How science is going sour on sugar

When the British physiologist John Yudkin published Pure, White and Deadly—his 1972 book linking heart disease to sugar consumption—he met strong opposition from the sugar industry. As Geoff Watts writes in this week’s BMJ (doi:10.1136/bmj.e7800), “jobs and research grants that might predictably have come Yudkin’s way did not materialise.” Attacks also included the abrupt cancellation of conferences suspected of promulgating anti-sugar findings, and the book was dismissed as a work of fiction. Enter fat in the role of chief culprit in the rise in heart disease. The fat hypothesis, the chief proponent of which was the American biologist Ancel Keys, influenced policy makers and captured the popular imagination. …