Sugar, Diabetes and Processed Foods: The Case Against Sugar
April 1, 2017
We’re joined by special guest author Gary Taubes as he shares findings from his latest book The Case Against Sugar. Taubes has perhaps worked harder than anyone on understanding the role sugar plays in our diet and in our health. Join us as he shares the background of why two-thirds of adults are overweight or why one in seven people are diabetic and more importantly, what can we do about it?
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Transcript
KARA: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition. I'm Kara Carper, licensed nutritionist and host of Dishing Up Nutrition today. Our frequent listeners, who we really do consider family, know that we tell you over and over about the harmful effects of eating sugar. Some of you might even hear our voices in your head when you reach for that afternoon cookie. Maybe you're going into the freezer at night to get your favorite ice cream. Well, today, we're stepping it up even more. We have an extra special treat. No, not a sugar treat, but we have the author of The Case Against Sugar joining us via phone from California. Author Gary Taubes has spent the past three years researching and working on this amazing book. And I really believe no one has worked harder on or better understands the role that sugar plays in our diet and in our health.
CAROLYN: Well, good morning everyone. I'm Carolyn Hudson, registered dietician and today's cohost of Dishing Up Nutrition. This show is brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness, a company providing life-changing nutrition education and life-changing nutrition counseling. In our Menopause Seminar, we often quote Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause. So, we are so pleased to see her praise of Gary Taubes boo, The Case Against Sugar.
KARA: That's right. And Dr. Doctor Northrup said in the book, “I am grateful beyond words for Gary Taubes’ courageous and meticulous documentation of the information in this book. If you apply it, it will quite literally save your life.” We're just so honored to have Gary on the show today.
CAROLYN: I know this book took three long years to write, Gary. So, first, I wonder if you could share with us two things. Why did you feel so fully compelled to dig so deeply into the harm the sugar industry has caused to people all over the world? And second, please share with us what has happened to people's health in the past century.
GARY: Okay, well, good morning. I've been reporting the subject as an investigative journalist beginning in the mid-nineties and just came to this revelation. Over the course of the century, we've been living longer and longer, but we've also developed chronic diseases at are unprecedented rate, even independent of our age. So today, over a third of all adults are obese. Two thirds are overweight, one in a 11 are diabetic, which is a remarkably high number. And one and four or five people died of cancer. And we know that all these diseases have dietary nutritional triggers that it's not just bad luck or bad genes, although they play a role, but it's also something in our diet that's causing it. And I just felt when you look at the history and I approached the subject historically, our sugar consumption had always been the prime suspect, particularly for diabetes. And we kept dancing around it. Nobody was digging into the data to ask is there really a chance that sugar causes these diseases? And the case I'm making in this book, The Case Against Sugar is that it was the prime suspect. It should still be the prime suspect.
CAROLYN: Absolutely.
KARA: So, if you're listening and you're a person who loves to understand the history of why two thirds of adults are overweight or one in 11 are diabetic, this is the book for you. Gary not only dug deep into the history of diabetes, but he wants everyone to see how it's affecting people today. So Gary, we're wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit about the connection with diabetes and kidney failure, diabetes and lower limb amputation. And in your book, you talk about how much money is being spent and healthcare dollars with just the diabetic drugs and devices.
Diabetes, its Side Effects and the Healthcare Industry
GARY: Well, when we're talking about diabetes and when I use the word diabetes in our discussion, I’m mostly discussing a type two diabetes, which is the form that associates with age and with overweight, so the the older we get, the heavier that we are, and it represents 90 to 95 percent of all diabetes cases. And, the side effects are pretty awful to begin with. As you mentioned, kidney failure eye sight deterioration, nerve damage, a tooth decay, foot ulcers and gangrene that could lead to amputation. Six out of every 10 lower limb amputation in adults in America are due to diabetes today. And we have a dozen classes of drugs that are now available for the disease. The estimate for the direct costs of obesity and diabetes to the healthcare burden in America is now a billion dollars a day.
CAROLYN: A Day? That is an amazing statistic.
GARY: It is, and it's an interesting double edged sword because I often think of it as, boy, our healthcare system can’t sustain this kind of cost. This is a billion dollars a day that's going to profit and pay for physicians, for hospitals, for pharmaceutical companies. So, we have to figure out what's triggering this disorder. A non-infectious plague with this disease, but simultaneously it's great business for the pharmaceutical company so they're not all that motivated to solve a problem that’s bringing in this kind of money. The other issue that I discussed at length in this book is as you move towards overweight, obesity and diabetes, your risk of every other major chronic disease increases. So, if you're diabetic, you have an increased risk of heart disease, of stroke, of cancer, of dementia. So, whatever it is that's causing diabetes, causes these diseases, is at least increasing the risk of these other.
