Gary Taubes ‘The Case Against Sugar’

welcoming Gary taubs thank you thank you it's a pleasure to be back here several of those talks I want to come back to here the eclipse the hearing aids and uh anyway let me tell you a little bit about myself since my latest book is called the case again sugar the first thing you have to know is that I'm not a doctor I'm not a nutritionist I don't have a PhD um I am a journalist I started my career as an investigative science journalist I did my first two books about um physicists and nuclear physicists who discovered non-existent phenomena and lived to regret it as such I was obsessed with um how hard it is to do science right and how hard it is to get the right answer and one line I quote in three of my books is from the physicist Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman who said the first principle of science is you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool and in the early 90s after my first two books I had a lot of fans in the physics community so they um said to me if you're interested in bad science or people who do it wrong you should look at some of the stuff in public health because it's terrible so I moved into public health reporting in the early 90s and I found that my physicist friends had if anything underestimated the problem and by the late 90s I was moving into nutrition almost purely by chance I stumbled into the nutrition field and I did a series of two investigations one for the journal science on salt and high blood pressure and you know this idea the low salt that salt causes our blood pressure to go up and hypertension I spent nine months on a single magazine article I interviewed over 80 subjects and I concluded that the evidence behind this idea that's all causes high blood pressure is terrible and you would only really believe it if your preconception was so strong that you were convinced it was true before any of the studies were done while I was doing that story one of the worst scientists I'd ever had the pleasure to interview took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt but to eat less fat and one of my lessons from my early research was that bad scientists never get the right answer so when I got off the phone with this guy I called up my editor at science I said when I'm done doing the salt story I'm going to do a fat story I don't have no idea what the story is I was eating a low-fat diet like everyone else in America but I know that if this guy was involved in any substantive way there's a great story there um so I spent a year working on a single magazine article for science a single investigative piece was called the soft science of fat um I interviewed about 140 subjects for one magazine article and I concluded the evidence behind the low-fat Dogma was as bad as it was for the low salt dogma and that nutritionist didn't have a clue what they were doing this was followed about a year later with an Infamous cover story for the New York Times magazine called what if fat doesn't make you fat and which I started looking at the science behind obesity and What Makes Us accumulate excess fat um that piece was probably the most controversial magazine article the New York Times ever ran one thing such articles do the cover you guys might remember this even on the other coast the cover was a porterhouse steak with a piece of butter on it um and the implication was that Robert Atkins you know Dr Atkins diet Revolution was right all along okay which was completely unacceptable to the medical community but with the evidence seemed to support so I'll cover stories like that tend to get authors large book advances which this one did and it paid for four years of my life so I could then do the book I'd always wanted to do about nutrition science the book of course took five years so it paid for four um it's an interesting thing in writing you do research till you run out of money and then you start borrowing and you start writing so you can hand in the manuscripts I could give you some money and then by the time you hand in the manuscript the money you get pays back the money you've borrowed and now you're broke again and no matter how much the advances that anyway digressing uh the book that came out of this was good calories bad calories when I went into this field I thought I was going to sort of let the food police have it for telling us all that's giving us all this bad advice about what makes us sick and make us eat these horribly boring low-fat low salt diets and in the midst of doing more research on this subject than any human being had done until that time I realized that there was a very compelling alternative hypothesis which is the problem isn't the fat in the diet it's the carbohydrates so the grains and the starches and the sugars and suddenly I'm writing books in which I am even more of the food police than the other food police and now I can't go out to eat with anyone in my life without like we're at a restaurant and they want to order french fries and they're looking at me like do you mind um sad so my I wrote this book good calories bad calories it's 500 pages it's got 160 pages of endnotes and bibliography um dense read and after I wrote it I got emails and letters from people saying this book changed my life could you please write one that's readable like could you write one that my father could read or my son could read I got emails from doctors saying could you write one that my patients could read and I got emails from patients saying could you write one that my doctors could read so the result was in 2011 I published a book called what if it's all been a big excuse me uh why do we get fat and what to do about it if it I had my say it would have just been why do we get facts I don't like to give diet advice but my editors insisted that if they were going to publish this book I had to give some advice um I knew the book had succeeded when I got an email from a family friend saying I was on a flight to the Caribbean and I read your book therefore making it airplane reading and then he said I haven't had a carbohydrate in three months I've lost 30 pounds my blood pressure has dropped I've never felt so healthy the problem is I'm blaming obesity and heart disease and the chronic disease that associate with it on sugar and refined grains and people would say to me well what about Southeast Asia here's a continent of billions of people who consume a lot of refined grains and don't have high levels of obesity and diabetes so I'm the obvious answer to that is this is a population that doesn't eat a lot of sugar in fact even though the sugar refining was kind of pioneered in China 2000 years ago in part because of the Communist era they never modernize their sugar refining processes so by the middle of the 20th late 20th century they were consuming the amount of sugar we were consuming 200 years earlier in Japan which was always raised an example even back in the 1920s when there were Public Health authorities arguing that Sugar caused diabetes a counter argument from Elliott Johnson who is a leading diabetes clinician in America was that well the Japanese eat a high carb diet and they have very little the diabetes Jocelyn didn't realize that sugar and other carbohydrates were different so the Japanese as I learned in my research in the 1960s consumed about as much sugar as we did in the 1860s and they had the diabetes rates that were similar to what ours were in the 1860s and along the way in this research I had done some more articles for the journal science about the mechanism of a condition called insulin resistance and insulin resistance is when your cells of your body become resistance to the hormone insulin it's the fundamental defect in type 2 diabetes which is a common form that Associates with obesity and insulin resistance is believed by the researchers who study it to actually begin in the liver in part with fat accumulation in the liver and it Associates with what's now called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which is also epidemic in America just like diabetes and as it turns out a sugar molecule or high fructose corn syrup is half a molecule of glucose and half a molecule of fructose it's a fructose that makes it sweet fructose is fruit sugar it's what makes fruit sweet but in Fruit you get it in very low Doses and when we refine sugar cane or sugar beets or corn into high fructose corn syrup we basically take out everything but the glucose and the fructose and then we put it in sugary beverages we make it very easy to consume and the idea is you this fructose gets dumped on your liver and it gets a lot of it gets converted to fat and if it gets converted to Fat it's going to cause insulin resistance so you basically have this scenario that I described in the book where sugar there's a mechanism by which you would expect it to cause insulin resistance and you would expect it if it causes insulin resistance to cause diabetes and obesity and if it causes diabetes and obesity you would expect it to at least increase the risk of all these chronic diseases that are associated with obesity and diabetes so there's this whole cluster of chronic diseases they're often referred to as diseases of Western life for diseases of Western Lifestyles