Every week there seems to be another story in the news about how horrible and unhealthy sugar is for you. Now, I like my nightly piece of dark chocolate as much as the next guy, but that is about the healthiest kind of sugar you can eat probably. Everything in moderation.
The problem is, these guys were patently dishonest about the “healthiness” or sugar. This is not a feel good story – the good guy loses in the end. But fortunately the world is finally waking up to the truth – FAT is not the enemy – SUGAR is!
It all began on September 23, 1955, when President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. At a press conference the next day, his chief physician Dr Paul Dudley White instructed Americans on how to avoid heart disease: stop smoking, and cut down on fat and cholesterol. White based his recommendations on the research of a nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys.
Heart disease was a relatively new and increasingly serious health problem for middle-aged men. As recently as the 1920s, heart disease was very rare, but heart attacks were becoming more common, and Americans wanted to know why. Enter Keys with a solution that will sound familar – “an excess of saturated fats in the diet, from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs, raises cholesterol, which congeals on the inside of coronary arteries, causing them to harden and narrow, until the flow of blood is staunched and the heart seizes up.”
Meanwhile, in 1957, John Yudkin first proposed that SUGAR was the true problem – literally poisoning us in the amounts we were consuming it. Keys wasn’t the only one to disagree with this theory – sensing a thread to their industry bottom line, both The British Sugar Bureau and the World Sugar Research Organisation quickly criticized the theory, called his book “science fiction” and “emotional assertions”.