CAROLYN: Absolutely. We see that in our office all the time. That is for sure. The other thing that I remember reading in your book is the increase in diabetes cases. I think it was what, 800 percent or 900 percent?
GARY: It depends what we're talking about obviously, but since the late 1950’s, if you look at the data from the Centers for Disease Control, diabetes prevalence in this country has increased roughly 700 percent. That’s a shocking number. That's why I use a phrase like a plague to describe it. Imagine if 50 years from now one in 11 Americans had multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy or any one of these relatively rare diseases today we would be overrun with scientists and research committees trying to understand what had happened. And because diabetes is associated with overweight and obesity and because our medical system thinks that it's caused by that, rather than investigate, rather than interrogate our assumptions about this disease, ask if we the scientists, the public health community have made a mistake, we blame the patients. Or the maybe the food industry for making food that's too delicious so that we can’t say no.
CAROLYN: Yeah. It would seem that we, the people are really in big trouble with diabetes and other health problems as you just said. But that hasn't always been the case, right? I mean, what has dramatically changed our health and how did we get here?
The History of Diabetes in America
GARY: Well, and that's the story I'm investigating in this book. I went back to the nineteenth century. And so, diabetes is a relatively easy diagnosis to make because it’s such an awful disease, particularly before we had insulin available to treat it. And you go back to the hospital records in the nineteenth century and you find that this disease was exceedingly rare. Or if people had it, they certainly weren't ending up in the hospital. And that's hard to imagine. And I tried to speak to medical historians who might help me figure that out. But, you could see from the mid nineteenth century onward, this steady, slow increase in diabetic cases. And then in other populations of people who are all around the world, whenever populations’ diets were industrialized, the term that is often used as “Westernized,” when they start eating the way we eat here in America, you would see, boom, this explosion following of diabetes and obesity.
KARA: Gary, I'm so sorry to interrupt. We have to interrupt you to take a quick commercial break. When we come back and we want to hear more about that. You're listening to Dishing Up Nutrition brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. And, like we're talking about, 50 years ago, one in eight American adults were obese. Today, more than one in three are obese. Why this increase? Could it be the sugar became the mainstay of breakfast, first and fruit juice, then in sugar-rich breakfast cereal? Well, according to the information that Gary Taubes shared in the case against sugar, 20 years ago, Americans started drinking nine gallons of fruit juice every year. And that's like drinking an additional eight pounds of sugar per year.
So, we have a wonderful Nutrition 4 Weight Loss program that can help you get back on track if you are having an issue with sugar. You can either sign up online, you can call our office at 651-699-3438. Carolyn’s going to talk a little bit more about that Nutrition 4 Weight Loss program when we come back in just a minute.
BREAK
CAROLYN: Welcoming back to Dishing Up Nutrition. I'm Carolyn Hudson, registered dietitian, and I'm here with Kara Carper, licensed nutritionist, and a very special guest, author Gary Taubes, who wrote The Case Against Sugar. It tells an amazing story of how the sugar industry has very diligently increased sugar sales throughout the world, while rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity have steadily increased. The American Heart Association recommends that we consume no more than six teaspoons of sugar daily. Now, that's pretty low, right? Most people have a lot more. So, how do you stop that giant sugar cube from rolling over you? At Nutritional Weight & Wellness we believe you can do this with education, information and support. Do you want to turn your health concerns around? We would invite you to join our Nutrition 4 Weight Loss program at any of our locations of anytime online.
KARA: So, like you said, Carolyn, we have a special guest, Gary Taubes on the line, and before break we started talking about what has changed with the increase in health problems, diabetes, heart disease. How did we get here? Gary, I know you were in the middle of a thought. Could you please finish what you were going to say?
GARY: The main point was that you can see, again, diabetes in the US increasing. Virtually absent pre-1850 and then it slowly starts to increase and then it kind of explodes in the twentieth century. And you can see the same transition happening in populations all over the world whenever they go from their traditional diet to our diet. And then it coincides almost perfectly in almost every case with this increase in sugar consumption. In the US, we just tend to forget that 200 years ago sugar was bought in barrels in the public store and it was expensive and it was for the adults in the family and it was a treat. And then with the industrial revolution in the 1840’s, you get the candy industry and the ice cream industry and the chocolate industry kicking off.