heart disease obesity diabetes heart disease cancer Alzheimer's gout arthritis half a dozen others cavities okay cavities are crucial Dental caries because back in the 1960s people were saying since all these diseases cluster together and the first signs if you take a native population eating its traditional diet and you give it a western diet on the weight of becoming obese and diabetes of diabetic the first thing you'll see is cavities occurring in the children so doesn't it make sense so whatever it is that causes the cavities also causes the Obesity and diabetes sort of Occam's razor simplest possible hypotheses and we know what's causing the cavities it's sugar and white flour so what I wanted to do with this book is just lay out this train of sort of possible cause and effect and we have this conventional thinking in the field that the worst that can be said about sugar is it's empty calories so it's absent vitamins and minerals and it just adds calories to the diet so when you consume sugary beverages maybe you consume it over and above what you need from the rest of the diet and that's what makes you fat and to me that's an excruciating like naive way to look at some extraordinarily complex physiological phenomena so I wanted to lay this out in the book and that's what I'm doing there's one underlying theme in all my books one of the things I realized doing my research that I had no idea about so all my books including my first two on physics and nuclear physics were about good science and bad science and one of the things I learned doing this book or my first book on nutrition is that prior to World War II the very best scientific research in the world was done in Europe science was in effect a European invention and medical science all the fields of Medical Science that relate to obesity and diabetes were pioneered in Europe and in Germany in Austria genetics metabolism nutrition Endocrinology the science of hormones and hormone-related diseases and I what I learned was that the German and Austrian researchers had a very different hypothesis of obesity than we do okay so we think that obesity is caused by taking in more calories and we you expand right this idea it's energy imbalance I'm just curious how many of you believe that to be true you don't eat too much and you're sedentary okay good I once gave electron why we get fat at the tough School of nutrition which is the hotbed of the sort of anti-fat movement in America that in the University of Washington here two places that really don't like my work and before the interview I said how many of you believe that obesity is an energy how many of you you know an energy balance disorder that's caused by taking in more calories than you spend and nobody raised their hand and I said well then I don't have to give this lecture because I'm going to try to convince you it's fake and apparently I had phrased it with a double negative so um the counter argument the Germans and austrians had come to the conclusion that obesity is a hormonal defect you know back in the 1920s obese people would say well it's hormones and it was considered an excuse even back in the 1920s before any hormone but insulin had been discovered and people had no idea how hormones work in the human body the medical community would say well this is an excuse for fat people to not eat in moderation like lean people do and this idea built up to the 1960s that was hammered on over and over again you know it can't be a hormonal defect fat people just don't have willpower like I do is the implication the Germans and austrians said clearly it's a hormonal defect it's got to be a hormonal defect I mean look at it men and women fat and differently that tells you the sex hormones are involved right it's got to be men and women go through puberty that boys lose fat the girls gain fat the sex hormones you know it's you get these localized accumulations of obesity the most one of the most famous is something called stiato Pidgeot which is a big fat you know uh I don't know how forget that I don't know how to describe that politically anyways World War II comes along the German and Austrian schools vanish they evaporate um some of these researchers flee to the United States and but they don't get jobs because nobody wants to hire these German Jewish researchers and certainly not ivy league institutions which actually had protocols in place so as not to be overrun by Jewish academicians and Jewish students so in fact a lot of them ended up just moving West and it's one of the reasons places like Washington and and Berkeley where I live are such great universities because they Embrace these people but this idea that obesity was a hormonal regulatory defect evaporated with the second world war and after the war um very well-meaning U.S nutritionists and young doctors sort of recreated the science of obesity from scratch with no idea how to do science and no understanding of Endocrinology or genetics or metabolism or even profoundly nutrition and they ended up with this idea that it's just about eating too much gluttony and sloth it was like a Biblical theory of obesity and in the 1960s when researchers started to understand what it is that actually regulates the accumulation of fat in your fat cells by that time we had already decided obesity was an eating disorder caused by taking in too many calories and nobody cared what the endocrinologists were learning about this obesity I was actually I was doing a BBC TV show they were interviewing me in in Oakland via Skype and the host of the BBC show was a geneticist who studies obesity at Cambridge University so he studies the genetics of obese and he got a little angry at me because I kept asking him questions when he wanted to ask me questions but one of the questions I asked him was do you know what regulates fat accumulation and fat cells and he said well we don't know that and I said no you don't know that because you study genetics but if you pick up an Endocrinology textbook or a biochemistry textbook it'll tell you and it's primarily the hormone insulin and it'll tell you what enzymes insulin upregulates and down regulates it worked to pull fat into fat cells anyway so this whole story ties back to sugar if obesity is a hormonal regulatory defect and if it's more or less controlled is the Endocrinology textbooks in the biochemistry textbook will tell you by this hormone insulin and whenever works to elevate insulin in your bloodstream is going to make you accumulate excess fat and it happens to be sugar again that's targeted in this condition and insulin resistance and if you're insulin resistance your pancreas has to pump out more insulin to make you accumulate fat to make to make you excuse me um take up the high blood sugar in your body and deal with it and so you've got it basically a very strong chain of effects that would implicate whatever the cause of insulin resistance is in obesity and if obesity then diabetes and if obesity and diabetes so again that's the story I'm telling I think it's vitally important than doing it to understand the history so much of this book is about the history the other thing I'm also saying that in 2017 we've missed the story 2016. this came out December 27th so I'm making this argument that the nutrition Community got it wrong the Obesity Community got it wrong despite the anti-sugar movement the question is why is this anti-sugar movement about sugar being empty calories that we consume in excess whatever that means nobody ever says lung cancer is caused by smoking and excess right they say it's caused by smoking but we'll blame obesity on consuming Foods in excess and the question is it's just caused by consuming Foods just as smoking is caused by you know lung cancer is caused by smoking so what I had to do with this book is I had to explain why such a profoundly important hypothesis had been ignored and something I argued time and again is the evidence is actually ambiguous I'm speculating by saying sugar causes all these disease why is in 2017 I have to speculate we haven't done the research necessary to nail it down so the other part of the story is how the sugar industry worked in the 50s 60s and 70s to take what the nutritionists were giving them and make sure no one ever concluded that sugar was uniquely toxic not a short-term toxin like we're used to like a you know a chemical that might kill you if you inhale it for three weeks but a long-term toxin that works over years and decades to create these chronic decisions diseases disorders that are so burdensome and will eventually shorten your life like no other so much of what I do in this book is also talk about the history of the sugar industry their public relations campaigns they ran concerted campaigns in the 60s and 70s first two fight back the challenge that artificial sweeteners presented in the 60s and it's funny people like to say it was a surreptitious campaign by the sugar industry but I first realized this happened because I was reading a New York Times article and a administrator that in 1967 a vice president of the sugar Association took credit for spending almost a million dollars to fund studies to demonstrate that cyclamates were carcinogenic and to a New York Times Reporter he says look if some