Even if you have only a passing interest in nutrition and the subject of ‘healthy eating’, you’re likely to have picked up a change of wind in recent times regarding the dietary cause of obesity. For three or four decades, conventional wisdom has had it that dietary fat is the true villain of the peace. Fat, after all, contains about twice as many calories as carbohydrate and protein, and the idea here is that if we eat a lot of fat, we’re likely to end up eating calories that are surplus to requirements, which can then end up being dumped as fat in our tissues. Fat is also incriminated by its name (it is called ‘fat’, after all).
However, latterly, there has been increasing focus on the role of sugar in obesity and disease. This week’s British Medical Journal carries and editorial which highlights this. This editorial makes mention of another piece in the same edition of the journal in which journalist Geoff Watts writes about the book Pure, White and Deadly, written by doctor and nutritionist John Yudkin in 1972. I have a copy of the book on my bookshelf which I purchased some years ago. The book highlights what John Yudkin thought about the perils of sugar, particularly in relation to heart disease. It also makes and account of some of the political struggles he faced from the food industry and the British Nutrition Foundation.
The food industry can be expected to want to protect itself from anti-sugar attacks, of course. Only this week we have seen Coca Cola launch a TV advertisement in the US which is a major damage limitation exercise, pointing the finger at all calories as a potential source of obesity (not just those from super-sugary soft drinks) and highlighting their offering of no-calorie and low-calorie products. Most people, I think, are savvy enough to see through this sort of guff.
However, the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) is, I think, a more worrying body, because (like the British Dietetic Association), I think it positions itself as a source of independent and evidence-based advice on diet. It’s got a really ‘solid’ name, I believe the organisation is in fact riddled with conflicts of interest that come from its apparently cosy relationship with the food industry. For example, the BNF’s publication published a (I think) hugely biased ‘review’ in praise of bread which was funded by a bread manufacturer. I wrote about this here. The Director General of the BNF wrote to me with some sort of a defence, but closer examination revealed the situation was worse than I first suspected, and she never did respond to some questions I asked her about how the review came about in the first place (giving her the opportunity to prove the integrity and transparency of her organisation in this instance). You can read about this here.
Here’s an except from Pure, White and Deadly which speaks, I think, of a sorry tale of how the British Nutrition Foundation worked to suppress John Yudkin, his research and his influence. Read this except, and you may be forgiven for thinking that the BNF is not a nutritional organisation at all, but a political one. Its remit, I believe, is simply to further the interests of its sponsors (elements within the food industry).
The British Nutrition Foundation
The British Nutrition Foundation was born in 1967, 26 years after the birth of the Nutrition Foundation of the United States. The latter is funded almost entirely by the American food industry and has a large Council, comprising not only members of the industry but also research workers in nutrition and food sci¬ ences and distinguished members of the public. It produces a regular monthly journal. Nutrition Reviews, which discusses and comments. on recently published research in the wide field of nutrition. The Nutrition Foundation also publishes occasional volumes that sum¬ marize what research has discovered in the major areas of nutrition. On the whole, it can be said that the American Nutrition Foundation is not influenced by the fact that it is funded by the food industry, although it has to be admitted that it rarely criticizes aspects of the industry that a completely uncommitted group might consider deserve at least some degree of criticism.Thus, when it was set up in 1967, the British Nutrition Found¬ ation (BNF) had the American organization as a model, and it too was funded by the food industry. Its first and major sponsors were the sugar refiners Tate & Lyie, and the flour millers then known as Rank. This combination occurred, it seems, chiefly because of the personal friendship between, on the one hand, the families of Tate and Lyie, and on the other hand the Rank family. There was also a business friendship between the two groups, since Rank was to a sizeable extent a user of sugar – for example, in the manufacture of cakes and biscuits – especially after it had amalgamated with two other large firms in the flour milling and baking industry to form Ranks Hovis McDougall.
The first Director of the British Nutrition Foundation was the late Professor Alastair Frazer, a biochemist who had taken a special interest in the biochemistry of drugs and had just retired from the Chair of Pharmacology at Birmingham University. His major research had been on how the body digests and absorbs fat from food. To this extent, then, he was concerned with nutrition, although in a fairly narrow field. At first he was kept busy approach¬ ing other firms in the food industry, most of whom were, it seems, less than enthusiastic about promising financial support to the organization; for this reason the BNF had a precarious first few years. However, one approach to the food industry seemed more successful than most: Professor Frazer’s claim that, in a climate of growing consumer concern about processes and additives used by the food industry, the BNF would stand as a sort of protective fence between the industry and the public. In spite of these time-consuming efforts to produce funds for the Foundation, the Director-General nevertheless found time to supervise and support a film telling of the virtues of sugar as a food.