In the 1870’s you get the soft drink industry. By 1920, we're consuming, per person, on average, a hundred pounds of sugar per year. That's almost a 20-fold increase from a hundred years before. And then you guys know that fruit juices were virtually nonexistent until the 1930’s. Sugary cereals come in in the 1950’s and finally by the 1960’s we're consuming roughly every three hours what we would have consumed in sugar 150 years earlier once a week.
Our bodies, particularly our livers, are getting pummeled with the substance that they just didn't ever historically have to handle. And there's just an enormous amount, although still not enough scientific evidence that we just can't deal with it. Our bodies can’t deal with this constant stream of sugar that's being usually drank, but eaten and consume from morning until dessert before we go to bed.
KARA: That’s such a good reminder. I know in your book I think you mentioned we were having sweets, on average, a can of coca cola once a week would be the equivalent of what was regular for sweets.
GARY: Yeah. When you wake up in the morning, you have orange juice and there’s sugar in your cereal and if you're eating a low fat free yogurt, there's sugar in your yogurt and then you go to work and you take a break at work and you have a soft drink or fruit juice, then lunch. And again, we just got away from drinking water or milk, which were our beverages available, to every beverage we consumed had to have sugar in it. And you would expect it to be harmful. And because of some pretty bad science by the nutrition community and the sugar industry's diligent work, as you noted, we just decided we were going to ignore all this.
KARA: When you started talking about traditional cultures and how things go south when the western diet is introduced, I just have a comment. Over the past few years, whenever we attend our annual professional nutrition conferences, it seems that speakers often will bring up the negative effects that sugars had on the Pima Indians of Arizona. And I've always been fascinated by that story. Gary, would you mind just sharing the Pima story with our listeners? I think it really illustrates what sugar’s done to everyone.
The Effects of Sugars on the Pima Tribe
GARY: Well, it should have illustrated what sugar had done also to the research at the National Institutes of Health, but again, they were kind of plugged into their own little world. So, the Pima used to be the most affluent native American tribe, back if you go up until the 1860’s or so, and then for a variety of reasons, they suffered through periods of famine and then the usual, a terrible poverty that afflicts the native American populations in our country. And then in the 1930’s/40’s, doctors are looking at levels of diabetes and the Pima. And it seems to be, again, exceedingly low and certainly no higher than any other population in the country. And then during the war years, World War II, which happened again with all our native American populations, the men were drafted to the army and fought in the wars and often the women were working in ammunitions factories and so they were sort of quickly and dramatically westernized.
And even though they had access to the western diet, the poverty had kept it pretty much at bay. And then post-war by the 1850’s, you've got physicians commenting on the obesity in this tribe. And the one study I saw is that virtually every child over the age of 12 is obese. A bit of an exaggeration, but that's how the physician described it. And still relatively you don't see the signs of diabetes. You don't see diabetes patients in the Indian affairs hospitals. And in the mid 1960’s, the NIH sent a trio of researchers out to Phoenix to study, actually, arthritis in hot, dry climates. And they do blood tests on a thousand members of the Pima population and roughly one in two have diabetic levels of blood sugar and this is stunning to them. And in fact, they go back to Washington and they report it. And the NIH immediately sent them back out to set up a research laboratory that's still in existence today studying this population. But, the point is the hospitals are still relatively empty. You don't see the side effects, the amputations, the blindness that you would expect. And they think maybe diabetes is just a much more benign disease in Native Americans. And then in the 1970’s, boom, the hospitals are full of diabetic Pimas with all these horrible complications with this disease. And they realize it's not benign. It was just a new disease. You see this same pattern in native American populations again, throughout the country, first nations people, then Canada. And when you look at what changes in the diet, when they suddenly become Westernized, more than any other change is the sweets, the sodas, soft drinks, the candy, the sugar.
CAROLYN: On that thought, listeners, think about this. If sugar has the ability to take a healthy group of people and turn them into a disease-ridden group, what is it doing to you if you're struggling with these things? Do you have more fat around your middle, more aches and pains, fragile bones, heart disease, or even fatty liver?
