damage, which in turn led to obesity and diabetes, as well as tooth decay and numerous other negative health consequences. He regarded all this evidence as being so strong that his first chapter contained a rather remarkable assertion that he italicized for emphasis:

…if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.

Although Yudkin was appropriately cautious about drawing a causal link, he also noted that certain types of cancer had become much more frequent in recent years alongside the heavy consumption of sugar, with the international statistics raising suspicions that those trends were directly connected. For example, the five countries with the highest rates of breast cancer deaths in older women were exactly the same five countries with the highest sugar consumption, ranked in almost identical order, while the same was also true for the five countries lowest in such deaths and sugar consumption, once again in similar order. Likewise, the incidence for cancer of the large intestine and breast cancer both had moderately high international correlations with sugar consumption.

Yudkin’s account also described the well-funded and very energetic lobbying effects of the sugar industry. These even included exerting financial pressure upon his own academic institution and launching media campaigns to dispute or discredit any accusations made against its product, such as those provided in his book. Big Sugar had also undertaken aggressive attempts to ban any competing artificial sweeteners such as cyclamates and saccharine.

Based upon the story he told, one might even easily suspect that in those pre-Internet days the obscurity that eventually befell Yudkin’s own important research findings may have partially been due this sort of concerted corporate pressure exerted on the media and the academic community.

Gary Taubes’ 2011 Times Magazine cover-story on the harmful aspects of sugar attracted huge attention, and the following year Yudkin’s long-forgotten book was republished more than 35 years after its previous edition. The leading medical source that Taubes cited and relied upon had been Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist specializing in childhood obesity at the UCSF’s highly-regarded School of Medicine who had spent years researching the health risks from sugar. Lustig provided an Introduction to Yudkin’s new 2012 edition, explaining how surprised he had been in 2008 when he discovered that long-forgotten but prophetic work and the difficulty he had faced in even locating a copy, declaring that he had actually been a Yudkin disciple without ever realizing it.

In that handful of pages, Lustig explained that beginning in the 1950s, Yudkin’s Sugar Hypothesis of obesity and cardiovascular illness had been vigorously opposed by the competing Fat Hypothesis of Dr. Ancel Keys, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, leading to a bitter international academic feud. By the 1970s, several major research studies seemed to conclusively settle the question in favor of the latter explanation, contributing to the academic eclipse and occlusion of Yudkin’s theories on sugar. However, according to Lustig, later and larger studies ultimately deflated those earlier ones, but these came only after Yudkin had already left the scene and been largely forgotten.

That same year Lustig published Fat Chance, his own national bestseller, discussing all these same issues at far greater length, and I found it extremely informative and persuasive.

In his Introduction, the author explained that he only began to deal with the issue of obesity very reluctantly, fifteen years into his medical career. This book had appeared a dozen years ago in 2012, but by that time a full quarter of American children were already obese, indicating that something had obviously gone extremely wrong in our national public health policies.

According to the official narrative, obesity was a consequence of personal life-style choices, such as lack of exercise, but Lustig quickly noted that this condition and all the associated health problems had become widespread among children as young as five, with an obesity epidemic even among infants just six months old. So it seemed much more likely that some dietary factor was responsible.

The populations of other countries influenced by American eating habits such as fast food had been following that same unfortunate trajectory, with Britain, Australia, and Canada close behind us in the obesity of their children, while France, South Korea, and even China had also seen rapid increases in that condition.

Moreover, Lustig argued that obesity itself was less the real concern rather than merely being a highly-visible marker for a package of serious health problems that he labeled “the metabolic syndrome.” These included high blood pressure and diabetes, which together led to much higher death rates among adults. He claimed that the key factor behind all of these conditions seemed to be the malfunctioning of the insulin hormonal system, with the likely cause being liver damage due to heavy sugar consumption, exactly as Yutkin had originally warned decades earlier.

Digestible carbohydrates constitute our main food source, and they are classified either as starches or sugars. The former consist of long chains of the glucose molecules that all our cells burn for energy, and are therefore generally harmless. But sugars are half glucose and half fructose, and that latter, much sweeter molecule can only be metabolized by the liver, so ingesting too much overloads that organ and can result in a fatty build-up that damages the tissue, similar to the cirrhosis of the liver found in alcoholics. Such liver damage disrupts the insulin system, causing obesity and other associated health problems.

During the late 1970s, public concerns that our diet was too heavy in sugar had led food companies to begin replacing that additive with “High Fructose Corn-Syrup” (HFCS). The latter compound was slightly sweeter than ordinary sugar and only half the cost, thereby raising profit margins, so by the late 1990s it had become our main sweetener. But HFCS was virtually identical to sugar in its chemical composition except being slightly higher in its harmful fructose component and therefore even worse for human health.