From what I have said, you might ask whether the BNF at that time tended to be somewhat on the side of sugar, and if so whether it has remained so. I shall let you make up your own mind when you have finished reading this chapter.
The Director-General objects
In the late 19605 Ranks Hovis McDougall ( R H M) decided to begin research into the possibility of producing an inexpensive high-protein food: an attempt that, some twenty years and tens of millions of pounds later, has recently resulted in an excellent savoury pie appearing on the market. At the very beginning of the project I was asked by the then Director of Research of RHM to act as an adviser on the project.At the same time he told me that his friends from Ranks Hovis McDougall and from Tate & Lyle, both of which continued to be major sponsors of the BNF, had said that it was not appropriate for me to advise RHM; nevertheless he himself wanted me to do so. A short while after the project got under way, he told me that the Director-General of the BNF was pressing him to tell me to desist from saying that sugar was harmful. I said that it would be more sensible if we had a meeting with Professor Frazer at which I would describe the results of our recent research and explain the reasonableness of my views.
We met at BNF headquarters: Professor Frazer, the Research Director of RHM, two or three members of BNF, and I. We had an interesting discussion, from which it was clear that Professor Frazer was not very up to date on research into the causes of coronary heart disease, or research into some of the effects of sugar on the body. He strongly rejected the suggestion that sugar had, or could have, anything to do with coronary disease. He insisted that there was no relationship between the increase in sugar consumption and any increase in coronary disease; in fact, he said, there had not been an increase in the disease. I said that this was contradicted by the general recognition of cigarette smoking as an important cause of the disease; as there had been a tremendous increase in smoking, it followed there must also have been an increase in the prevalence of heart disease. ‘That only shows,’ said Professor Frazer, ‘that smoking too has nothing to do with the disease’ – a view that would have been supported by very few other scientists or doctors.
As we left the room after lunch, the Director-General was overheard to say, ‘You can take it that Yudkin won’t be getting any research grants from the BNF’; this prophecy was certainly fulfilled.
The BNF doesn’t want nutritionists from QEC
Throughout my time as Head of the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, neither I nor any of my colleagues had any association with the BNF. I should point out here that my Department, instituted in 1953, was the first in any European university to be devoted to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of nutrition, and was carrying out research that was probably at least as extensive as that of any other nutrition department in the country.In terms of the aims of the BNF, its most important committee must be its Science Committee. The chairmen of this committee have always been distinguished scientists; none has been a professional nutritionist but they have all had some contact, if sometimes rather remote, with the subject of nutrition. As I write, there have been five chairmen of this committee since the Foundation began; these have included the late Sir Charles Dodds, one of the outstanding biochemists of the time, and the late Sir Ernst Chain, who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin with Florey and Fleming. Both Dodds and Chain approached me while Chairman and asked why I was not on the BNF Science Committee, or indeed on any of its other committees. When I said that I had not been invited, they asked if they might suggest that I should be appointed. To this I agreed, although I guessed what the reply would be. And so it proved. Both chairmen had been told in due course that there was no question of having me in any way associated with the BNF. What I had not guessed was that the member of the BNF Board from Tate & Lyle, which had remained one of the major sponsors of the Foundation, had said that if I were appointed he would resign from the Board, and would see that his firm – and others – withdrew their sponsorship.
If you have the stomach for more, I suggest you grab yourself a copy of John Yudkin’s Pure, White and Deadly. For many years, it was out of print. But recently the publisher (Penguin) has decided to roll the presses on this book once again, and I think it’s about time too.
Congratulations for drawing attention to the long overdue republication of Yudkin’s classic work. And congratulations to Penguin for republishing it. But I wonder how long it will be before someone from Tate & Lyle sidles up to the chairman of Penguin (probably in the Reform Club), and says, ‘Why on earth have you bothered to republish that thoroughly second-rate book by Yudkin? It never was much good, and it’s decades out of date now. Such a pity, because it reflects badly on the rest of your list.’
And so on. This kind of lobbying goes on from top to bottom. I recently made a very brief reference to the new book on sugar by Robert Lustig, and within days a comment questioning Lustig’s quality as a scientist appeared. Even on a piddling little blog like mine (http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/sugar-bitter-truth.html) That’s because the vested interests have set up a Google alert for the names of Yudkin and Lustig, and every time they are mentioned a quiet little ‘corrective’ appears. Watch this space.
Nice study. Here’s the link: http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e7492
I’m sure people won’t be surprised to hear that sugar makes you fat. But they may be surprised to hear that, according to the paper, replacing sugar with other carbohydrates (ie starch) doesn’t make any difference.
