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The Case Against Sugar Paperback – Illustrated, December 12, 2017

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From the best-selling author of Why We Get Fat, a groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé that makes the convincing case that sugar is the tobacco of the new millennium: backed by powerful lobbies, entrenched in our lives, and making us very sick.

Among Americans, diabetes is more prevalent today than ever; obesity is at epidemic proportions; nearly 10% of children are thought to have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And sugar is at the root of these, and other, critical society-wide, health-related problems. With his signature command of both science and straight talk, Gary Taubes delves into Americans' history with sugar: its uses as a preservative, as an additive in cigarettes, the contemporary overuse of high-fructose corn syrup. He explains what research has shown about our addiction to sweets. He clarifies the arguments against sugar, corrects misconceptions about the relationship between sugar and weight loss; and provides the perspective necessary to make informed decisions about sugar as individuals and as a society.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Taubes’s writing is both inflammatory and copiously researched. It is also well timed... Hard-charging (and I’ll add game-changing)." —Dan Barber, The New York Times

"[A] blitz of a book... Mr. Taubes’s argument is so persuasive that, after reading The Case Against Sugar, this functioning chocoholic cut out the Snacking Bark and stopped eating cakes and white bread... The Case Against Sugar should be a powerful weapon against future misinformation." —Eugenia Bone, The Wall Street Journal

"Compelling... Perhaps at long last, sugar is getting its just desserts." —The Economist

"Taubes builds his case through lawyerly layering of rich detail... Extraordinary and refreshing." —The Atlantic

"Taubes sifts through centuries’ worth of data... Practically everything one wants to know about sugar—its history, its geography, the addiction it causes—is here. In the end, each of us is confronted with a choice. Continue consuming sugar at our current level and suffer the ill effects. Or reduce, if not eliminate, it from our diet, thereby improving our odds of living a long, healthy life." —The Seattle Times

"I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition." —Michael Pollan

“[The Case Against Sugar] should be required reading if only to understand the scope, power, and impact that Big Sugar has had on America’s health—or, perhaps more accurately, sickness.” —Outside

“Staggering… Taubes’s brilliant and accessible science writing has won him many fans.” —Booklist, starred review

"[Taubes] delivers another convincing book... Fascinating and illuminating.” —Library Journal

“[Taubes’s work is] compelling, as well as meticulously explained and researched. Readers will hate to love this book, since it will cause them to thoroughly rethink the place of sugar in their diets.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Taubes] helps us understand how to make better decisions regarding sugar as individuals and as a nation.” —Library Journal

“The obesity epidemic is an ever-growing threat to the overall health of our nation. In making the case against sugar, Gary Taubes details the often insidious efforts by the sugar industry to hide how harmful it is, just as the tobacco companies once did. This is required reading for not only every parent, but every American.” —Katie Couric

“No one in this country has worked harder on or better understood the role of sugar in our diet than Gary Taubes. As a journalist, an investigator, a scientist, and an advocate, he is without peer. (Plus, he knows how to write.) The Case Against Sugar is not only a terrific history but a forward-thinking document that can help us think more intelligently about how (and how not) to eat.” —Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything Fast

“Once again, the brilliant Gary Taubes manages to make a complex scientific subject easy to understand. The Case Against Sugar is a riveting history of ideas, a clear analysis of evidence, and an utterly persuasive argument that sugar is the new tobacco. Taubes methodically explains why sugar—not sloth, not fat—accounts for our unprecedented levels of obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Taubes answers every counter-argument as he exposes bad research, reveals conflicts of interest, and explodes myths.” —Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

“I am grateful beyond words for Gary Taubes's courageous and meticulous documentation of the health dangers of sugar. No one has hit the political and economic forces behind this 'acceptable' addiction as clearly and unflinchingly. The information in this book will, quite literally, save your life if you apply it." —Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