Although Lustig drew heavily upon numerous academic journal articles and research studies to build his case, he boldly summarized their conclusions in a much more forthright and direct manner. He argued that fructose was both a mildly addictive substance and also a chronic human toxin, as were all the various types of sugars that contained it. And although fructose was chemically classified as a carbohydrate, the liver actually metabolized it as a fat, so it could be regarded as falling into both those different categories.

Until the last couple of centuries, the human intake of sugar had been completely negligible, so it was hardly surprising that our digestive system failed to cope with the enormous quantities we were now ingesting, resulting in our numerous health problems.

Once we recognize that sugar—or rather its fructose component—constitutes our main dietary problem, our evaluation of different foods and beverages is completely transformed.

For example, it has long been widely understood that heavily sugared soft-drinks are bad for our health, and in recent years the media has often portrayed Coca Cola and its rivals as a major source of our obesity problems. But I’d guess that at least 98% of the public regards natural fruit juices as an ideal alternative, with their consumption even being encouraged by government food programs.

However, Lustig pointed out that this was total nonsense. Although nothing might seem more healthful than freshly-squeezed orange juice, the unfortunate truth is that calorie for calorie or ounce for ounce, fruit juice is actually higher in dangerous fructose than sugary sodas and therefore worse for our health. Indeed, the author opened his first chapter with the story of a young boy from an impoverished Latino family whose extreme obesity was due to his very heavy consumption of orange juice, which his mother had naively encouraged because she assumed it was good for him.

According to Lustig, eating most whole fruits themselves—whether oranges, apples, or pears—is generally harmless because their fructose is surrounded by a thick layer of indigestible fiber, greatly slowing its digestion and therefore putting much less pressure on the liver. But using a blender to create the fruit “smoothies” so beloved by many health-food adherents shears away those cellulose fibers and allows the very rapid absorption of the fructose. So the result is something just as harmful as fruit juice itself, and for similar reasons, applesauce falls into the same dangerous category.

I’ve always liked natural orange juice and was shocked that Lustig described it as actually worse for our health than Coca Cola, but the endocrinologist made a very persuasive case.

Some of the statistics cited by Lustig were quite remarkable. He explained that by 2012 the average American was ingesting 130 pounds of sugar each year, amounting to more than a pound every three days, up from just 40 pounds per year in the 1980s, and that 33% of such sugar came from beverages, with sodas foremost in that category.

When the FDA first began to classify food additives in 1958, sugar had been declared entirely safe due to its natural origins and long use rather than as the result of any sort of testing or scientific analysis, while political pressure later ensured that the same “officially safe” designation was applied to HFCS, once again without any testing. As a consequence, those compounds could be added in unlimited quantities to any food product, and since they generally improved the taste, this was so widely done that of the 600,000 food items today sold in the U.S. fully 80% are laced with added sugar. So finding a food product without added sugar is actually much more difficult than not.

Lustig described the huge fiscal consequences. Our government spent $20 billion per year subsidizing corn and soybean crops, with much of the former used to produce HFCS. Meanwhile, the public health costs due to the resulting medical problems probably totaled another couple of hundred billion dollars per year. So taxpayers paid to produce more of the product that massively inflated our national health costs.

Lustig made the very useful analogy that sugar—or more precisely its fructose component—is actually quite a lot like alcohol, certainly not poisonous in the normal sense of the word or even harmful in limited amounts, but a chronic metabolic toxin when ingested in large quantities over long periods of time. Indeed, given that both fructose and alcohol must be metabolized by the liver, over-consumption of either typically results in similar damage to that vital organ. However, alcohol is also metabolized by the brain while fructose is not, so only the former results in drunkenness and some other particular health consequences are different. But otherwise the analogy is an apt one, and he noted that alcohol is produced by fermenting sugar, the main difference being that the analogous first-stage transformation of sugar itself instead occurs inside our bodies during digestive processing.

As described in such metaphorical terms, our food companies have spent decades quietly adding the equivalent of large quantities of alcohol to most of our processed foods and beverages, including those given to children and infants, and American health has severely deteriorated as a consequence. In somewhat exaggerated terms, the food industry has been secretly dosing most of our population from youngsters to the elderly with a pint of whiskey each day, so should we really be so surprised that our entire population has developed such serious medical problems?