However, the researchers use this to bend the results around to the completely illogical, but stand, conclusion that it’s all about calories: “The data suggest that the change in body fatness that occurs with modifying intake of sugars results from an alteration in energy balance rather than a physiological or metabolic consequence of monosaccharides or disaccharides.”
So, they are saying, it’s not the sugar (because it works the same for starch); therefore it’s the calories. Whereas we would say, it’s the sugar AND the starch, because they are the same thing!
… and: the “suggest that sugar increases body weight mainly by promoting overconsumption of energy” (http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8077)
I bought the book a little while ago when it would still have cost £120 second hand in the States. This for me flagged up a sea change in attitude that Penguin must have latched on to. This is a marker of change gives me some confidence that change is quietly underway and accelerating.
I looked at the comment referenced above and to me it appears extremely suspect, indeed the way it is constructed looks like there has been a professional hand in it.
I read ‘Pure, White an Deadly’ in the 70s. Yudkin was way before his time. It was difficult to buy anything much sugar-free then but I do remember buying Wholeearth Marmalade. I might buy a copy of the book now. Pity the author can’t see himself vindicated.
I bought a copy about 2 weeks ago. I’ve only just started reading and, yes, it is somewhat outdated being originally wrote in 1972 and then updated in 1986 (?). However, it’s a chilling look at Yudkin’s prophecy about sugar which, unfortunately, is proving to be true.
It’s a great piece of work from a history of nutrition, but it’s message is just as relevant today as it was 30-40 years ago!
I’m so glad this has been reprinted, because originals are impossible to get hold of.
I read Yudkin’s book a few years back after a recommendation from a tutor on my weight loss course. It soon becomes so obvious that this information should be common scene. I spent a great portion of my life suffering with mild hypoglycemia. Family and friends come to realise i would be a nightmare if i didn’t eat something every few hours . Cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and pasta for dinner meant i needed snacks in between or i’d feel dizzy, light headed and irritable. As soon as i reduced my sugar content this condition went and i can even miss meals now without biting someones head off. I genuinely feel free and liberated from the sugar roller-coaster. Now if i do have a large sugary desert i can feel heart palpitations and increased breathing rate. Humm i wonder whats worse for your heart a bit of fat or a processed substance which upsets your whole metabolic system? Listen to your body and you can tell whats good for it. Remember this when the sugary processed company’s start there backlash, or your GP tells you to eat no more than three eggs per week and to follow the governments food pyramid.
Wow! John Yudkins book was on my bookshelf from when it was published ’till the Big Clear Out before coming to Spain three years ago – I sold it at a car boot sale, so someone new has read it fairly recently, hopefully…
The message is slow to get through tho, that was 40 years ago!
I despair of the real truth ever emerging. It’s positively dangerous – this political intervention the whole time.
The BMJ article referred to in the editorial can be found at:
http://www.bmj.com/highwire/section-pdf/625499/4/1
The tide really must be turning against sugar. One of the authors of this paper, Professor Jim Mann, once served as a consultant to the Sugar Research Advisory Service (SRAS). On their web site they describe their goal: “The Sugar Research Advisory Service aims to encourage appropriate use and enjoyment of sugar as part of a healthy and balanced diet.”
His name was also attached to a white paper put out by this organization in 2004:
http://sras.org.nz/docs/Sugar_Report_October_2004.pdf
The report includes the statement: “Sugar is an integral part of our diet and the foods that we eat on a day to day basis. It also offers many food benefits such as taste and texture. Sugar is a valuable energy source and therefore its intake needs to be considered in the context of the overall diet.”
Maybe a zebra can change it’s stripes!
I hope this is delivered in ebook form in kindle or iBookstore or nook!
This is such an important article and message. Anyone who values their health should inform themselves about what is going on with our food and all the vested interests involved. The message is beginning to get known.
Professor Michael Yudkin, son of John Yudkin, is a speaker at a FAB event in Oxford in March ..
http://www.fabresearch.org/3218
.. along with Professor Robert Lustig, the author of ‘Fat Chance: the bitter truth about sugar’.
Of course there’s this excellent lecture ‘The Bitter truth’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It seems that dieticians have a completely different view on healthy eating from nutritionists. Not just on sugar but on carbs generally. Leaflets on healthy eating are or were produced by the sugar bureau.