“If you ever doubted that sugar is the root cause of our obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemic, then look no further than The Case Against Sugar. This deeply researched, well-reasoned exploration of the history and biology of sugar would convince any supreme court of nutrition that it is sugar, not fat, that should be indicted and limited. Doctors, scientists, policymakers, and concerned eaters would do well to heed Gary Taubes’s advice.” —Mark Hyman, M.D., author of The Blood Sugar Solution

“The Case Against Sugar is just that. It’s a carefully reasoned, persuasive account of how doubts about sugar in the modern diet were systematically overlooked for over a century. Gary Taubes has become an important voice in the debate surrounding nutrition. He once again presents a compelling argument that will challenge our knowledge about the connection between food and health—it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the impact of the ingredients we eat.” —Nathan Myhrvold, lead author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

About the Author

GARY TAUBES is the author of Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories. He is a former staff writer for Discover and a correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and has been included in numerous “Best of” anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Science Writing (2010). He has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. He is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and a co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). He lives in Oakland, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

WHY DIABETES?

"Mary H—an unmarried woman, twenty-six years of age, came to the Out Patient Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital on August 2, 1893. She said her mouth was dry, that she was “drink- ing water all the time” and was compelled to rise three to four times each night to pass her urine. She felt “weak and tired.” Her appetite was variable; the bowels constipated and she had a dizzy headache. Belching of gas, a tight feeling in the abdomen, and a “burning” in the stomach followed her meals. She was short of breath." --Elliott Joslin’s diabetes “case no. 1,” as recorded in the case notes of his clinic.

Elliott Joslin was a medical student at Harvard in the summer of 1893, working as a clinical clerk at Massachusetts General Hos- pital, when he documented his rst consultation with a diabetic
patient. He was still a good three decades removed from becom- ing the most in uential diabetes specialist of the twentieth century. The patient was Mary Higgins, a young immigrant who had arrived from Ireland ve years previously and had been working as a domestic in a Boston suburb. She had “a severe form of diabetes mellitus,” Joslin noted, and her kidneys were already “succumbing to the strain put upon them” by the disease.

Joslin’s interest in diabetes dated to his undergraduate days at Yale, but it may have been Higgins who catalyzed his obsession. Over the next ve years, Joslin and Reginald Fitz, a renowned Har- vard pathologist, would comb through the “hundreds of volumes” of handwritten case notes of the Massachusetts General Hospital, looking for information that might shed light on the cause of the disease and perhaps suggest how to treat it. Joslin would travel twice to Europe, visiting medical centers in Germany and Austria, to learn from the most in uential diabetes experts of the era.
In 1898, the same year Joslin established his private practice to specialize in the treatment of diabetics, he and Fitz presented their analysis of the Mass General case notes at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Denver. They had exam- ined the record of every patient treated at the hospital since 1824. What they saw, although they didn’t recognize it at the time, was the beginning of an epidemic.

Among the forty-eight thousand patients treated in that time period, a year shy of three-quarters of a century, a total of 172 had been diagnosed with diabetes. These patients represented only 0.3 percent of all cases at Mass General, but Joslin and Fitz detected a clear trend in the admissions: the number of patients with diabetes and the percentage of patients with diabetes had both been increasing steadily. As many diabetics were admitted to Mass General in the thirteen years after 1885 as in the sixty-one years prior. Joslin and Fitz considered several explanations, but they rejected the possibility that the disease itself was becoming more common. Instead, they attributed the increase in diabetic patients to a “wholesome tendency of diabetics to place themselves under careful medical supervision.” It wasn’t that more Bosto- nians were succumbing to diabetes year to year, they said, but that a greater proportion of those who did were taking themselves off to the hospital for treatment.

By January 1921, when Joslin published an article about his clinical experience with diabetes for The Journal of the American Medical Association, his opinion had changed considerably. He was no longer talking about the wholesome tendencies of diabetics to seek medical help, but was using the word “epidemic” to describe what he was witnessing. “On the broad street of a certain peaceful New England village there once stood three houses side by side,” he wrote, apparently talking about his hometown of Oxford, Massachusetts. “Into these three houses moved in succession four women and three men—heads of families—and of this number all but one subsequently succumbed to diabetes.”