KARA: Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about chapter one in Gary's book, which is one of my favorite chapters, but you are listening to Dishing Up Nutrition. Yesterday I had a client who I'd encouraged to take our 12-week Nutrition 4 Weight Loss series and she checked in with me and said, “I gained eight pounds.” And I said, “That's great.” She probably gained it through muscle mass, first of all, but, why did I suggest that she take the Nutrition 4 Weight Loss program? The number one reason was not to lose weight, but so that she could stop following her low-fat starvation diet, which probably was one factor in her osteoporosis. She really needed a weekly class to be reminded to eat lunch and protein and good healthy fat. And she said, “Oh, there's so much information in these classes. I'm going to sign up again because I feel great!” And I can't wait to have a bone density test to see how much it's improved. I don't want to be an old lady in a nursing home with a broken hip. I want to go skiing without being afraid of falling. So, it's a great testimonial and we will be back in a minute.
BREAK
CAROLYN: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. As a nutrition education and counseling center, we at Nutritional Weight & Wellness love and appreciate the investigative work author Gary Taubes did to write The Case Against Sugar.
As a dietician, however, it is really difficult for me to understand how the sugar industry put money before the health of people. No wonder people are confused about nutrition, especially about what to eat for weight loss. So, they just give up sometimes. Unfortunately, since they continue to eat sugar and all those process carbs, they are faced with diabetes and heart disease. So, what do you do? What to do? What to believe, even? I've been a Dietitian for a long time and kind of been around the block and now that I teach Nutrition 4 Weight Loss, I see the health results. I see people with fewer aches and pains, more energy, better blood sugar numbers, and of course, good weight loss. Really, there is still hope for everyone out there. What do you have to lose? These are great classes and they're going to help you give up sugar and supply you with the energy and wellbeing that you are looking for each and every day. If you want to have more information about our classes or have questions, call 651-699-3438.
And Gary, I have a personal experience in, in kind of this whole thing that you were talking about with the Pima Indians. Back in the ‘70’s, I was living in northern Manitoba in northern Canada. And I witnessed what happened to the native population there. I couldn't believe the amount of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity in that small little community. And I talked to some of the elders and they said, no, it didn't use to be like this at all. It wasn't until we got food in from the south that these things started to happen. So, I totally loved that part of your book and reading about that and kind of this whole law of adaptation. It doesn't happen overnight. So, we changed our diet basically overnight and we have health consequences, obviously.
GARY: Well that’s the thing. Most of us here had the hundreds of years to sort of slowly adapt to the amount of sugar in our diet and we still clearly can't deal with it. And there are problems I discussed in the book. I think a lot of what we're seeing today, I mean clearly, we’re being born predisposed to get fatter and more diabetic than every population in history. You have to ask the question, what's happening in the womb of the pregnant mother that could be causing that phenomenon? But, then these other populations, like you just described in Canada. The modern American diet was just airlifted and dropped on to them over the course of 20 or 30 years and again, it's similar to the Pima where suddenly their diets are full of sugar when they never were before, and then they see these diseases manifest almost overnight. And you witness what you saw. I think the question is why didn't we notice this before and why don't we stop once we're clear? We always knew this.
Your Brain and the Drug-like Effects of Sugar
KARA: We wonder that same question on a daily basis. I want to get into talking about the case against sugar in chapter one. The title was “Drug or Food?” It reminds me of, well, a lot of people I know, especially particularly clients at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, they often say sugar has a drug-like hold on them. If they open up a bag of candy, they can't stop eating until it's all gone. And I was thinking about a specific client. She said it was fine to share her story, but she's someone who has miniature candy bars stashed in her kitchen drawer, her desk drawer at work, the glove compartment in her car, on her nightstand, so it almost seems like sugar is an addictive drug for my client, similar to cocaine, alcohol or tobacco. And, if you're listening, you maybe can relate to this, right, Carolyn?
CAROLYN: Yeah. In, in your book, The Case Against Sugar, you talked about how sugar has been used to take people psychologically out of a boring, hard life and how sugar gives people the reason to live. That might be the only joy for them. So, I have not, I never really knew about how people who were forced into slavery or poverty use sugar as an addictive substance. So, it would really appear that there is a connection to sugar addiction and drug and alcohol addiction. I was captivated, Gary, with your research about how babies respond to sugar. So, what has science found about the brain's pleasure center and sugar?
GARY: Well, this, like many things is a complicated story, but researchers have known for decades that sugar triggers a response. Sugar consumption triggers a response in our brains in an area called the reward center. Technically, it's the nucleus accumbens, which is basically where we feel extreme pleasure, and the idea is this part of our brain, they're more or less evolved to reward activities that help procreate. So, sex and food.
