In other words, toxic sugar would seem to offer the most parsimonious explanation of the facts. Yet for more than 40 years, Taubes says, scientists have preferred to conjure up a broad array of factors: not only saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt, but also portion sizes, processed food, sleeping habits, lack of exercise, environmental toxins, viruses, prescription drugs, and even alterations to our microbiome. Indeed, they’ve viewed the baldness of the case against sugar as a sign of quackery or wishful thinking. It’s deemed much more sensible, these days, to chart a fuzzy middle course. We went too far with saturated fat, so let’s not make that same mistake again. Instead of searching for a single bad ingredient, the experts now construct whole ecologies of blame: the food desert, the industrial farm, the consumer-capitalist society. (Sugar may be bad for you, but it can’t be the only thing …) One might choose to see this as humility. Taubes argues that it’s giving up.

Kevin Van Aelst

Certainly he’s tenacious. It takes some grit to pursue a simple claim through a jungle of confusing research, and even more when you consider how that simple claim was for many years ignored or denigrated by experts in the field. To explain this disrespect, Taubes delves into the history and politics of sugar. Things might have turned out differently, he says, and the Yudkin theory been given fair consideration, but for the long-term efforts of a partnership between the honchos in nutrition research and their conniving sponsors from the food industry. In Taubes’s telling, this group—which some have called the “sugar conspiracy”—worked behind the scenes to squelch the toxic-sugar theory.

To expose the machinations of Big Sugar, Taubes draws from internal memos, letters, and other industry records obtained by Cristin Kearns, a dentist who quit her job to scour university archives for evidence of backroom deals. Sugar companies formed a research foundation in 1943 and soon began a concerted effort, through hefty grants to scientists and seven-figure ad campaigns, to counter claims that sugar causes cavities and that diet soda might be better for your health, among other threats to the industry. It was, in effect, the Big Tobacco strategy: Amplify uncertainty about what causes what, put the skeptics on your payroll, kick the can of scientific proof ever further down the road. According to Taubes’s and Kearns’s research, some of the most important figures in the field of nutrition—Ancel Keys, for one, as well as Harvard’s Fredrick Stare—took money from Big Sugar and at the same time made a point of doubting sugar’s role in chronic illness.

Taubes’s account leaves out half the story, though, as I guess a prosecutor’s brief is wont to do. Allow me some reluctant words for the defense. It’s true that Keys, Stare, and their associates were taking sugar money, but Yudkin had his own ties to the food industry. According to David Merritt Johns, a Columbia University public-health historian who has studied the sugar/fat dispute, Yudkin took funding from Nestlé and the U.K.’s National Dairy Council, as well as from H. J. Heinz, Unilever, and other food-related businesses. He was also sponsored by the public-relations arm of the egg industry. On the first page of Pure, White and Deadly, he offers thanks to “the many firms in the food and pharmaceutical industry that for 25 years have given me such constant generous support,” claiming that “for many of them” the results of his research “were often not at all in their interests.” Johns says this sort of coziness with industry appears to have been common in the field.