competitor can s out spend can undersell you 10 cents to a dollar wouldn't you throw a brick bat at them if you could so it wasn't a surreptitious campaign it was just capitalism at its best they were being artificial sweeteners came on the market in the 1950s by the 1960s they were taking over the stone industry and the sugar industry thought they had to fight it back so they did they funded studies and they got cyclamates banned and they almost got saccharin banned based on science that was almost unbelievably bad um in the 1970s when a very uh influential British nutritionist named Johnny udkin was claiming that sugar was deadly and that was probably the cause of diabetes and heart disease the sugar industry funded a campaign of researchers who believe that saturated fat was a problem and they just had the the whole country the nutritionists and cardiologists in the United States had concluded that saturated fat was what caused heart disease and if it's what caused heart disease it probably caused diabetes all they had to do was pay the nutritionists to stand up and write what they really believed and what they believed was that sugar was benign and this report that was produced by the sugar industry it had been designed part of a public relations campaign by a Hotshot public relations firm in Chicago and the report was called sugar in the diet of man it was about I think 10 or 11 articles a supplement in a journal and they gave it to the FDA when the FDA had to decide whether or not sugar was safe or not and the FDA read the reports had clearly these very influential nutritionists believe sugar is benign so we will too and one thing led to another and the end result was that roughly they managed to in effect shut down sugar research in this country for about 30 years in fact by the mid-1980s to say sugar might be harmful and to study it was to be accused of being a quack so it wasn't just that the NIH wouldn't fund such studies but it would actually ruin your reputation as a scientist if you claim to do it and what happened is some research was done anyway for instance there's a one of the Paradigm shifts I talk about in all my books is in the 1960s we focused on the idea that we get heart disease because fat raises the cholesterol in our blood and Our arteries clog up we often use this sort of clogged pipe and some people actually talk about artery clogging fats how many of you believe that come on serious this is Washington you all have to be on a low-fat diets right let me rephrase this how many of you eat skinless chicken breasts okay and throw out the egg yolks how many of you think butter is going to kill you okay there are some fans in the audience anyway this was the dogma and the problem and this was embraced by beginning with a senate committee Run by George McGovern in 1977 that wanted to get in the business of telling Americans how to get healthy and then the USDA got involved and then we had the dietary guidelines and by 1984 the National Institutes a health got involved and they created the national cholesterol education program and then there was a report from the National Academy of Sciences and was followed by a report from I'm going to forget surgeon general's office all of them saying dietary fat the Surgeon General said that two-thirds of the deaths in America every year are caused by the fat content of our diet and the evidence for it is stronger than it is for cigarettes and lung cancer which was an insane statement because the evidence was virtually is I couldn't say non-existent but come completely uncompelling if you actually read the studies so we have this idea that dietary fat causes raises your cholesterol and that causes heart disease but while we were proclaiming this idea and we were putting it forth and changing our dietary policies and creating this dogma and the belief that a low-fat diet is a healthy diet the research continues this is what science does so researchers started saying look this insulin resistance thing this begins in the 1950s also seems to be crucial to heart disease and there's a whole slew of metabolic disorders things that start to go wrong when you get heart disease that cluster together so it's not just high cholesterol it's not clogging of your pipes your blood pressure goes up your LDL cholesterol may or may not go up but your HDL cholesterol comes down something called triglycerides blood fats they go up if you start to become what's called glucose intolerant which is the beginnings of diabetes is visible your waist size gets bigger you're getting fatter and the inflammatory molecules begin appearing you begin to develop a state of inflammation so there's like a dozen or two dozen phenomena you could identify that shows that this whole homeostatic disruption is going on that culminates with heart disease or diabetes work hands when it's all fundamentally linked insulin resistance so today 75 the CDC says 75 million Americans have this condition called metabolic syndrome which is thrown intents and purposes insulin resistance syndrome and this is what's going to give them obesity and diabetes if they get it when they get it to step on the way to obesity to step on the way to diabetes is to step on the way to heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer's and it's all linked to the carbohydrate content to die in specifically sugars and we ignored it because we were so focused on cholesterol that's the message we wanted people to get and the drug companies have drugs that help prevent heart disease at least in some patients statins and the statins lower cholesterol so the drug companies wanted to reinforce this message because they wanted people to buy their drugs I mean again capitalism at its best the real science which was very powerful and very compelling which all implicates sugar and carbohydrates not fats was ignored and so what I've been trying to do as a journalist and there are other the researchers out there and other journalists out there and we're all fighting this issue of we look like Quacks but we're making progress and when we're trying to convince people is that they shouldn't be avoiding the fat in the diet they should be avoiding the carbohydrates they should be avoiding the sugars and we're trying to convince people that they don't get fat because they eat too much I mean think about it this way if I was giving a talk on wealth I might get a pretty good audience and afterwards in the Q a somebody said to me why is Bill Gates so rich or Jeff Bezos and I said well it's because he makes more they make more money than they spend you guys would leave right if I was giving a talk on climate change which would probably get a pretty full house and at the end somebody says okay why is the atmosphere heating up and I said because it's taking in more energy than it expends and I looked at you like this was a serious answer you'd think I was joking but in obesity research when somebody asks why you get fat or why he's fat or she's fat and I'm not the answer is they take in more calories and they expend and it's almost incomprehensibly naive and it's so much the conventional wisdom you show me a paper on Obesity I'll show you where that belief system is interwoven into the research and into that paper my geneticist friend at Cambridge University the BBC host he's not studying the genetics of why people get fatty studying the genetics of he thinks why people eat too much or exercise too little so part of this goal is to get people to get rid of that energy balance idea and the stakes are enormous okay as I said one of the things the fundamental thing I'm trying to do with this book so Claude Bernard the great French physiologist in 1865 said science is about explaining what we observe okay fundamentally that's what you're always doing in science whether What You observe is a supernova or a gamma-ray burst and you know from the night sky whether it's the way a frog behaves or a you know swallows mate or you name it anything you know why we get heart disease why we get obesity it's about explaining what we observe the observation today that's so frightening is these obesity and diabetes epidemics worldwide every single population in the world when they transition to a western diet from whatever they were eating Baseline so it doesn't matter whether they were Inuits living on caribou and seal meat or messiah in Africa living on the meat and milk and urine from the cattle they heard or agrarian populations in the Himalayas or Native Americans or African-Americans any population when they start eating Western diets experiences these tremendous increases in obesity and diabetes in October the director general of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan gave a keynote address to the annual meeting the National Academy of Sciences and she said these epidemics of obesity and diabetes represent a slow-motion disaster worldwide their overwhelming Health Care Systems the estimated cost of obese and diabetes and direct health care costs in the U.S is a billion dollars a day if you look at indirect societal costs and you believe these estimates it's a trillion dollars a year and Margaret Chan said the chances of public health organizations like the who reigning these epidemic sin she said preventing