 

Lustig’s research had been a central source for Taubes’ writings on sugar, and the journalist explained that he had discovered it because of a very compelling public lecture that the endocrinologist had given on the subject in 2009, entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” By 2011 it had already accumulated some 800,000 views on YouTube, for the first time informing much of our public about those important issues.

In the years since then, that video has gone super-viral, with its 25 million views possibly ranking it as the second most popular academic lecture in the history of the Internet, only exceeded by Prof. John Mearsheimer’s famous 2015 presentation on the underlying causes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In his talk, Lustig covered much the same material as he did in his 2012 book, and I would highly recommend it to those who prefer absorbing their information in that format.

Video Link

The year after Lustig’s book appeared, he gave a follow-up lecture on the same subject that has racked up 7.2 million views, and is also definitely worth watching.

Video Link

Quite a number of Lustig’s later video presentations and interviews are easily available on YouTube, totaling many millions of additional views, and I’ve certainly benefited from watching several of these, including this one:

Video Link

Decades ago, the important research analysis of a top nutritional expert such as Yudkin had been confined to a narrow circle of his academic peers, perhaps allowing its easy suppression by the media pressure of hostile corporate sugar lobbyists. But the creation of the Internet, together with its video platforms and social media distribution channels, has transformed our informational landscape, substantially leveling the playing field between a single determined researcher and powerful, multi-billion-dollar corporations.

Ironically enough, in one of his later talks, Lustig mentions that he had not even been aware that his original, super-viral lecture on sugar was even being recorded, so only chance circumstance brought him the enormous resulting public attention, which in turn probably prompted him to write his book and allowed it to become an influential national bestseller.

 

The combined impact of best selling books, high profile articles in top newspapers, and viral video lectures can sometimes sway important political leaders. Probably as a consequence of all this media coverage, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a 2012 city-wide ban on the sale of large, sugary beverages as a means of countering the obesity epidemic. On many major health campaigns of the past such as restrictions on public smoking, our largest metropolis had served as an important bell-weather, so his political project soon inspired similar efforts elsewhere in the country. This greatly alarmed the soda industry, which feared the momentum of an unstoppable national trend, leading it to quickly mobilize opposition forces, including longstanding political allies such as the NAACP

Unfortunately for Bloomberg’s hopes, polls soon revealed that a large majority of New Yorkers were opposed to his proposal, and although the mayor’s hand-picked Health Board approved the ban, the order was struck down by a judge just before it was scheduled to take effect, with subsequent appeals failing.

The collapse of this effort took the wind out of the sails of many copycat campaigns around the country, while also demonstrating that even a multi-billionaire elected official faced huge difficulties in enacting such dietary measures. And if Bloomberg had been nutritionally consistent and included fruit juices in his ban, he surely would have faced a gigantic political revolt and never even gotten to first base with his proposal.

Although I’d casually followed the Bloomberg controversy in the newspapers, I’d been totally ignorant of the underlying nutritional science, so like most of the public I’d vaguely assumed that the soda ban was merely a typically foolish example of nanny-state overreach, while believing that our growing national obesity was mostly due to such personal sins as gluttony and sloth. This probably reflected the poor quality of the scientific coverage of that issue in even the elite liberal media, perhaps partly due to the influence of industry lobbyists.

Although the dangers of a diet high in animal fats had been the most frequent warning I had casually absorbed from the media over the decades, some other major dietary risks were often also mentioned. We were warned against consuming too much salt, which supposedly caused high blood pressure, possibly leading to strokes and heart attacks. Nutritionists and food companies seemed to agree about this danger, with the former often recommending a low-salt diet and the latter boasting that their products were low in salt or “low-sodium,” which amounted to the same thing since salt was sodium-chloride. But after I published my original article focusing on fats and sugar, a reader suggested a book on that other nutritional topic, and it provided a very different perspective.

The Salt Fix was published in 2017 and the author was Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a Cardiovascular Research Scientist working at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, who also served as associate editor of the medical journal BMJ Open Heart. These seemed like very solid professional credentials and the back cover of his book was studded with glowing endorsements by prominent medical doctors who focused on nutritional matters, reinforcing his credibility. The book was relatively short, running only a couple of hundred pages, but the author made a highly persuasive case that everything the media had always told me about the dangers of salt was almost entirely wrong, and indeed the opposite of the truth.