Joslin suggested that had these deaths been caused by an infec- tious disease—scarlet fever, perhaps, or typhoid, or tuberculosis— the local and state health departments would have mobilized investigative teams to establish the vectors of the disease and prevent further spread. “Consider the measures,” he wrote, “that would have been adopted to discover the source of the outbreak and to prevent a recurrence.” Because diabetes was a chronic dis- ease, not an infectious one, and because the deaths occurred over years and not in the span of a few weeks or months, they passed unnoticed. “Even the insurance companies,” Joslin wrote, “failed to grasp their significance.”

*

We’ve grown accustomed, if not inured, to reading about the ongoing epidemic of obesity. Fifty years ago, one in eight American adults was obese; today the number is greater than one in three. The World Health Organization reports that obesity rates have doubled worldwide since 1980; in 2014, more than half a billion adults on the planet were obese, and more than forty million children under the age of ve were overweight or obese. Without doubt we’ve been getting fatter, a trend that can be traced back in the United States to the nineteenth century, but the epidemic of diabetes is a more intriguing, more telling phenomenon.

Diabetes was not a new diagnosis at the tail end of the nine- teenth century when Joslin did his rst accounting, rare as the disease might have been then. As far back as the sixth century b.c., Sushruta, a Hindu physician, had described the characteristic sweet urine of diabetes mellitus, and noted that it was most common in the overweight and the gluttonous. By the rst century a.d., the disease may have already been known as “diabetes”—a Greek term meaning “siphon” or “ owing through”—when Aretaeus of Cappodocia described its ultimate course if allowed to proceed untreated: “The patient does not survive long when it is completely established, for the marasmus [emaciation] produced is rapid, and death speedy. Life too is odious and painful, the thirst is ungov- ernable, and the copious potations are more than equaled by the profuse urinary discharge. . . . If he stop for a very brief period, and leave off drinking, the mouth becomes parched, the body dry; the bowels seem on re, he is wretched and uneasy, and soon dies, tormented with burning thirst.”

Through the mid-nineteenth century, diabetes remained a rare af iction, to be discussed in medical texts and journal articles but rarely seen by physicians in their practices. As late as 1797, the British army surgeon John Rollo could publish “An Account of Two Cases of the Diabetes Mellitus,” a seminal paper in the history of the disease, and report that he had seen these cases nineteen years apart despite, as Rollo wrote, spending the intervening years “observ[ing] an extensive range of disease in America, the West Indies, and in England.” If the mortality records from Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century are any indication, the city’s resi- dents were as likely to die from diabetes, or at least to have diabetes attributed as the cause of their death, as they were to be murdered or to die from anthrax, hysteria, starvation, or lethargy.

In 1890, Robert Saundby, a former president of the Edinburgh Royal Medical Society, presented a series of lectures on diabetes to the Royal College of Physicians in London in which he estimated
that less than one in every fty thousand died from the disease. Diabetes, said Saundby, is “one of those rarer diseases” that can only be studied by physicians who live in “great cent[er]s of popula- tion and have the extensive practice of a large hospital from which to draw their cases.” Saundby did note, though, that the mortality rate from diabetes was rising throughout England, in Paris, and even in New York. (At the same time, one Los Angeles physician, according to Saundby, reported “in seven years’ practice he had not met with a single case.”) “The truth,” Saundby said, “is that diabe- tes is getting to be a common disease in certain classes, especially the wealthier commercial classes.”