a quote bad situation from getting much worse is effectively zero so think about that the director general of the World Health Organization is talking about the slow motion disaster epidemics and not only acknowledging that organizations like ourselves have completely failed to curb them but predicting complete failure in the future and one of the things I would do if I was a journalist or in newspapers I would have I mean imagine if this was HIV in 1985 we understood that the HIV virus causes AIDS but imagine after coming to that conclusion 40 years later 30 years later AIDS prevalence AIDS incidents had continued to go up mortality from this disease had continued to go up we would have task force and committees and think tanks and teams of research as we would be spending billions if not trillions of dollars trying to understand what we don't understand about the disease but in obesity and diabetes we've had the same phenomena you know in the 1890s the estimate was that roughly one out of every 3 000 patients in hospitals in eastern coast in Philadelphia and Boston and London and Paris suffered from diabetes it's one out of every three thousand today if you go to VA hospitals one out of four okay one out of every 11 Americans in or out of hospitals has diabetes today so there's been this tremendous explosion and we have to understand what's causing it you cannot stop an epidemic unless you understand the cause you have to know what to remove what to get out of the population whether it's the HIV virus so you recommend you know safe sex and contraceptives and you design drugs that are made that go after the virus if it's a lung cancer epidemic you have to know it's smoking right so you can tell people to stop smoking in this country with obesity and diabetes we have the director general of the who basically shrugging her shoulders and saying yes we've seen 900 percent increases in diabetes in the United States in 50 years 900 percent and it's going to go up but we don't know what to do about it well how about examine your assumptions so what I'm trying to do in this book is ask the question are we wrong about what the cause is if this was a legal case and we have this crime being committed every country in the world it's very similar crime in a very similar way who's the Prime Suspect you know who should we be targeting why should we be targeting and the answer is sugar so with that long introduction I'm going to do a little bit of reading and I'm going home for the best but I have to borrow a book somebody has to hand me a hand okay so the first chapter of this book discusses is obesity and diabetes epidemics and why I'm focusing on sugar and why I think it's the prime suspect as I say in the book If This Were legal case this book would be the prosecution strategy um I had trouble writing it I don't like writing one of the reasons I'm such a good reporter if I am a good reporter is because reporting is a way to procrastinate on writing it's as long as you keep doing the research you know and then like I said the problem with that is eventually you run out of money and then you have to write um I had finally written the first chapter and then I wrote the second chapter drug or food which I'm going to read from and I finally had the sense of profound relief this is a good chapter I'm on my way I'm going to be able to get this book done and then I'm reading a book called 1493. so I spend four thousand words I have four thousand words basically discussing this question of whether sugar is a drug or a food is it addictive 1493 is written by a friend of mine Charles Mann it's about the history of What's called the Columbus exchange to the spread of foods and and plants around the world after Columbus discovered America and Charles he goes by cam is such a beautiful writer that I can't even read his writing it depresses me so much but I realized they had a chapter on the history of sugar I should read it because I know he's such a great reporter and a great writer and I'm reading his history and in this chapter he has a single line 17 words he says scientists today debate amongst themselves whether sugar is a addictive substance or people just act like it is and I think great I've written 4 000 words cams just wrapped it up in 17. I could throw away my first chapter and then I'm back to the state of Frozen you know writer's block that I was in or I could keep the first chapter and quote cam which is what I do so you're going to find Cam's quote in here it begins with two other quote two epigraphs the first is from Royal Al Dao his Memoir boys Tales of childhood which was written in 1984. and Dahl said the sweet shop in landf in the year of 1923 was very center of our Lives to us it was what it was what a bar is to a drunk or a churches to a bishop without it there would have been little to live for sweets were our life blood and then the second quote is from Michael Pollan Botany of Desire 2001 one of the great books Michael wrote before Omnivore's Dilemma he said imagine a moment when the sensation of Honey or sugar on the tongue was an astonishment a kind of intoxication the closest I've ever come to recovering such a sense of sweetness was second hand though it left a powerful impression on me even so I'm thinking of my son's first experience of sugar the icing on the cake at his first birthday I have only the testimony of Isaac's face to go by that and his fierceness to repeat the experience but it was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him was in fact an ecstasy in the literal sense of that word that is he was beside himself with the pleasure of it no longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had been just a moment before between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement he was on my lap and I was delivering the ambrosial fork falls to his gaping mouth as if to exclaim your world contains this from this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it by the way you should argue the wisdom of starting a book with two authors who can write better than you can your readers are likely to put your book down I think I'm gonna go get Botany of Desire okay what if we're all down Michael pollen are right that the taste of sugar on the tongue can be a kind of intoxication doesn't it suggest the policy possibility that Sugar itself is an intoxicant a drug imagine a drug that can do this to us that can Infuse us with energy and can do so when taken by mouth doesn't have to be injected smoked or snorted for us to experience its Sublime and soothing effects imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids and that when it given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its Pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives by the way just when I put together this thought experiment that I'm about to read I never thought I'd be able to use it in the book I thought if I put this in the first chapter it gives away my hand so profoundly no one will ever think I was balanced or unbiased and then I sent it to a colleague of mine who's one of the best scientists I know and he said if you don't use this you're crazy so it plays my hand over consumption of this drug may have long-term side effects but there are none in the short term no staggering or dizziness no slurring of speech no passing out or drifting away no hard palpitations or respiratory distress when it is given to Children its effects may be only more extreme variations on the Apparently natural emotional roller coaster of childhood from the initial intoxication to the Tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later more than anything our imaginary drug makes children happy at least for the period during which they're consuming it it calms their distress eases their pain focuses their attention and then leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off the only downside is that children will come to expect another dose perhaps to demand it on a regular basis I should have said this book was also informed by the fact that I am a parent of two pre-adolescent boys um and Michael Pollan who said to me at lunch one day that moderating your children's sugar intake is one of the primary responsibilities of adulthood and I borrow from Michael there as well but I don't quote him um how long would it be before parents took to using our imaginary drug to calm their children when necessary to alleviate pain to prevent outbursts of unhappiness or to distract attention and once the drug became identified with pleasure how long before it was used to celebrate birthdays a soccer game good grades at school how long before it became a way to communicate love and celebrate happiness how long before no Gathering of family and friends was complete without it before major holidays and celebrations were defined in part by the use of this drug to assure pleasure how long would it be before the underprivileged of the world would happily spend with little money they had on this drug rather than on nutritious meals for their families how long would it be before this drug is Anthropologist Sydney W mint said about sugar demonstrated quote a near invulnerability in a moral attack before even writing a book such as this one was perceived as a nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas I wanted to call this book stealing Christmas the case against sugar and just lay it out there because I I understand the grinch-like aspect of what I'm doing I mean I'm not blind to it another way of saying I'm not an idiot but my editor preferred and a surprising number of people when I told them the title didn't get the Grinch reference so I don't know maybe Dr Seuss isn't quite as that permeated our lives as I thought okay what is it about the experience of consuming sugar and sweets particularly during childhood that invokes so readily the comparison to a drug I have children still relatively young and I believe raising them would be a far easier job of sugar and sweets were not an option if managing their sugar consumption as Michael Pollan said that I'm not quoting here did not seem to be a constant theme in our parental responsibilities even those who vigorously defend the place of sugar and sweets in modern diets quote an innocent moment of pleasure a bomb amid the stress of Life unquote as the British journalist Tim Richardson has written acknowledge that this dose does not include allowing children quote to eat as many sweets as they want at any time and that quote most parents will want to race in their children's sweets unquote but why is it necessary children crave many things Pokemon cards Star Wars paraphernalia Dora the Explorer backpacks and many foods taste good to them what is it about sweets it makes them so uniquely in need of rationing which is another way of asking whether the comparison to drugs of abuse is a valid one this is of more than academic interest because responsive entire populations the sugar has been effectively identical to that of children once populations are exposed they consume as much sugar as they can easily procure although there may be natural limits set by culture and current attitudes about food the primary barrier to more consumption up to the point where populations become obese and diabetic and then perhaps Beyond has tended to be availability in price this includes in one study sugar intolerant Canadian Inuit who lack the enzyme necessary to digest the fructose component of sugar and yet continue to consume sugary Beverages and Candy despite quote the abdominal distress that it brought them is the price of a pound of sugar has dropped over the centuries from the equivalent of 360 eggs in the 13th century to two in the early Decades of this one the amount of sugar consumed is steadily inexorably climbed in 1934 while sales of candy continuing to increase during the Great Depression the New York Times commented quote the depression proved that people wanted candy and that as long as they had any money at all they would buy it during those brief periods of time during which sugar production surpassed our ability to consume it the sugar industry and purveyors of sugar-rich products have worked diligently to increase demand and at least until recently have succeeded the critical question what scientists debate is a journalist and historian Charles C Mann has elegantly put it is whether sugar is actually an addictive substance or if people just act like it is the question is not easy to answer certainly people in populations have acted as though sugar is addictive but science provides no definitive evidence until recently nutritionist studying sugar did so from the natural perspective viewing sugar as a nutrient to carbohydrate and nothing more they occasionally argued about whether or not it might play a role in diabetes or heart disease but not about whether it triggered a response in the brain or body that made us want to consume it in excess that was not their area of Interest the few neurologists and psychologists interested in probing the Sweet Tooth phenomena or why we might need to ration our sugar consumption so as not to eat it to excess did so typically from the perspective of how these sugars compared with other drugs of abuse in which the mechanism of addiction is now relatively well understood lately this comparison has received more attention as the Public Health Community has looked to ration our sugar consumption as a population and is thus considered the possibility that one way to regulate these sugars as with cigarettes is to establish that they are indeed addictive these sugars are very likely unique in that they are both a nutrient and a psychoactive substance with some addictive characteristics historians have often considered the sugars a drug metaphor to be an apt one a quote that sugar is particularly highly refined sucrose produce peculiar physiological effects as well known throughout the late Sydney mints whose 1985 book sweetness and power is one of two seminal English language histories of sugar and which other more recent writers on the subject myself included heavily rely but these effects are neither as visible nor as long lasting as those of alcohol or caffeinated beverages quote the first use of which can trigger rapid changes in respiration heartbeat skin color and so on minces argued that a primary reason that through the century sugar is escaped religious based criticisms the kind pronounced on tea coffee rum and even chocolate is that whatever conspicuous behavioral changes may occur when infants consume sugar it did not cause the kind of flushing staggering dizziness Euphoria changes in the pitch of the voice slurring of speech visibly intensified physical activity or any of the other cues associated with the ingestion of these other drugs as this book's word you sugar appears to be a substance that causes pleasure with the price it is difficult to discern immediately and paid unfold on the years or decades later with no visible directly noticeable consequences as Min says questions of quote long-term nutritive or medical consequences went unasked and unanswered most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar because we'll never go long enough without sugar to find out mints and other sugar historians consider the Drug comparison to be so fitting in part because sugar is one of a handful of quote drug foods to use mints's term that came out of the tropics in which European Empires were built from the 16th century onward the others being tea coffee chocolate rum and tobacco its history is intimately linked to that of these other drugs rum is distilled of course from sugarcane whereas tea coffee and chocolate were not consumed with sweeteners in their regions of origin actually when the Conquistadors discovered the Aztecs um eating chocolate in Mexico in their March and through the continent and their Devastation of the people they the Aztecs are mixing it with um Chili Peppers and the Conquistadors tried it and they said it to quote it tasted awful and they wouldn't feed it to their pigs so they shipped it back to Europe anyway and it started we started mixing it with sugar in Europe and within about 50 years hot chocolate had become sort of the morning and afternoon topple for the Spanish aristocrats in the 17th century one sugar was added to the sweetener and prices allowed at the consubstance of these substances in Europe exploded sugar was used to sweeten Liquors and wine in Europe as early as the 14th century even cannabis preparations in India and opium-based wines and syrups included sugar as a major ingredient Cola nuts containing both caffeine and traces of a milder stimulant called theobromine became a product of universal consumption in the late 19th century first is a coca-infused wine in France and then as the original mixture of cocaine and caffeine of Coca-Cola which sugar acid added to mass the bitterness of the other two substances the removal of the cocaine in the first years of the 20th century seem to have little influence on Coca-Cola's ability to become as one journalist described it later quote the sublimated essence of all that America stands for the single most widely distributed product on the planet and the second most recognizable word on Earth okay being the first it's not a coincidence that John Pemberton the inventor of Coca-Cola had a morphine addiction that he'd acquired after being wounded in the Civil War Coca-Cola was one of several patent medicines he invented to help wean him off the harder drug like Coca-Cola enables its partakers to undergo long fast and fatigue read one article in 1884. Two drugs so closely related in their physiological properties cannot fail to command early Universal attention as for tobacco sugar was and still is a critical ingredient the American Blended tobacco cigarette the first of which was camel introduced by R.J Reynolds in 1913. it's this quote marriage of tobacco and sugar unquote as a sugar industry report described that in 1950 that makes for the mild experience of smoking cigarettes as compared with cigars and perhaps more important makes it possible for most of us to inhale cigarette smoke and draw deep into our lungs it's the inhalibility of American Blended cigarettes that made them so powerfully addictive as well as so potently carcinogenic and that drove the explosion in cigarette smoking in the U.S and Europe in the first half of the 20th century then the rest of the world shortly thereafter and of course the lung cancer epidemics that have accompanied it an interesting