John_Yudkin_-_Pure_White_and_Deadly_revised_1986_OCR

Pure, White and DeadbJ
diet that tells you in effect to reduce only, or chiefly, those foods
that give you the calories you don't need whilst giving you little of
the nutrients you do need.
Although I said I was not going to go into details about the principles
of obesity, I must add one important point about babies. I
have already mentioned the custom, increasingly common among
parents, of adding sugar to milk formulas and to the cereal and other
foods on which babies are weaned, as well as giving them sugary
drinks. The result is the number of fat babies to be seen everywhere,
to the extent that paediatric authorities in the United States and the
United Kingdom have frequently drawn attention to the problem.
A few years ago it was suggested that the overfeeding of babies
not only made them fat, but encouraged the development and persistence
of obesity when they became adults. The story was that the
fat cells in the babies' adipose tissue are encouraged by overeating
to divide, so that not only do the existing cells become full of fat but
the body produces more cells in order to accommodate still more
fat. This idea was based on the finding that the number of cells that
could be seen in the adipose tissue of fat babies was greater than the
number in thin babies. These extra cells persist into adulthood, so
that the fat baby becomes an adult with more adipose tissue and
hence a greater propensity to store fat. Such a person, it was concluded,
would clearly have a greater problem in controlling excessive
weight than one with a normal amount of adipose tissue.
More recently this suggestion has been challenged on the grounds
that it depends on the ability to count accurately the number of cells
in the adipose tissue. The critics say that in thin babies some of the
cells are empty and can easily be missed when they are counted; in
a fat baby the cells all contain fat and are therefore more visible and
likely to be counted. This leads to what the critics believe is the mistaken
conclusion that there are fewer fat cells in thin babies than in fat
babies.
Whatever the truth about fat-cell numbers, what is certain is that
babies, like older children and adults, get fat if they take in more
calories than they use. And you have only to look around you to see
how easy it is for a baby to get these excessive calories. Even though
some manufacturers of baby foods have stopped putting sugar in
their products, mothers will do so with little hesitation. Nor do they
hesitate to give their babies sugary drinks in their bottles whenever
they believe that the little ones are thirsty.
II
How to eat
more calories
without eating
real food
A criticism that one hears frequently of refined
sugar is that it supplies 'empty calories'. This is true. Often, the
critics go on to say that the refining process is at fault in that it
removes essential nutrients that are present in unrefined sugar in
significant amounts. This is largely not true, as we have seen.
Having considered what happens when you take sugar in addition
to your other foods; let us now look at what happens when you take
it instead of some of your other foods. After all, if people take 500
calories a day as sugar, and sometimes much more, it is likely that
there will be some reduction in other foods; there must be a limit to
how much even the most gluttonous person can eat.
In the simplest situation, imagine a diet of 2,500 calories a day,
made up largely of good nutritious foods like meat and cheese and
milk and fish and fruit and vegetables, with some potatoes and bread
and breakfast cereal. Now keep the calories at 2,500 but replace 500
or 550 of them by sugar, the average amount taken in a day. I have
shown that you can usually do this simply by adding only moderate
amounts of white sugar to your tea and coffee, and taking an
occasional sugar-sweetened soft drink. Clearly, the result of this
replacement of 20 per cent of your calories by sugar would be a
reduction in your intake of nutrients - protein, all vitamins, all
mineral elements - also by 20 per cent.
No nutritional deficiency will occur if your previous diet contained
an excess of 20 per cent of all the nutrients you required. But
suppose it did not contain this surplus. More important, suppose
that you were one of those who takes more than the average amount
of sugar - equal perhaps to 30 per cent of your calories, or even 40
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