DiNicolantonio emphasized the crucial point that properly functioning human kidneys were extremely effective at eliminating excess salt from the body, so that even if someone ingested five or perhaps even ten times as much salt as the body required, the surplus would easily be flushed out in the urine, doing no harm at all to the human metabolism. Individuals suffering from serious kidney damage might need to be much more careful in what they ate, but they would obviously be facing numerous other health problems as well. So for ordinary people, concerns about too salty a diet made absolutely no sense, and indeed the author believed that the recommended daily allowance promoted by the government was far too low, perhaps half of what was necessary for optimal health, with too little salt raising the heart rate and therefore actually increasing the risk of a heart attack.

In my earlier readings, I’d discovered that a half-century of American nutritional policy regarding dietary fat had largely been based upon a tiny number of very doubtful research studies, and according to Dr. DiNicolantonio, exactly the same was the case regarding our widespread concerns about salt, with the opening sentences of his first chapter summarizing his dramatic claims:

For more than forty years, our doctors, the government, and the nation’s leading health associations have told us that consuming salt increases blood pressure and thus causes chronic high blood pressure.

Here’s the truth: there was never any sound scientific evidence to support this idea.

DiNicolantonio’s broader dietary views were closely aligned with those of Lustig and others, whose journal articles he cited, and the first page of his Introduction made this clear:

In fact, for most of us, more salt would be better for our health rather than less.

Meanwhile, the white crystal we’ve demonized all these years has been taking the fall for another, one so sweet that we refused to believe it wasn’t benign. A white crystal that, consumed in excess, can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease: not salt, but sugar.

Quite powerful circumstantial evidence supported his conclusion. For example, during the decades following the 1930s, salt consumption in America was probably stable or even declining while sugar consumption rose dramatically and during that period deaths from heart attacks had doubled, strongly suggesting which of the two white powders was likely responsible.

One very interesting aspect of the campaign against salt was that—just like the campaign against fatty foods—much of it seemed to have been quietly funded and orchestrated by the sugar industry, with the author arguing that this powerful lobby sought to minimize any attention given to the obvious dangers of its own product by secretly working to deflect public health concerns towards various other dietary components. One particularly striking 2013 academic review article revealed that over 80% of research studies having a food industry conflict-of-interest found no connection between sugary beverages and weight gain or obesity, while over 80% of unconflicted studies did.

Meanwhile, the evidence against salt seemed almost non-existent. The author made the telling point that in past centuries salt consumption in various European countries was probably far higher than today, perhaps a factor of 4-7 times greater, but without any evidence of major ill-effects on health. Meanwhile, the limited evidence indicated that hypertension in America had tripled over the last hundred years even though our salt intake had remained relatively stable during most of this period, hardly suggesting that it was responsible.

International comparisons told the same story. South Koreans ate a high salt diet but had some of the world’s lowest rates of hypertension, heart disease, and cardiovascular deaths. The lowest rates of death from coronary heart disease were found in that country along with Japan and France, all having very high salt diets, but with relatively little sugar.

Almost a decade after his earlier book, Lustig published Metabolical in 2021, which broadened and deepened his previous analysis, while incorporating years worth of additional research and data. Given his far greater prominence and the extent to which his claims about the massive health dangers from our heavy sugar consumption had gradually become accepted in many mainstream circles, I wasn’t surprised that the back cover of his book was filled with glowing endorsements by prominent medical writers and journalists. Meanwhile, the front cover carried similar praise by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, someone whose opinions I take very seriously.

With his reputation now much more solidly established and having become fully convinced of his own nutritional analysis, Lustig didn’t mince any words in his new volume. In the very first paragraph of his text he declared that the processed food that we eat amounted to “a plate of poison.”

While I’m not sure I would have put matters in such extremely dramatic terms, if his claims were correct that sugar was a chronic metabolic toxin responsible for so many of our serious health problems and that processed-food companies had quietly added it to 80% of everything that we eat, his basic point seemed not so unreasonable.

Near the beginning of his first chapter he emphasized that we have obviously been doing something very, very wrong in our public health efforts:

The US has the best doctors, hospitals, and medical technologies, the most innovative surgeries, the best and newest drugs, and spends the most per capita on healthcare of all the countries on the globe.

Are Americans healthier? Do we enjoy better healthcare? Do we live longer? The answer to each of these questions is an unequivocal and emphatic no. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; Americans have the worst health outcomes of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, the thirty-seven richest countries)…

No doubt, of all the OECD countries, the US is the sickest.

He illustrated this total mismatch between healthcare expenditures and health outcomes in the striking graph used near the beginning of this article, showing our own country’s complete divergence from most of the rest of the developed world.

Lustig argued that the main cause of America’s severe health problems has been a package of chronic, non-contagious illnesses that he calls “the metabolic syndrome,” including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all of which involved abnormal metabolic processing in various organs of the body.

