John_Yudkin_-_Pure_White_and_Deadly_revised_1986_OCR

Pure, White and Deadly
or the vegetables, than about the effects of sugar, even though sugar
on average constitutes about 17 per cent of our diet, a larger proportion
than any of these other items. Yet in 1972, when Pure, White
and Deadly was first published, what little research there had been
already showed that sugar in our diet might be involved in the production
of several conditions, including not only tooth decay and
overweight but also diabetes and heart disease.
Since that time research has produced further evidence that sugar
is implicated in these conditions, and has also added to the list of
diseases in which the sugar we eat may possibly, or even probably,
be a factor. Many ofthe experiments from which these conclusions
are derived have been carried out at the Nutrition Department of
Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, some of them in
collaboration with research workers in the Biochemistry Department.
When our experiments have been repeated independently in
other research institutes, the results have always been in line with
our own. Those who disagree with what we say may therefore challenge
the conclusions that we draw from the research, but they
cannot legitimately disagree with the experimental results.
In this edition I have taken the opportunity to bring up to date
and extend many of the statistics that I quoted earlier. I have also
summarized the research that we and others have done during the
last 14 or IS years which has shown more of what happens in our
bodies when we eat sugar.
I am often asked why we don't hear very much about the dangers
of sugar, while we are constantly being told we have too much fat
in our diet, and not enough fibre. I suggest that you will find at least
part of the answer in the last chapter of this book.
viii
I
What's so
different
about
sugar?
Sugar is common enough in all our lives, and
almost everyone believes that it is simply an attractive sweet - one
of many carbohydrates in the diet of civilized countries. But sugar
is really quite an extraordinary substance. It is unique in the plant
that makes it, in the materials that chemists can produce from it,
and in its use in foods at home and in industry. And recent research
shows that it also has unique effects in the body, different from
those of other carbohydrates. Since it now amounts to about one
sixth of the total calories consumed in the wealthier countries, it is
essential that more is known about what it does to people when it
enters the body in food and drink.
Curiously enough, not only the layman but also the physician and
the medical research worker have until recently assumed that there
was no need to bother with any special study of sugar. Since man
began to produce his food instead of hunting and gathering it, his
diet has contained large amounts of carbohydrates of one sort or
another (see p. 10). It did not seem to occur to anyone that it made
any difference whether this carbohydrate consisted almost entirely
of starch in wheat or rice or maize, or whether the starch was gradually
becoming replaced by increasing amounts of sugar, as has been
happening in the last 100 or 200 years.
Although some early research workers occasionally pointed out
that eating sugar was not always the same as eating starch, no one
paid much attention to this until 25 years or so ago. When I wrote
a book on weight reduction in 1958, I strongly recommended a diet
low in carbohydrate, but I made very little distinction between the
benefits of avoiding starch and avoiding sugar. Since that time, an
I