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The message over the last decade or so is that sugar is highly addictive and pushed by food producers to make us eat as much as possible. Sugar leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. It dries out our skin and makes us look old. It’s poisonous, and food companies are behaving just like the tobacco industry, denying ill effects while driving us all to an early grave.

It doesn’t end there.

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Now we have Gary Fettke, an orthopaedic surgeon in Australia, railing against the sugar found in fruit — fructose — as the cause of all health problems. He says it all started when Adam and Eve picked the first apple. Think of the snake as Big Food.

Where did all this come from? My take is that the obesity crisis has spurred pseudo-research in our desperation to figure out why we’ve put on so much weight so quickly.

Anyone following the scientific literature quickly finds themselves neck deep in conflicting studies. The problem is science can’t definitively determine any cause and effect between sugar and disease, only a correlation, leaving the door wide open for junk science to flourish while fast-buck authors peddle scare theories to pick consumers’ pockets. The media promotes these authors with endless headlines such as “Sugar Overload” (Maclean’s) and “How Toxic is Sugar?” (CBC).

In the ’90s, experts told us animal and dairy fats were the culprits. Then came the anti-carbohydrate craze. Soon the blame shifted to chemicals in the environment. What you won’t hear is that the decline in smoking is one of the biggest factors driving obesity according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.