story when I about 15 years ago I read a book called sugar Blues do any of you guys remember that William Duffy Gloria Swanson's husband wrote this book and in the book he talks about sugar and tobacco and how the sugar and the tobacco leaf is critical to the success of the American cigarette and for years after that I tried to confirm that story and I just couldn't find any evidence to do it and two things happened the internet grew and grew and more and more sources of evidence got scanned into the computer and you could search them and I also back in about 2011 I was lecturing in Denver at a bookstore Canada covered in Denver and after my lecture a woman came up to me and she said she was a dentist I had gotten a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to write this book on sugar and part of the grant was to uncover what I considered was sure with sugar industry influence on the science in the 70s you could feel it in the research the same way you know they discovered planets by seeing the influence of another planet so I'm giving this lecture I had done nothing on the book I had completely stalled I was starting my not-for-profit instead and after the lecture this woman comes up to me Kristen Kearns and she says she's a dentist in Denver she works in a lower class clinic and she deals with diabetics with terrible teeth all day long and she read my book good calories bad calories and she became obsessed with it and then she went to a lecture on uh you know a dentistry and chronic diseases and she heard a speaker from the American Diabetes Association say they didn't know why diabetics had such poor teeth and she was horrified and she started investigating the sugar industry and she used Google and she found a catch of sugar industry documents that was uh from a defunct sugar industry that a company that had gone out of business and donated its archives to Colorado State University and she drove up from Denver to Fort Collins and she started pulling boxes and the first box was labeled confidential sugar industry documents and she thought she so she tells me the story after my talk and my eyes light up like the big bad wolf scared the hell it's like I want everything you've got and I want to put it in my book and take credit for it um I learned that Kristen's sense of humor was different than mine so I had a anyway we ended up working together we did a a cover story from Mother Jones that helped Kristen get a job at UCSF as a researcher um if you read the New York Times you know she's had a couple of Front Page New York Times stories based on her research and I talk about her research in the book and I'm proud to have played a role in her life although I still regret having scared her so much that first day um one of the documents that Kristen found is this document written by a sugar industry executive in 1954 called The Marriage of sugar and tobacco so post-world War II the sugar industry all of America starts going on a diet in part because artificial sweeteners are suddenly available to allow people to cut calories and people are arguing that sugar is fattening and the sugar industry sees the writing on the wall even then and they realize they have to start diversifying their products so they have to find other products that they could be using and they're proud of the fact in 1954 that sugar has played such a major role in The Tobacco industry and they're bragging about in this document and they had no reason to think that it wasn't a great thing it was more American capitalism at work and so it's all laid out in this document including the references to FDA reports and the name of you know Tobacco Company Executives who could confirm it and it didn't really fit in my book because my books about heart disease and diabetes not the role of sugar and tobacco but how can I leave it out so at one point I had a chapter called The Marriage of sugar and tobacco that had given number it was chapter two and a half you know like that if any of you saw Being John Malkovich there was ended up chapter three my editor doesn't have the same sense of humor I do either but um the other interesting thing is it actually had been covered there's a brilliant historian of science at Stanford Robert Proctor who'd written a 700 page expose of the sugar industry called Golden the Holocaust that is relentlessly reported all based on the tobacco industry documents and he came upon this article on the tobacco industry documents so it doesn't really fit into his book but he wrote about it anyway probably because it's such an amazing story about the role of sugar and tobacco and I was still able to kind of get the scoop in this book because first of all Robert Proctor's book is 700 pages long so it's hard to get through um I find myself saying of other people's books what other people said of good calories bad calories it's good but it's long anyway a little bit more reading then we'll go to q and A's unlike alcohol which was the only commonly available psychoactive substance in the old world until sugar nicotine and caffeine arrived on the scene the latter three had at least some stimulating properties and so offered a very different experience one that was more conducive to the labor of everyday life these were quote the 18th century equivalent of uppers writes the Scottish historian Neil Ferguson taken together the new drugs gave English society An Almighty hit the Empire it might be said was built on a huge sugar caffeine and nicotine Rush a rush nearly everyone could experience sugar more than anything seems to have made life worth living as it still does for so many particularly those whose lives were absent the kind of Pleasures that relative wealth and daily hours of leisure might otherwise provide as early as the 12th century one contemporary chronicler of the Crusades Albert of aachen was describing merely the opportunity to sample the sugar from the cane that the Crusaders found growing in the fields of what are now Israel and Lebanon as in and of itself quote some compensation for the suffering they had endured the pilgrims he wrote could not get enough of its sweetness it's sugar tea and coffee instigated the transformation of daily life in Europe and the Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries they became the Indulgence that the laboring classes could afford by the 1870s they had come to be considered necessities of life during periods of economic hardship as a British physician and researcher Edward Smith observed at the time the British poor would sacrifice the nutritious items of their diet before they'd cut back on the sugar they consumed quote in nutritional terms suggested three British researchers in 1970 an analysis of the results of Smith's survey it would have been better if some of the money spent on sugar had been diverted to buy bread and potatoes since this would have given them very many more calories for the same money as well as providing some protein vitamins and minerals which sugar lacks entirely in fact however we find that a taste for the sweetness of sugar tends to become fixed the choice to eat almost as much sugar as they used to do while substantially reducing the amount of meat reinforces our belief that people develop a liking for sugar that becomes difficult to resist or overcome sugar was an ideal substance as mince it served to make a busy life seem less so and the pause that refreshes it eased or seemed to ease the changes back and forth from work to rest it provided swifter sensations of fullness or satisfaction than complex carbohydrates did combined easily with many other foods and some of which was also used tea and biscuit coffee and Bun chocolate and jam smeared bread no wonder the rich and Powerful liked it so much and no wonder the poor learned to love it what Oscar Wilde wrote about cigarettes in 1891 when that Indulgence was about to explode in popularity and availability might also be said about sugar it is quote the perfect pleasure it is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied what more can one want okay thank you I think I'll leave it at that and maybe thank you all right we have about 10 or 15 minutes for questions if you do have a question please come to one of these mics remember to keep your question in the form of a question and keep it to one so we can get through as many as possible thank you I don't want to steal my own book yeah okay so I understand the case against sugar is there a case against artificial sweeteners that is um do they have a bad rap just because big sugar was on their case if we had if we completely replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners would we be healthy or we we not be healthy okay well that's the question if we replace sugar with artificial sweeteners will we be healthier so again 1999 American the food industry was making available 155 pounds of sugar to every man woman and child in the nation and then you calculate how much artificial sweeteners because they're much more intense um so you have a smaller dose to get the same sweetness and then you ask the question which is worse so when the FDA bans cyclamates in 1971 which was the first successful artificial sweetener they did So based on this rule that if you could show that sugar cause