Some of the trends he cited were striking. For example, when he attended medical school in 1976, diabetes had been a very rare illness, almost entirely confined to a small fraction of those over 65, with its total prevalence being just 2.5%. But the latest CDC statistics show that it is now found in 11.6% of all Americans, representing a rise of more than 350%, and a similar though much more gentle increase has also occurred worldwide from a much lower base.

In 1980, 30% of all Americans suffered from a chronic illness and today the figure was 60%. Partly as a consequence of these very negative trends, over the last half-century, the share of our GDP spent on healthcare had tripled from 6% in 1970 to 17.9% today.

Some of the main chronic illnesses he mentioned were very strongly associated with obesity, so it seemed obvious that they were diet-related. But much more controversially, he suggested that the same might also be true of others, including certain forms of obesity-related cancer, autoimmune diseases, dementia, and even some types of mental illness, all of which had increased enormously during this same period while striking much younger individuals. Although the mutations leading to the appearance of such cancers were probably random or due to other factors, he cited solid evidence that the subsequent cancerous growth may be due to metabolic malfunctioning caused by diet, and the very rapid worldwide increase of Alzheimer’s disease suggested something similar.

Lustig argued that insulin system dysfunction may be the primary factor behind this entire package of metabolic syndrome illnesses, with obesity merely being the most common, highly-visible marker of the condition rather than the underlying causal factor. Therefore, in his opinion obesity constituted a “red herring,” merely a symptom rather than the cause and focusing upon it had distracted us from the true factors responsible. In support of this controversial analysis, he noted that while 80% of the obese had those health problems, 20% were actually metabolically healthy, while 40% of those suffering from metabolic syndrome illnesses were not obese.

According to Lustig, the prevalence of these metabolic illnesses had reached absolutely alarming proportions, with a remarkable 88% of Americans afflicted with these conditions irrespective of weight. For example, non-alcoh0lic fatty liver disease had become the leading cause of liver transplants, and although it had been unheard of prior to 1980, 40% of all American adults now suffered from it. Dementia cost our country $290 billion per year, with attempts to find a drug to cure it resulting in 146 failed trials.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, Lustig angrily declared that “Modern Medicine is a racket,” with so many of the treatments and drugs it lucratively marketed being essentially aimed at treating these individual illnesses or symptoms rather than focusing on the fundamental underlying cause; and I think his point was a reasonable one. Insulin injections helped manage diabetes and various medications controlled high blood pressure, but these merely ameliorated such major health problems without addressing why the latter had increased so rapidly over the last couple of generations.

His book was published in 2020, and in the last several years our weight loss industry has been completely transformed by the release of GLP-1 injection drugs. Although their cost runs in the range of $1,000 per month or more, they are already being used by 12% of Americans, yielding an enormous domestic market worth nearly $50 billion per year. But although these drugs successfully reduce weight and may therefore alleviate some of the related health problems, Lustig has argued that they should not distract us from locating and removing the deeper underlying cause of all these health issues.

Lustig has become best known for his focus on the dangers of sugar, and he noted that inedible dietary fiber played an important mitigating role by preventing its rapid absorption, thereby cushioning any potentially harmful impact upon the liver. This explained why the fructose in whole fruit was relatively harmless while the fructose in fruit juice was not.

But he also emphasized that we needed to eat sufficient fiber in order to maintain the health of our microbiome, the trillions of bacteria that symbiotically coexist inside our intestines. He explained that these microorganism normally feed upon the dietary fiber that we ingest, but if that supply is lacking, they may instead begin digesting the mucin layer that protects our intestinal cells, leading to severe health problems. So fiber is beneficial in both these ways, explaining its importance in our diet. Unfortunately, fiber also tends to make the long-term storage of food more difficult, and for that reason it is usually removed from processed foods, so many Americans now get much too little if it in their diet.

Our media and health advocates regularly denounce our diet for being so heavy in such “processed foods,” but to a large extent I think that term is merely shorthand for foods in which the fiber has been removed and additional sugar added. Those are the underlying problems, and obfuscating that issue with a vaguer and more general term can have negative consequences. For example, almost nobody would describe freshly-squeezed orange juice as a “processed food,” but according to Lustig it is just as harmful as the worst of those.

For decades our media has regularly issued dietary warnings and one reason I’d never paid much attention was that they generally seemed so diffuse and scattered, cautioning against so many different types of foods on a rotating basis without usually providing a simple focus. If we are told that a very long list of different nutrients are bad for our health, there’s a natural tendency to throw up our arms and simply ignore the entire problem.