William Osler, the legendary Canadian physician often described as the “father of modern medicine,” also documented both the rarity and the rising tide of diabetes in the numerous editions of his seminal textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine. Osler joined the staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Bal- timore when the institution opened in 1889. In the first edition of his textbook, published three years later, Osler reported that, of the thirty- ve thousand patients under treatment at the hospital since its inception, only ten had been diagnosed with diabetes. In the next eight years, 156 cases were diagnosed. Mortality statistics, wrote Osler, suggested an exponential increase in those reportedly dying from the disease—nearly doubling between 1870 and 1890 and then more than doubling again by 1900.

By the late 1920s, Joslin’s epidemic of diabetes had become the subject of newspaper and magazine articles, while researchers in the United States and Europe were working to quantify accurately the prevalence of the disease, in a way that might allow meaningful comparisons to be drawn from year to year and decade to decade. In Copenhagen, for instance, the number of diabetics treated in the city’s hospitals increased from ten in 1890 to 608 in 1924—a sixty-fold increase. When the New York City health commissioner Haven Emerson and his colleague Louise Larimore published an
analysis of diabetes mortality statistics in 1924, they reported a 400 percent increase in some American cities since 1900—almost 1,500 percent since the Civil War.

Despite all this, the disease remained a relatively rare one. When Joslin, working with Louis Dublin and Herbert Marks, both statis- ticians with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, examined the existing evidence in 1934, he again concluded that diabetes was rapidly becoming a common disease, but only by the stan- dards of the day. He conservatively estimated—based on what he considered careful studies done in New York, Massachusetts, and elsewhere—that only two to three Americans in every thousand had diabetes.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (December 12, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307946649
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307946645
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.84 x 8 inches

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Gary Taubes

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Gary Taubes is an investigative science and health journalist and co-founder of the non-profit Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI.org). He is the author of Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It and Good Calories, Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK). Taubes is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and has won numerous other awards for his journalism. These include the International Health Reporting Award from the Pan American Health Organization and the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, which he won in 1996, 1999 and 2001. (He is the first print journalist to win this award three times.) Taubes graduated from Harvard College in 1977 with an S.B. degree in applied physics, and received an M.S. degree in engineering from Stanford University (1978) and in journalism from Columbia University (1981).

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Cooper R.

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes is a great book if you’re looking to read more into the ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2018

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Review:
The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes is a great book if you’re looking to read more into the field of nutrition and its history or even just looking for a great non-fiction book. He tells a grand story about sugar in our society and it gives you an opportunity to look into the past with regards to medical practices, and how sugar came to be so prevalent in present times. Taubes weaves his way through the history of nutrition and various studies regarding sugar as part of our diet. He gives us an important insight into the pressures that a private industry put on the government 30 years ago and frames it in a way such that it is very easy to envision these pressures still being exerted on our government today. And although he seems to favor those standing against the sugar industry he is still able to remain subjective throughout. This book will open your eyes to what is happening in your body when you eat poorly and it will motivate you to change if you happen to be needing a kick in the rear to motivate yourself.
Using some basic criteria such as information given and ease of reading, all you can ask out of a non-fiction research book in my opinion, this book exceeds all expectations. This book was very easy to pick up as someone with very little background information on nutrition and I’m sure it’ll be just as easy for anyone else. It is a somewhat simple read; but still packs quite the load of useful information in relation to our health. He allows his arguments to build off each other, starting small with basic topics then building until you will have an almost “aha” moment when his argument is connected fully in your mind.

Delivery:
I ordered this book from Amazon along with a couple others on a Sunday night and selected free two-day shipping. Somewhere along my ordering process I must have clicked something wrong because instead of sending my package to my college address it instead went to my home address 3 hours away. That aside, the package got to my house on a Tuesday which was surprising to me because that was earlier than what even Amazon expected on their tracking site. My family sent it to me on Wednesday and the USPS went off and got it to me the next day. Apart from all the delivery issues, the book arrived without any bends or rips at all despite being a paper back. I hadn’t ordered a book from Amazon before this so I didn’t know what condition to receive it in but I was content. Overall, don’t expect to have the same issue that I did but expect to have a great delivery and receive it in great condition.