And then addictive drugs just happened to be by chance the substances that trigger the same release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine that is supposed to happen when we eat, when we make love, and it's supposed to happen in sort of a moderate, low level, so we want to repeat these. But drugs of abuse, like cocaine or alcohol or tobacco, nicotine or heroin just kind of overwhelm the center. And it turns out sugar consumption has many of the same properties in the brain. But it's clearly different than these other drugs. We've always had this debate.
And I have a good friend who’s a journalist named Charles Man, a wonderful historian. He wrote a book called 1493, which talked about how food spread around the world after Columbus. He discussed the sugar industry and I thought his sentence just said it all. “Scientists debate amongst themselves whether sugar is an addictive substance or we just act like it is.” We clearly act like it is. We know it's a psychoactive substance in that you can give sugar, as you know, to babies and we do it for circumcision ceremonies just a few days after birth in order to either kill pain or distract them from the pain of the process. It clearly has this effect. And we know with our kids that even the hardcore defenders and sugar in the world, and there are many who think of it as just this wonderful gift to mankind to give a little bit of joy into these hard, joyless lives that we live. With children, you've got to ration it. It's perhaps the only thing that you have to ration with your kids. Of course, today you have to ration screen time, so that’s another conversation.
KARA: That’s right. As a parent, know you have two boys. I'm sure that you’ve had that conversation over the years.
GARY: It’s something we do constantly. It's sort of what rationing sugar consumption would have been. You wouldn't have had to do it a hundred 50 years ago. We didn't have enough sugar. And worst of all we didn't think of it is something that was harmless.
CAROLYN: Yeah. Well Gary, there are so many realizations in The Case Against Sugar. And one of the other things I really wanted to get to was talking about the amount of money spent to promote a substance that both you and I believe harms our whole civilization. It's really appalling. It's a really a wise saying that says, “Follow the money trail.” And so, then we come back from this break, we can talk a little bit more about that and you can share a couple of those money trails with us.
KARA: That would be great. Let's take a quick break though. We'll be right back.
BREAK
CAROLYN: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. We are pleased to have Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar join us today via phone to share his wisdom. Here's an interesting fact from the book The Case Against Sugar. In 1902, Coca Cola was spending $100,000 a year on advertising, but by 1913, they were spending an amazing million dollars annually. So, over the past 100 years, the advertising budget has obviously increased tremendously. And of course, so have those sales of Coke.
GARY: This is clearly the issue. Again, in this book, I actually blame the research community more than I blame the industry because the industry just does what it does. So, just like the cigarette industry, I talk about there's a clear link between, even the tobacco leaves happen to have a very high sugar content.
CAROLYN: I found that amazing. I was like, oh my gosh, I had no idea.
The Sugar Industry, Advertising and the Myth of Low Fat Diets
GARY: Sugar kills us many more ways and then we would have thought. But these products, but we just tend to think, I mean, we thought that tobacco was a healthful product that just helped us get through the hard times of life. And back 50, 70 years ago you would even have commercials for which cigarettes doctors recommended. And the sugar industry convinced itself it was benign and researchers convinced themselves that it was benign and that dietary fat was the problem. We should all be on low fat diets. The industry just took advantage of it. And they took advantage of everything the world offered, including wars to spread their products worldwide. I mean, back after World War II, Coca Cola had its first big conference to talk about how to use the spread of oats to American forces worldwide to spread Coca Cola worldwide. And there was a banner at the conference.
When we think of the Soviet Union we think of the Berlin Wall and when they think of us they think of Coca Cola. And that's what we have to take advantage of. And they did. And then massively. The advertisers and marketers got better and better at targeting our children, among other things, as sources for sugar-sweetened cereals and sodas and fruit juices. The industry, capitalized then by the 1960’s, were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure this is what we consume. And for those of you watching sporting events, what do we advertise? We advertise beer and soda. And also, erectile disfunction drugs which could be a product of the beer and the soda. We let this happen and now we're seeing the results and we have to figure out what to do about it. The first thing is, as you're saying on the show, is we have to try and break this addictive need we have for this substance. We have to convince our self that we can enjoy life without the candy bars and the sweets and the sodas.
KARA: So, because it does get back to money, can you share one or two of what you referred to as the money trails as far as following the money trail?
GARY: Well, what happened again in the 1960’s. First of all, artificial sweeteners came in. That got started in the fifties and that was a real threat to the sugar industry because not only did artificial sweeteners not have calories and not have sugar and so people who were gaining weight and the whole country is going on a diet by then thought I should have artificial sweeteners, but they were cheaper than sugar.