cancer in one laboratory animal one you had a ban it as a you had to declare it not generally recognize the safe and there was some lousy studies showing that cyclamates could cause bladder cancer and some rats at enormous doses some funny lines about you'd have to basically drown the rat in Diet Sprite in order to give it um answer to that question is I can't believe artificial sweeteners are worse but the science doesn't exist to say for sure so a lot of the research implicating artificial sweeteners comes from the science of epidemiology observational studies this was the field that I first started examining when I moved into public health so an observational studies you the most famous is a nurse's health study at Harvard of the Framingham heart study you follow a population of people you find out what they eat you give them surveys you follow them for 20 or 30 years and you see what diseases they get and you try to correlate the diseases with whatever it is they ate and you come up with associations and you've heard this phrase Association is not causality so you can say that people who are healthy or consume less artificial sweeteners and people who didn't and people who were lean or consumed less artificial sweeteners and people who are fatter and the nutrition Community because they can't do any better we'll say well this implies that artificial sweeteners makes people fatter but the other likely scenario is people who have a tendency to gain weight are the ones who are going to try and avoid the calories and sugars and the soda and so we're going to drink the diet sodas so you don't know what the truth is that those kinds of studies are the basis of this idea that artificial sweeteners cause metabolic disease like obesity and diabetes when you actually do laboratory studies on humans the evidence very ambiguous and the studies are lacking in rigor and they're often done on lean healthy students so if you're in a university setting you want to do a study you get lean healthy students and they might be able to tolerate sugar and or artificial sweeteners when middle aged people predispose to get fat canned so I think the artificial sweeteners got a bad rap in the 60s and 70s they were tainted with this sense that they're carcinogenic I think that taint has stayed with it ever since and people see them as a Target I find the science uncompelling but it does not mean that they don't cause harm the flip side is that there's at least one study suggesting I forget what sweetener it is might have been sucralose influences are gut by own our gut biota and I don't know if that's meaningful but the researchers would like to think it is and there's um a lot of suggests a lot of smoke and I don't see any fire but I think that artificial sweeteners are vitally important for a lot of people to get off sugar it's just too much of a step to go cold turkey to drinking water so I think they're valuable anyway and I think my guess is that it's worth making the transition they're certainly not worse than sugar and another thing that I think of when I do these studies is I can find epidemics of obesity and diabetes in the literature in which artificial sweeteners clearly played no role at all so when researchers today suggest that the artificial sweeteners might cause obesity or diabetes I say it kind of violates my sense of Occam's razor does that make sense but again one of the messages in this book is that in part because of the success of the sugar industry public relations campaigns in the 70s the research that should have been done 30 and 40 years ago was never done so we don't really know the truth we know that they're not short-term toxins which is what the FDA requires we don't know that they're not long-term toxins hi um your quote by Oscar Wilde touches on what I'm about to ask about but I'm wondering if you can shed some light on the phenomenon where a person can binge on sugar to the point of nausea and yet the brain says give me more I suffer from it if that helps um and the answer is no I mean again one of the things I because of this Lacuna in the research even in the U.S there's one group studying the possibility that triggers addiction at Princeton and they weren't biochemists and I don't think I'd like them and their hearts are in the right place but I don't think they did good science there's research in rats on sugar um one thing I never put in my book my books are good calories bad calories very dense but there was a theory in the field of physiological psychology so physiological psychotic ecology became neurobehavior research merged and they became genetic dominated but in the 70s or 80s from it begins with sort of Claude Barnard and Pavlov and a researcher named cannon at Harvard who coined the term homeostasis and the idea was that our fundamental behaviors are caused by fundamental by physiological States so you drink a beer that's a behavior but you drink the beer because you're thirsty and the Thirsty is a physiological State you're trying to replenish body fluids and there's all kinds of experiments you could do in animals like you get a dream destroy the adrenal glands of a rat and that rat now needs Saul to survive and without knowing it without knowing it needs salt to survive it will come to prefer the taste of salt water to fresh water and then it'll drink salt water in order to keep living so this whole field of science it was the 1980s there was a theory in physiological psychology that the liver is basically the organ that senses hunger just like our eyes we don't actually see with our eyes our eyes record photons coming in and the picture that we see is put together in our brain the ideas are liver basically um monitors all fuel availability in the country and all the in the body and all the foods that we eat are the carbohydrates and fats and proteins are all being passing through the liver and so the idea was that somehow the liver determines fuel status in the United States in in the human body and it inhibits hunger so like insects basically we would be hungry all the time or Baseline behavior is eating but when the liver thinks we have enough fuel it inhibits that behavior and the theory that I found compelling which is actually the theory of a man who's become a friend and colleague now that he's retired is that the liver is monitoring the production of a molecule called ATP and liver cell so ATP is the energy currency of our body it adenine triphosphate and it breaks down to ADP so three phosphate molecules one of them gets used you produce energy you end up with two phosphate molecules so the idea was when we're producing a lot of ATP it means we have a lot of in our liver means we have a lot of fuel available and that signal sent many ways primarily up to the vagus nerve and it inhibits eating Behavior when we consume sugar the fructose molecule because I'm trying to understand that phenomena that you get hungrier when you start eating it I mean this is true to some extent the French have a saying that the appetite begins with the meal and if you think about it you can do this as an experiment think about the number of times you sit down to a meal and you're not really hungry and you start eating and you actually get hungrier as you said that's what an appetizer is it's a food that's supposed to increase your appetite so with sugar in particular it requires more ATP to metabolize it than is produced so it creates a diminishing of ATP and liver cells so you consume it even though it's in theory fueling the liver it's actually depleting liver cells of ATP and if my friend's theory is correct that could explain a scenario by which as you start eating it you suddenly crave more of it and you never get satiated but not all people experience well that's one of the things I mean I go out with my wife a lot of so the things that inform my writing of the book I have children I have a problem controlling myself around sugar I used to be a cigarette smoker so I think I understand Addiction on a very profound level my wife we go to dinner she orders dessert I don't because I'm being virtuous I don't eat sugar right georders dessert because she doesn't care about being virtuous and she has two bites and she pushes it away and she's done I'm having this mental conversation with her dessert now you know go ahead eat it you know you want it no no no no you don't eat sugar it's bad for you you're just going to Crave it because the more you eat the more money it goes back and forth the longer it takes a waitress to clear her plate the greater the chances come to a hundred percent that first I'm going to have one bite and then I'm gonna just finish it you know like give me that um I don't think anyone knows I literally and clearly we respond to Sugar differently you know huh could it be that it doesn't pass the blood brain barrier somehow that it's it has to do with the blood-brain barrier I don't think so but again it's right I think it's fair I think it's a peripheral effect first you know but again it's whatever's happening it happens instantaneously I had a colleague at my not-for-profit who described his you know the first taste of his daughter to an ice cream cone when she was six months old and the effect is so instantaneous that it's hard to understand