For example, my local Palo Alto newspaper runs a syndicated Health column, and although I rarely glance at it, a few days ago I did so, with the subject being the prevention of strokes. Aside from describing the nature of strokes and suggesting reasonable exercise, some nutritional guidelines were provided. Readers were told that obesity and high blood pressure were important risk factors, and as a consequence they should limit their intake of fatty foods, cholesterol, red meats, saturated fats, and processed foods in general. The dangers of consuming too much sugar was certainly included in that laundry list, but mixed in with so many other dietary warnings that the impact was greatly diluted, and in the past I never would have paid much attention to it.

On a far grander scale, this weekend’s Wall Street Journal devoted the first two pages of its weekly Review section to a long article on the unhealthy foods responsible for our terrible epidemic of chronic diseases, with the authors being two former high-ranking public health officials. Although sugar led their list of dietary culprits, numerous were also named, including salt, red meat, processed meat, refined grains, and fats. Sugary soft drinks were a top target, with a soda tax offered as the solution, along with restrictions on ultra-processed foods. But once again I think that singling out so many different villains and priorities greatly lessened the impact, while no one reading the article would have ever suspected that natural fruit juices were actually higher in sugar than the regularly demonized Coke and Pepsi, and therefore worse for our health.

In sharp contrast, Lustig’s nutritional mantra, regularly repeated throughout his book, was a very simple one: “Protect the liver and feed the gut.” The leading source of liver damage is the fructose component of sugar, while dietary fiber both protects the liver and feeds the gut, so those seemed the most important items upon which to focus, a relatively simple action plan to take away from a book running more than 400 pages long and containing over than 1,000 reference notes.

 

Aside from diagnosing our public health problems, Lustig also effectively traced their origins. Although sugar has been eaten for thousands of years, he explained that it may have suddenly become dangerous just in the last couple of centuries due to purification processing. As he pointed out, Coca leaves are a useful medicine in Bolivia but can be purified into the concentrated drug of cocaine. Opium poppies have also had a medicinal role but heroin is a dangerous drug. Caffeine is harmless when taken in coffee, but can be concentrated into potentially dangerous weight-loss drugs. So in ancient times sugar was a lightly-sprinkled spice and still remained merely a condiment during the Industrial Revolution, but in its modern, highly processed and concentrated form, it had actually become a potentially dangerous drug, and a moderately addictive one.

Lustig also explained the important role of corporate lobbying and PR efforts in our public health disaster. He drew a clear and persuasive analogy between the nefarious activities of Big Tobacco and those of Big Sugar, noting that contrary to what one might assume, the former was actually modeled upon the latter rather than the other way round, with the tobacco industry hiring a top sugar lobbyist to launch its efforts in 1954.

As concerns over rapidly rising obesity and related health problems escalated, the sugar industry became very successful at deflecting the blame unto all sorts of other products such as fatty foods and salt, so those became the central villains of the standard nutritional narratives promoted by our governmental and media. Sugar-funded studies suggested that sodas or desserts ranked below French fries and potato chips as a cause of weight gain, but they omitted the fact that both ketchup and chips were actually very heavy in sugar. In fact, a more realistic study seemed to show that of all the items offered on the McDonalds menu, purchase of the sugary drinks correlated most closely with the added weight of the customers.

Researchers and investigative journalists eventually uncovered documents revealing that the Sugar Lobby had spent decades secretly funding scientific researchers whose studies pointed to all culprits except themselves.

An important point that Lustig emphasized was that although Big Food was huge and enormously profitable, the fiscal externalities it generated were actually far larger. The total gross annual revenue of the food industry, including groceries and restaurants, was $1.46 trillion per year with a 45% profit of $657 billion. But US medical costs were $3.5 trillion per year, and Lustig argued that 75% of these or $2.67 trillion were food-related chronic diseases. According to his estimate, if we could merely roll back our rate of those diseases to their 1970 levels, we could conceivably save 75% or $1.9 trillion each year.

However, such success would hardly be in the interest of much of our pharmaceutical industry, whose $771 billion in annual revenue with 21% gross profit heavily depended upon the existence of those chronic illnesses. As Lustig puts it:

You do the math: between food and pharma, you’ve got $2.1 trillion per year going down a rathole—into shareholder pockets—while the public gets sicker and healthcare is collapsing.

As an ignorant layman, I had begun my exploration of these nutritional issues skeptical that any of the science would be solid enough to convince me of anything dramatically different than my casual understanding that natural foods were generally healthier and that a balanced diet was better. But after reading ten books and numerous lengthy articles on the subject by knowledgeable experts who drew upon a vast quantity of scientific research, I have concluded that I was wrong.