Final Thoughts:
This book is a great investment as I can see myself picking it up sometime in the future when I’m needing something to read. It is an extremely well written, informational book that will benefit you by making you more cognizant of health hazards in the food that you consume. Expect Amazon’s typically fast and efficient delivery on your order and you’ll be into this book in no time.

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Ira M. Edwards

Two books about sugar addiction and chronic diseases

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2017

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Two books taken together offer adequate evidence that sugar addiction stands out above all other factors among multiple causes of chronic diseases that became epidemic in recent times.
Robert Lustig -- THE HACKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
Gary Taubes -- THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR
Gary Taubes, as a journalist, demonstrates the best of objective science. Often a journalist makes the facts clearer than a scientist ever does. In his previous books, one stands out for public health relevance. That is WHY WE GET FAT.
Taubes makes a case for sugar as the main factor that, far above all else, is the reason we have epidemics of gout, high blood pressure, elevated blood glucose, insulin resistance, diabetes, arterial disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and more. All of these are hormonally related to metabolic syndrome, the topic that put Lustig in the forefront of nutritional science. Taubes gives a historical background of opposing views fairly, with little condemnation, though much activity of sugar industry representatives could have been judged criminal.
Opposing views: "Chronic diseases are caused by overeating and under-activity. (more calories in than out.)" "Eat less and exercise more" has a history of failure, but heavily promoted by the industry with massive publicity efforts over many years. Some observers were not fooled, but they were few, and did not have the media presence of Frederick Stare and Ansel Keys.
My crude accusation: The industry-government-medical-media complex that tried to make sugar into a health food and denied its role in disease may have caused over 100,000,000 to die short of their normal life span, living their last years in misery. The death count and misery is rapidly growing even now.
Taubes quotes a reason for this opposition, other than self (selfish) interest: "As soon as we think we are right about something," as New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz noted in the 2010 book BEING WRONG, we narrow our focus, attending only to details that support our belief, or ceasing to listen altogether."
Fortunately, Gary Taubes understands this.
This is my understanding of THE HACKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Robert Lustig: Sugar has the same neurohormonal paths in the brain as opiods. Sugar is addictive with brief hits of pleasure, but not satisfying, with long-range health consequences. We want more because a little is not satisfying. We crave more to the point of leaving other nutrients lacking, and food without sugar becomes tasteless. The book is not about sugar, though that may be Lustig's most vital point. It is about addictions, hormones of pleasure and hormones of happiness that do not lead to contentment. Though I have studied nutrition and endocrinology for many years, that is not my main interest. I am interested in what Lustig says about sugar. I am author of an orthomolecular nutrition textbook, but my greater interest is in the health and welfare of many people I know who suffer from chronic diseases, or are heading that way.
I have a problem with Lustig's writing about drugs. He overstated the value of psychoactive prescription drugs and seemed unaware of the extent of harm. I have seen too many lives destroyed by these to let that pass. His suggested that cannabanoids and even limited use of LSD may be more effective. They could hardly be worse.
I expect Taubes's book to be the one that makes a difference in the world, with Lustig's as vital scientific background, with both giving accounts of how the powers of this world hack the minds of all of us.
My conclusion:
1. Sugar excess is the major cause of modern chronic diseases.
2. Sugar is addictive and not satisfying. Excess leads to disappointment, not happiness or contentment.
3. Sugar substitutes have little evidence of benefit.
4. We can benefit greatly in prevention and treatment by reducing sugar to near the level used by our ancestors or non-industrial populations. Skipping deserts is a useless token, not a solution. Fruit is good, not fruit juice. Sweet drinks of all kinds are out. Most processed foods have sugar added, and must be regarded as toxic.
5. We need fat, even saturated fat, a spectrum of natural fats. Coconut oil, fish oil. bacon. Fats add flavor, satisfaction and satiety.
6. We need phytonutrients and minerals which are scarce in modern food.
7. Changing is hard. Changing is scary to anticipate, pleasant to remember.
If these two books are too much for you, try a fun but scientific book by Denise Minger: DEATH BY FOOD PYRIMID.