That ‘balanced diet’ phrase has a lot to answer for. It is trotted out at will by those who don’t wnat the truth known. Few people know what it really means. In my view sugar has no value at all in a healthy diet, it just tastes good that is all. The body’s need for carbs and sugar is actually nil! Yet we die without protein and fat. This makes a nonsense of just how much sugar people are consuming, as they assume they need it for energy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Thanks for excerpt. Yudkin is correct when he says sugar is “pure” and “deadly”. Yudkin certainly went against the grain when he wrote this book. Seems like if someone speaks about something that has the potential to make large, powerful groups lose money, everything and anything is done to cover up.
Another lie that will be surfacing very soon is the fallacy that fat and cholesterol causes heart disease. Where the sugar industry have been covering up Yudkin’s work for decades, the pharmaceutical industry have been covering up the lie that cholesterol causes heart disease, in the effort to support the $30 Billion statin market. So don’t worry if removing sugar from your diet means you need to replace it with more fat and cholesterol – your heart will love you for it. As long as its natural animal fat that is, from grass-fed pastured animals – and none of that artificial processed rubbish. Yes, that’s right, natural saturated animal fat is the healthiest of them all! Who’d a thought!
Now we need “Pure, orange and deadly” to explain why the composition of calorific sweeteners in orange juice and full sugar or HFCS coca cola is practically the same and to explain what this means for health messages. If you blame sucrose for something you have to attach the same blame to orange juice, if not to all carbohydrates.
Hi John
Great item as usual, thanks for the up-date on John Yudkin’s Pure, White and Deadly. Over to Amazon now me thinks. Keep kicking butt and thanks for your great work.
The George McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs 1973.
Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. “I don’t hold the cholesterol view for a moment,” Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. “For a modern disease to be related to an old fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life,” Cleave said. “if anybody tells me that eating fat was the cause of coronary disease, I should look at them in amazement. But, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up … that is a very different proposition.” Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides. McGovern now struggled with the difficulty of getting some consensus on these matters.
“Are you saying that you don’t think a high fat intake produces the high cholesterol count?” McGovern asked Yudkin. “Or are you even saying that a person with high cholesterol count is not in great danger?”
“Well, I would like to exclude those rare people who have probably a genetic condition in which there is an extremely high cholesterol,” Yudkin responded. “If we are talking about the general population, I believe both those things that you say. I believe that decreasing the fat in the diet is not the best way of combating a high blood cholesterol …. I believe that the high blood cholesterol in itself has nothing whatever to do with heart disease.”
“That is exactly opposite what my doctor told me,” said McGovern.
Extract taken from the brilliant book ‘The Diet Delusion’ by Gary Taubes page 123 a must read for anyone with an interest in weight loss and controlling diabetes.
Kind regards Eddie
That book is available here for free:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61094773/John-Yudkin-Pure-White-and-Deadly-The-New-Facts-About-the-Sugar-You-Eat-as-a-Cause-of-Heart-Disease-Diabetes-and-Other-Killers
I’ve just watched the Youtube clip with Dr Robert Lustig that Chloe provided a link to. Oh my God, I urge you to watch it. Having read John’s book & spent literally hours & hours researching low carb/paleo/primal diets, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of it. This lecture from Lustig was amazing – wouldn’t it be good if GPs & dieticians watched it?
The BNF is a registered charity. Perhaps John you might want to ask the Director-General if they get any charitable donations from British Sugar/Tate & Lyle. I think they are obliged to declare these if asked. If the BNF has interests which it is promoting against evidence for links between eg diabetes or cancer then they would be an industry lobbying group not entitled to charitable status. Also should not be getting EU or UK research grants.
Here are a list of videos that you guys may find interesting. They all err on the side of low-carb eating, the Paleo diet and a general approach to nutrition of eating ‘real food’ (ie avoiding food that is subject to industrial processing).
http://naturalmessiah.blogspot.co.uk/p/audiovisual.html
Here’s another link for the book pdf:
http://www.hcvsociety.org/files/Diet/Pure-White-and-Deadly.pdf
No surprise that the cash cows of agri-business want to keep the truth about a lot of their products away from the public eye.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
This is Lustig’s lecture on youtube. It went viral and has many many hits…Should be mandetroy viewing!
I wonder how soft drinks industry people can sleep at night knowing they are the main driver of obesity in children…
I wonder how soft drinks industry people can sleep at night knowing they are the main driver of obesity in children…
In the same way that the tobacco industry people got to sleep knowing they were actively promoting the addictive qualities of tobacco….
The film The Insider was a watershed for me and if you haven’t seen it please do and bear in mind the above discussion. It is about (I forget his name) an insider in one of the big tobacco firms in the US who “outed” his knowledge that they were knowingly marketing their products in such a way as to increase addiction. Oh boy.
Are you aware of this report?