The nutritional analysis of Dr. Robert Lustig, Gary Taubes, and numerous others seems solidly established, making a very strong case that the fructose component of sugar has been the central factor behind so many of our national health problems.

With both fat and salt generally exonerated, and sugar instead unmasked as our true dietary villain, many of the inescapable conclusions are quite remarkable and more than a few of them almost read like satire.

I discovered a handy website called Nutrionix.com that provides the standard nutritional facts for some 1.2 million common food items, and checking some of that copious information produced many surprises.

Probably no food outlet has been as heavily demonized in the media as McDonalds, whose ultra-processed burgers, heavy in animal fat and salt, are always portrayed as damaging to our health, with that fast-food chain and its many competitors widely blamed for our obesity epidemic.

Indeed, McDonalds food was considered so harmful that it became the subject of Super Size Me, a low-budget 2004 film by the late documentarian Morgan Spurlock that received an academy award nomination and grossed $20 million worldwide, and I recently watched it on Amazon Prime.

Spurlock spent 30 straight days eating only McDonalds meals, leading to a massive weight gain of nearly 25 pounds and numerous other health problems. The physicians who were regularly monitoring his condition were shocked by his rate of physiological decline, warning him that his liver seemed to be suffering the sort of rapid deterioration that might be expected in someone who was drinking himself to death.

All of this was attributed to his heavy diet of Big Macs and other McDonalds fast food but only at the very end were we told that he had been consuming a full pound of sugar each day. Those 450 grams were a mammoth quantity, three times the already dangerously high American average and almost an order-of-magnitude more than Lustig and others would regard as part of a safe diet. So under such circumstances, the damage his liver was suffering was hardly surprising. But when we investigate the source of that super-abundance of sugar, the answers we get are actually quite different than what Spurlock seemed to suggest.

Checking nutritional labels, we find that the sugar content of many of McDonalds’ most famous offerings is not high at all, including the Big Mac (9 grams), the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (10 grams), or a large order of fries (nil).

These large sandwiches run 520 to 590 total calories each, so eating four of them would total more than the 2,000 calories in a typical daily diet, while providing less than 40 grams of sugar, constituting exactly the sort of low-sugar intake that Lustig would strongly recommend. And since fries have almost no sugar, if they were included in the mix, sugar consumption would be further reduced. Even the much-vilified Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese only contains 10 grams of sugar.

All these McDonalds items are certainly high in fat and high in salt, but both those nutrients seem fairly harmless. Burgers and fries are too low in dietary fiber and may lack various vitamins, so they’re not nutritionally ideal and probably not suitable for individuals trying to maintain a strict diet, but they hardly seemed likely to damage anyone’s health. So the source of Spurlock’s massive daily intake of sugar and resulting health problems must be found elsewhere.

The culprit was the beverages with which Spurlock washed down his burgers and fries. His regular McDonalds meals came with large Cokes, each containing a whopping 77 grams of sugar, and since he often super-sized his orders, the 42 ounce Cokes he received totaled more than 100 grams of sugar, a huge amount. Nearly all of the other McDonalds beverages, whether lemonade, Sprite, or Orange Fanta, were just as heavily sugared.

If he sometimes drank a large chocolate milkshake, that came with a remarkable 106 grams of sugar, while the vanilla version was still 85 grams. Moreover, although fries are sugar-free, the ketchup most people slather on them is very high in sugar. So the dangerously unhealthy aspects of his McDonalds diet were probably somewhat different than he had assumed.

Exactly this same confusion comes up in the notorious McDonalds Happy Meals that Spurlock and so many others have denounced. Aimed at children, these typically include a hamburger, fries, and apple juice. Concerned parents might be very surprised to learn that although the hamburger and fries contain very little sugar and are probably healthy, the small container of apple juice totals 24 grams of that dangerous white powder, quite a lot for a young child. And if a health-conscious mother replaces the zero-sugar fries with the low-fat yogurt option, she may have made a serious mistake, adding another 12 grams of sugar to the meal.

A similar contrast between harmful and harmless items is found in the McDonalds Big Breakfast Meal, coming with scrambled eggs, sausage patties, hash browns, and an English muffin with real butter, totaling 650 calories but only 2 grams of sugar. However, if you add hotcakes with maple syrup, the latter is mostly pure sugar, so now your total increases by more than 20-fold to 48 grams.