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Scotty Andrade

All you need to know about Sugar, and then some!

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2018

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Excellent book. VERY thorough. It’s taking me awhile to read though, because it’s very sciency for a lay person like me. But I LOVE Gary Taubes! I will finish it eventually, but I’m also reading the book, “Pure, White and Dangerous,” and I feel that’s an easier read.

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gsxr

Insightful book about the marketing and business of ‘big sugar’

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2024

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Did you know that most commercial cigarette tobacco is soaked in added sugar prior to packaging and selling to the public; I didn’t, prior to reading this book. I work in health care and none of my colleagues including many doctors knew that either. I learned a lot about the business, uses, and marketing of sugar from this book, in addition to the insightful scientific information that the author is known for. I ordered an extra hard copy of this book to take to work to share with friends and colleagues. Highly recommended.

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2023

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I highly recommend this book to everyone of every culture. This is invaluable...it should be required reading for all healthcare and education professions. I want my loved ones to hear/read this book. Thank you for writing it so comprehensively.

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Candid86

Book is excellent, but not the physical copy

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2024

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I love the book itself, the content that is. However, I was under the impression that I was purchasing a brand new copy (definitely new copy price!), but the one I received is clearly used, as there are numerous highlighter marks throughout. I can live with it, but it was definitely a surprise I was not expecting.

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Mall

Excellent book

Reviewed in Canada on December 11, 2019

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This is a highly informative book. It is well researched and written and has led me to have a new opinion on nutrient science.

ricardo elias vera reyes

Libro bueno si te gusta la historia

Reviewed in Mexico on June 13, 2019

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El libro es bueno a secas pero si no te interesa mucho la historia te lo puedes ahorrar de leer. Su hipótesis principal es que las enfermeras como cáncer, hipertensión y diabetes están relacionadas con la obesidad y está su vez con el azúcar, hace un recorrido histórico desde la revolución industrial para mostrarnos como la occidentalización de la comida con mucha azúcar y carbohidratos va de la mano con la aparición de las enfermedades ya mencionadas, viene en un inglés entendible si tanto hacerle al cuento con metáforas y lenguaje difícil, para practicar lectura en inglés está bien.

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Derek Serapiglia

The case Against Sugar

Reviewed in Italy on April 28, 2020

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Questo libro e veramente interesante mi e piaciuto il consento che hanno svolto nel raconto della historia

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Maryann Ashton

Terrifying Truth

Reviewed in Australia on January 8, 2024

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This book was a fascinating read, despite the scientific information. It has opened my eyes and makes so much sense to my personal situations. I now want to go out, stand on street corners and tell everyone to stop eating sugar - it’s killing you!

RAS

Le sucre

Reviewed in France on April 29, 2018

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Gary Taubes a écrit plusieurs livres sur la nutrition et pourquoi on grossit. Il est loin d'être seul à pourfendre actuellement les méfaits du sucre, il suffit de parcourir ce site pour se rendre compte du nombre d'auteurs, souvent médecins, qui ont récemment écrit sur le sucre. Taubes montre notamment le pouvoir de l'industrie, qui a l'instar de l'industrie du tabac jadis, fait un intense lobbying pour cacher ces résultats qu'on ne saurait voir. Il réfute la théorie facile qu'un devient obèse parce qu'on absorbe plus de calories que ce qu'on dépense, mais il montre que l'obésité est une maladie hormonale stimulée par la surconsommation de sucre. Toutes les maladies de civilisation comme l'obésité, le diabète de type 2, la résistance à l'insuline, les problèmes cardiaques et sans doute le cancer, doivent beaucoup au sucre. En complément on peut lire "The obesity code" de Jason Fung, qui fait une excellente synthèse globale de la science de la nutrition.

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The Case Against Sugar Paperback – Illustrated, December 12, 2017

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