And Now a Word from Our Sponsors: Are America’s Nutrition Professionals in the Pocket of Big Food? by Eat, Drink, Politics’ Public Health Lawyer Michele Simon
Found at;
http://www.eatdrinkpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/AND_Corporate_Sponsorship_Report.pdf
Another very new book is by cardiologist Stephen Sinatra- ‘The great cholesterol myth’ points to sugar as the culprit.
I have Yudkin other book first published in 1958 ‘This Slimming Business’ where he cites sugar as the cause o weight gain. Now 60 years later Sinatra is saying the same thing. 60 years of going round the fat roundabout.
I am witnessing a roundabout turn on a few sacred ideas. One of which is the role of carbohydrate in the diet. It appears to me there is a gradual shift in thinking about starch; it isn’t as bad as we once feared. A certain percentage of carbohydrate is needed for optimum health (Paul Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet). When we talk about sugar, we don’t always make clear which sugar we’re referring to. Fructose and glucose are metabolised differently. Ray Peat points out that in the past fructose was used to treat diabetes (I haven’t checked his references and I do admit much of what he say’s make me scratch my head). If true, we ought to take a critical approach to anything we think we know about any food or mechanism. As time goes on I am less inclined to vilify any food or accept any alternative idea just because ‘it makes so much sense’. When I read Yudkin he made so much sense. Then I read Peat and thought ‘oh that’s interesting’. Robert McCArrison’s work highlighted that carbohydrate in the form of freshly milled whole meal flour and fruits is highly advantageous. Stephan Guyenet’s post: ‘is sugar fattening’ feb 22 2012 points out that the evidence is complicated. So you see, a lowly reader who has read enough to know that things are never as they seem is reluctant to jump on the ‘big pharma’, ‘big corporate interests’ bandwagon. At the moment Price, McCarrison and Pottenger are my ‘go to’ guy’s.
M, you raise some good points, but retain an open mind about carbohydrates if you can.
In the longer run of time carbohydrates have generally been been consumed in association with plenty of fibre. In modernity carbohydrates are consumed in association with less fibre. In the agrarian age there has been a shift towards eating more of the calorie dense carbs we call ‘staples’, these staples are often subject to pre-consumptive process and/or cooking. Each of these aspects greatly raises the overall glycaemic load of the human diet. There has been a great alteration to the nature of the human diet in 10,000 years. In evolutionary terms the change in certain attributes of the diet in those 10,000 years probably exceeds any measure of adaptation to these alterations. There is no reason to imagine adaptation prepared us for refined sugar or refined flour. We’ve been misled, too, by a willingness to direct complex carbs are far superior to sugar.
The big problem with long exposure to carb rich diets of high overall GL seems to be that they raise levels of insulin and if left unaddressed raised levels of insulin leads to ‘inflammation’. The body produces eicosanoids from certain fats. Eicosanoids are signalling molecules not unlike hormones – if more basic. Insulin, too much insulin, seems to work like a switch on certain eicosanoid production, and it results (simplistically speaking) that more ‘bad’ ones are produced at the expense of the ‘good’ ones. The ‘bad’ ones signal more ‘inflammation’. Inflammation seems to be causally involved in a range of health conditions. It is a mystical or mysterious affair that does not get enough airtime, but if you are curious to want an indication of the range of conditions in which inflammation may play a part then reading ‘Trick & Treat’ (Barry Groves) and ‘Earthing’ (Ober, Sinatra, Zucker) back to back and look out for the synergies between them. ‘Sinatra’ is the same Dr Stephen Sinatra, a cardiologist, who gets a mention higher up the thread. Discussion of multiple sclerosis in each of these books caught me off guard for clearly indicating causal factors where previously I had considered MS such a cruel and indiscriminate disease whose cause seemed totally inexplicable. If your interest and curiosity guides you to read these two titles and you too begin to wonder follow on with Ben Goldacres ‘Bad Pharma’.
Quite right, familiarity leads to contempt. The route by which I perceive this happens is that familiar and repeated exposure to certain things discourages curiosity, unfortunately some of the most familiar affairs in life can be the least well understood. Food and money rank highly. Aspects of money (really it is circumstances and conditions that arise under the influence of ‘fiat currency’) exert significant influence over what is offered for sale, how it it is grown, processed, and buying habits. The highly asymmetric nature of ‘fiat currency’ generally escapes the critical attention it deserves and as chance has it it is the asymmetric aspect that exerts the greatest influence over outcome. Large and highly capitalised business interests in the food provision chain contribute to a redistribution of wealth which undermines the quality and affordability of food offered for sale. Matters are multi-factorial, mind, and a comment can only indicate a few of the factors.
A fascinating post, thanks. What do you think the future of legislation is for sugar?