Good Calories, Bad Calories

Yudkin spent his first year of retirement writing a book on his sugar theory, published in 1972 and entitled Pure, White and Deadly in England and Sweet and Dangerous in the American edition. It did not serve to move the medical-research community closer to embracing either Yudkin or his theory. By the late 1970s, to study the potentially deleterious effects of sugar in the diet, says Sheldon Reiser—who did just that at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland—and to talk about it publicly, was to endanger your reputation. “Yudkin was so discredited,” says Reiser; “he was ridiculed in a way. And anybody else who said something bad about sucrose, they’d say, ‘He’s just like Yudkin.’”

Chapter Seven

FIBER

The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.

ATLE SELBERG, winner of the 1950

Fields Medal in Mathematics

THE HYPOTHESIS THAT SUGAR AND refined carbohydrates cause chronic disease peaked as a subject of serious consideration in late April 1973, when George McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs held its first hearing on diet and what the committee took to calling killer diseases. The testimony would have little impact on the content of McGovern’s Dietary Goals for Americans, in part because none of the staff members who organized the hearings would still be working for the committee three and a half years later, when the Dietary Goals would be drafted. Equally important, neither McGovern nor his congressional colleagues could reconcile what they were hearing from the assembled experts with what they had now come to believe about the nutritional evils of modern diets.

The committee had initially planned a series of hearings in 1972 on dietary fat, cholesterol, and heart disease, but the plans changed because McGovern ran for president. When the committee returned to the diet-and-chronic-disease issue after McGovern’s defeat, the subject that seemed most urgent—thanks in part to the publication of John Yudkin’s Sweet and Dangerous—was sugar in the diet, diabetes, and heart disease.

The hearings were a surprisingly international affair. Aharon Cohen from Jerusalem testified on diabetes and heart disease among the Yemenite Jews. George Campbell testified on his studies of diabetes in Zulus and Natal Indians in South Africa. Peter Bennett, an NIH epidemiologist, testified on the Pima Indians of Arizona, who had the highest incidence of diabetes ever recorded at the time: half of the Pima over thirty-five years old were diabetic. “The only question that I would have,” Bennett said, “is whether we can implicate sugar specifically or whether the important factor is not calories in general, which in fact turns out to be really excessive amounts of carbohydrates.” Walter Mertz, chairman of the USDA Human Nutrition Institute, testified, as did his colleague Carol Berdanier, explaining that refined sugar seemed to play particular havoc with health, at least in laboratory rats. It elevated blood sugar and triglycerides, and caused subjects to become diabetic, Berdanier said, “and they die at a very early age.”

When the testimony focused on sugar and diabetes, the committee members found it compelling. They occasionally solicited suggestions as to how Americans might reduce the 120-odd pounds of sugar they were eating on average in 1973, to the less than seventy pounds that Campbell said could be safely consumed without triggering an epidemic of diabetes and obesity.