Eat your danish before you read ‘The Case Against Sugar’

Have weight loss on your mind? Turns out if your blood-sugar level is high, your body will burn glucose for energy rather than fat — and you’ll have a tough time dropping pounds.

But obesity is the least of a sugar-user’s woes, Gary Taubes suggests in “The Case Against Sugar.”

The best-selling author of “Why We Get Fat” aims to show his readers that sugar consumption causes all of the so-called Western diseases: diabetes, heart disease, gout, stroke and Alzheimer’s — possibly even some cancers. Sugar disrupts nearly every system in our bodies, though it can take between 18 and 20 years to see the results, other than love handles.

He writes that he’s not sure if he can “assemble the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law and allow governments to regulate sugar, as they already do tobacco and alcohol,” but he thinks he is able to present enough evidence and “reasonable assumptions” against sugar to change an individual’s relationship with it.

And he’s right — his evidence is extremely well-researched and compelling, and even the most skeptical reader would find it hard to entirely dismiss his findings, most of which go beyond what we’re already familiar with.

Early on, Taubes acknowledges that writing a book against sugar is the “nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas.” No one, seemingly not even the author, wants it to be true that sugar is the root cause of the obesity epidemic and the nasty cluster of chronic diseases that goes with it.

Perhaps that reluctance is part of what has kept contrary research at bay. In addition, the sugar industry has been extremely active over the past 150-plus years making sure business comes before good health.

Taubes says the sugar industry, which is much larger than the tobacco industry ever was, has funded decades’ worth of research to dispel creeping suspicions and funneled millions of dollars into ad campaigns to keep us in love with the substance.

For instance, in the 1960s, the International Sugar Research Foundation was established by the Sugar Association. Members of the ISRF “provide more financial support to combat the accumulating evidence from researchers tying sugar consumption to both diabetes and heart disease.”

Speaking of sugar as a substance, did you know that other than iodized salt, sugar is the only “pure chemical substance that humans consume”? And unless we go out of our way to avoid it, it’s an ingredient in nearly everything we eat: spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, bread, crackers, fish sticks.

Of course, sugar wasn’t always in everything, and Taubes charts this eventual infiltration with the rise in prevalence of Western ailments; and the two are neatly proportionate to each other.

When we consume a lot of sugar — and what is “a lot” is hard to pin down, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it’s consumed at 128 pounds per person annually — and blood-sugar levels rise, the pancreas responds by secreting insulin, the common factor in several deadly diseases.

Taubes cites research that says a body constantly inundated with sugar continues to secrete insulin until, eventually, so much insulin is in the system that the body has to block it: insulin resistance. This resistance leads to “metabolic syndrome,” then to heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and the other Western diseases. Not necessarily in that order.

Sugar as a root cause for our medical woes makes a lot of sense the way the author lays out the scientific and historical evidence.

Even sixth-century Hindu physicians recognized that diabetes was caused by “overindulgence in rice, flour, and sugar.”

For Taubes, sugar is defined as “a group of carbohydrate molecules consisting, as the word ‘carbohydrate’ implies, of atoms of carbon and hydrogen.” He calls them the “-ose” words: “glucose, galactose, dextrose, fructose, lactose, sucrose, etc.” And, of course, high-fructose corn syrup.

However, because no harm immediately seems to come from eating or drinking sugar, and because it’s in most of our food, it’s hard to gather conclusive scientific evidence.

Fortunately — or unfortunately — numerous clusters of societies, populations native to Arizona (the Pima tribe), Africa and New Zealand, were “westernized” relatively recently and scientists have studied the results. In every case, studies show that when people begin to eat the way Westerners do, i.e. processed or preserved food, salty and sugary things, and altogether unnatural food-like stuff, it takes not more than a decade or so before the same cluster of diseases pops up.

The author does well to steer clear of dogma and recognizes that he’s presenting others’ often inconclusive research as well as his own “unscientific” observations. And that’s OK. We’re in the midst of an epidemic, and few people are equipped to carry out the extensive digging and compiling Taubes has done.

He points out that if diabetes were an infectious disease, “the newspapers, the country as a whole, would be demanding answers. The CDC and the World Health Organization would have established panels of expert investigators to pry into every crevice of our assumptions about the cause of this disease to see where we might have misunderstood its etiology.”

But that’s not what’s happening.

“The Case Against Sugar” will make you rethink what you buy, eat and feed your family. It also might help you drop a few pounds.

This story was originally published January 21, 2017 at 7:32 AM with the headline "Eat your danish before you read ‘The Case Against Sugar’."