Or consider that a breakfast Sausage McMuffin with Egg only contains 2 grams of sugar in its 480 calories, while the Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit has 3 grams in 460 calories. I’m sure both of these offerings horrify health-food zealots, but they seem almost entirely safe to eat. However, if you wash down either of those sandwiches with two cups of orange juice or heavily sugared coffee, you could easily add 40 or 50 grams of sugar, starting your morning by compromising your health.

 

Let us now return to the hypothetical case of the two meals, one healthy and one unhealthy, with which I had opened this article.

If a young health-food-minded progressive ate a meal consisting of three servings of fruit yogurt, a pair of small granola bars, and two glasses of natural orange juice, his 1,000 calories would come with 169 grams of sugar, significantly more than the already dangerously high amount that the average American eats in a day, and that sort of diet would raise huge red flags about his future health.

But if a blue-collar worker contemptuous of health-food issues devoured a McDonalds Big Mac or Quarter Pounder with Cheese, an order of fries, and washed it down with a Budweiser beer, his 1,000 or so calories would only include 9 or 10 grams of the dangerous white powder, exactly the sort of very low sugar diet that Lustig and all those other nutritional experts would consider ideal.

So those two meals were indeed healthy and very unhealthy, but exactly the opposite of what our media would suggest and what nearly all Americans would assume.

Although I’ve never watched it, one of Woody Allen’s early films was Sleeper, a 1973 comedy in which the owner of a health-food shop called “the Happy Carrot” is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 200 years in the future. Among other things, he learns that science has discovered that all the foods he considered beneficial were actually dangerously harmful, while eating deep fat or steak was ideal for one’s health, as was smoking cigarettes. Although only 50 years rather than 200 years have elapsed, probably more of that reality has come to pass than Allen would ever have expected. Indeed, although carrot juice is almost the archetypical health food beverage, it’s certainly rather bad for your health, with one 16 ounce glass containing considerably more sugar than two Big Macs.

Video Link

Focusing on the sugar content of foods completely transforms our understanding of everything we eat, and I’m providing a listing of various items so that readers can see the implications of adopting this particular nutritional metric:

 

Over the years, the extensive reading and research for my long American Pravda series have provided numerous enormous surprises that have completely reshaped my understanding of our history and our political system. But none of those much impacted my ordinary day-to-day life. However, my recent investigation of nutritional issues has done exactly that.

I’d never paid much attention to dietary matters, vaguely assuming that most of the supposed science was too ambiguous or disputed to be worth taking seriously. I had accepted the fifty years of continuous warnings about dietary fat were probably correct, but since I’ve always been pretty slender and didn’t usually eat fatty foods, it hardly seemed very relevant to me. In recent years, I’d encountered a continuous outcry in the media denouncing the dangers of sugary soft drinks, but since I almost never drank any of those, I paid little attention.

However, I’ve now read ten books presenting strikingly strong evidence regarding the harmful properties of sugar, coming from credible medical experts and scientific researchers, and this has been reinforced by many articles and video presentations. Taken together, this enormous body of material has completely cut through my inherent skepticism and convinced me to examine my own regular diet under this new framework.

Since I don’t like soft drinks nor eat too much fast food or sweets, I’d assumed my sugar consumption was rather low, but was surprised to discover otherwise, with the sugar contained in all sorts of processed foods being far different than I would have expected. For example, I often drank Gatorade, which I’d always assumed was a healthful sports drink, but instead discovered it was actually very heavily sugared, with roughly two-thirds the amount in Coke or Pepsi. So although my daily sugar intake was below the American average, it was still probably twice as high as the levels suggested by the medical experts I’d recently been reading.

Fortunately, fixing the problem wasn’t too difficult. I start each morning with three cups of coffee, but I’d always heaped a great deal of sugar into those, and instead minimizing that probably reduced my entire daily intake by almost one-third. Along with cutting back on Gatorade and a few other small changes here and there, I found it easy to get down to the appropriate recommended limit.

Our government and our media have spent decades prioritizing a dozen different nutritional factors, both positive and negative, some of them correct and some of them incorrect. But the very number of those different warnings and suggestions means that they become a blur and many people pay little attention. But focusing upon the single metric of sugar, a quantity easily determined for almost all food products, makes it relatively easy to improve our diet and benefit our health.

A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump Jr. ironically Tweeted out a photo of Kennedy eating a McDonalds burger and fries, suggesting that the latter had temporarily deferred his planned campaign for a nutritional diet, and that striking image drew more than 16 million views. While it’s possible that the proposed Secretary of HHS bent his dietary principles, it’s also possible that he had carefully researched that crucial issue and already discovered some of the same surprising facts I have presented in this article.

Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024

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