what signals are being sent so quickly even when a child has never had it before so I you know the University of Washington is full of people who study food reward I think they um I think about their research what they think about mine but this is what people are true yeah okay um sugar I got that um highly refined carbohydrates sort of turn the sugar fairly quickly I get that how about alcohol um also metabolized by the liver also converted into fat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease um is an interesting phenomenon because 20 years ago if you were diagnosed with fatty liver disease your doctor would assume even if you told him you were you know a rabbi and had never had alcohol in your life your doctor would assume you were lying because clearly it's caused by alcohol then what happened is it starts showing up in children and it becomes clear that this disease is not always caused by alcohol and uh yeah Robert lustig who's the Pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco who's sort of the most prominent proponent of the idea that sugar is toxic the argument that I've been making would say that their metabolized the same way effectively the same way biochemists who I know take issue with that um so uncertain as far as you're concerned uncertain as far as you're concerned if it's metabolized the same way and I for some reason as far as you're concerned whether whether or not it's metabolized the same way as sugar is not is a open question yeah it's still an open question I mean again I could probably find biochemists who could tell me for sure but I know biochemists who take the issue with that um you know the other thing is life is a bit tedious and we do need to enjoy ourselves you know it's not just about living forever it's about enjoying it on the way so there's some balance um two more questions yeah one or two yeah one on each yeah thank you for what you do even if uh you did kind of ruin some of my Pleasures but um one thing I'm curious about in your research did you presumably having sugar once a year is better than having it every day which is worse than having it every month is there is there some you know level at which I mean clearly it's not bad yeah this is the thing everyone's clearly different so there's no way to say I mean I as soon as I wrote my first op-ed sort of promoting my book for the Wall Street Journal I got an email from a guy who said email address was Silver Fox z z y at gmail.com or AOL um and he said you know I'm six years old I'm an old fart I'm 80 years old I've been putting three teaspoons of sugar in my coffee every day for 60 years I'm in perfect health and your theory is full of um clearly there are people can tolerate it for whom you know just like there's people who can and this is where this my smoking comes in I mean there are people who smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and never get lung cancer and live to be a hundred so clearly they can tolerate the cigarettes that they smoke and there are people who can clearly consume enormous amounts of sugar and it might even make them more vigorous but the question is when you start with the population so imagine you have a population whichever it is it's a traditional like Native American population in the Washington area 200 years ago and you give them sugar at the hundred pounds a year and then the 200 years later you've got some of them are still very healthy and you know it's a bell-shaped curve and a lot of them are obese and diabetic and it's the sugar so now how do you reverse it and what level is healthy and the problem is I don't know so one way to another way to think about it is clearly there's a level of smoking that people could do like my wife could smoke two cigarettes a day just like she can eat I mean two cigarettes a month we actually have a pack of marbles somewhere in the house that we hope our children never find because her friends come over she can have a cigarette and smoke socially and I can't I have one cigarette I'm going back to thinking about when I'm gonna have the neck sense to take over my life so again it's sort of a decision what you're going to have to make as adults both how much we want to consume considering the balance between Pleasure and Pain if I consume any it's easier for me to eat none than to try and eat at a moderation I think there's a lot of people like me just as it's easier for me not to smoke cigarettes and to try to smoke them in moderation it's easier for most alcoholics to not drink any alcohol than to try and drink in moderation and other people can handle it and there's there's just no way to say a related thing any evidence that it's better if you're doing it eating sugar as part of a meal with protein as opposed to by itself and probably again I would say I think I wonder in doing my research whether the real problem is sugary beverages because of the speed and the amount you consume but again there's there's no way to really tell um the I had a funny story and I forgot what it is one more question thank you it was wonderful speech right so you seem to place the blame on sugar but isn't it true that it's over consumption that is a problem which is the definition of gluttony it's funny I'm staying at the um Clinton Alexis Hotel there's a bookmark restaurant delicious and there the elevator has a quote from Mark Twain and actually I photographed it so I'm going to read it so I don't get it wrong I took a photo my Apple product is failing me what a coincidence he said too much of anything is bad but too much good whiskey is barely enough so as one of my problems with this whole thing is as soon as you say excess sugar consumption or excess calories or excess fat the word excess implies Badness it implies to but what is the correct amount this is the issue it's sort of nobody says too many cigarettes cause lung cancer even though clearly too many cigarettes cause lung cancer we just say cigarettes cause lung cancer and the cause of lung cancer cigarettes no that's true but my point is the word too much is a tautology so there's clearly is a place like I said remember I said Japan didn't have in the 1960s that exceedingly low levels of obesity and diabetes and they had the sugar consumption we had in the 1960s uh 1860s which about half of what we have today so had we never gotten past a 40 pounds per capita in Sugar availability which who knows how much that made the industry makes available is consumed but had we never gotten past that we might still be a lean in healthy population so that might be you know a sugary beverage once every other day or something or a suite is a treat then ice cream is a tree what it used to be before it became a common phenomena then we I think I could imagine that on our population would be healthy and obesity and diabetes would be rare diseases rare disorders conditions but the point is we've now gone to where we are today where 50 of the public is obese and or diabetic so they might be healthier eating no sugar at all not even fruit which is a radical thing to say but something I believe so it's almost impossible it's sort of the same question he was asking how do we Define too much if the problem is caused by sugar then it implies that there's a level in which it's so if toxicologists say the dose makes the poison so it implies that there's a dose that's safe but we don't know what it is and we can be confident that it's different for different people when I it's trying to establish is that it's the sugar is the problem not too many calories not too much fat not too much but how do we Define overconsumption it's like if you're lean and your sister's fat your sister is over consuming yeah I just had problems with the logic involved and I can't it draws me my last chapter is called how little is still too much and I talk about these you know logical Loops we go and as soon as we try to define something like moderation or the flip side of moderation is over consumption it's like Michael Pollan said you know famously eat food not too much mostly plants I think not too much is meaningless because there are people who weigh twice what you weigh and eat half what you eat but they're by definition eating too much right because they're fat they can indeed but we don't we don't say too much drinking causes liver cancer we say alcohol causes liver cancer it's true that you have to there's a point that it's safe and a point that it's not but we don't say that it's only when it comes to food and sugar that we start talking about the over consumption and too much otherwise it's taught a logical clearly if something's bad for you there's a level at which it becomes too much okay thank you thank you very much

Channel: Town Hall Seattle

Views: 132,001

Keywords: Gary Taubes the case against sugar, Gary Taubes good calories bad calories, Gary Taubes why we get fat, Gary Taubes joe rogan, Gary Taubes sugar, Gary Taubes ketogenic diet, Gary Taubes debate, Gary Taubes ted talk, Gary Taubes diet, the case against sugar, good calories bad calories, why we get fat, ketogenic diet, sugar, diet, fat, calories, ketogenic, keto, Gary, Taubes, Seattle, Town Hall, Town Hall Seattle

Id: 2jla1ofRIiY

Length: 82min 39sec (4959 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2017