So, the sugar industry spent the massive amounts of money at the time to fund research to demonstrate that artificial sweeteners are bad for us and come up with anything they can. They eventually led to the FDA banning cyclamates, which was the primary form being used at the time. And they managed to taint the artificial sweeteners ever since with this idea that they're somehow worse than sugar. I think whatever harm they might do, I would argue is clearly not as much as sugar has done.
And then we started to believe that dietary fat causes heart disease so our research community got obsessed with this dietary fat story that I believe was just wrong. And the sugar industry has a few nutritionists, the leading British nutritionists started arguing that it was sugar and not fat. The sugar industry just started plowing money into the researchers who were studying fat and these were very influential researchers at Harvard, at the University of Minnesota, and they paid them to write reports and studies that said, no, no, no, it's fat. It's fat, it's fat, it's not sugar. Sugar is benign. British researchers are quack. Don't listen to them. And by the 1970’s when the FDA decided they had to revisit this question of whether sugar was safe, they were depending on sugar industry documents or documents funded by the sugar industry that were arguing there's nothing wrong with sugar. It's all fat. And then boom, then we put into the government, our government gets involved and pushes this low-fat dogma that we've all been living with since then.
KARA: Oh yeah. I mean, our clients daily have programs in their brain that they need to be avoiding fat, low calorie.
GARY: It's hard for us to believe we should eat something like full-fat yogurt,
CAROLYN: Right? We really struggle with that with trying to convince our clients.
GARY: Yeah. And instead we consume Michael Pollan's wonderful phrase, “food-like substances.” So, you take the fat out. You dump high fructose corn syrup in.
KARA: Well, you're removing the flavor.
Heart Disease: Caused by Sugar, Not Fats
CAROLYN: Gary, I wonder though, you really point out very, very well in the book about these researchers were just obsessed with the fact that fat is causing heart disease and that we have to avoid that. But, did that research actually prove that fat caused heart disease?
GARY: No. And that's the thing. That was one of the very first investigations I did back from the journal. Science in the late 90’s. So we came to believe that we have to eat a low-fat diet to be healthy and that was an interesting idea. It was an interesting hypothesis and the research community tested in these trials that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and they just failed to confirm it. It just happens to be wrong. That happens all the time in science. And in women, it seems to be particularly ill-advised advice. And there was a study, they spent half a billion dollars on a single study. Half a billion dollars to test the idea that a low-fat diet would make women live longer and be healthier. And it just didn’t.
KARA: Yeah, the results are not there.
GARY: And yes, we can’t get off this idea that we have. And the problem is if you remove the fat from the diet, you gotta replace it with something. And we replace it with these easily digestible sugar-rich carbohydrates and they're the ones that are far more likely to be making us fat and making us diabetic and increasing the risk of all these other awful diseases.
KARA: We just have a couple minutes left. I don't know if it's possible to briefly talk about the Ansel Keys story in that amount of time, but he actually was from the University of Minnesota where we are.
GARY: Keys was the face of nutrition in America from 1960 through 1980 and he was a very ferocious researcher and individual and just convinced himself that that was the cause of heart disease. Any he happened to have a personal dislike for this British nutritionist who was saying it was sugar. And they battled back and forth and then Ansel Keys had the weight of the American funding community behind it and he just managed with the help of other very influential people to convince the nation that fat was the problem and that we should eat low fat. And Keys would not have wanted us replacing the fat with sugar. This is the kind of unintended consequence you have when you make these kinds of pronouncements. And it's what we did. So, the key thing again is just we got off on some very bad ideas in the nutrition community. The scientists are slowly getting back to where they should've been 50 years ago, but we're still stuck with this intellectual baggage from what they gave us, which is we have to eat a low-fat diet, our chicken breasts have to be skinless. Our yogurt has to be low fat, our dairy has to be low fat. And then you talked to earlier in the show about the kind of damage has seems to do to people.
KARA: Well, Gary, I wish we had three hours to talk to you. I'm sure you're a busy man. We really, really appreciate you for getting up early and being such a wonderful guest. And thank you for writing yet another remarkable book and we'd love to have you back in the future.
GARY: Thank you.
KARA: Thank you everyone for listening. Our goal is to help each and every person have better health through eating real food. It's a simple, but very powerful message. We hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for listening.
Looking to give up sugar? Enroll in our online class Breaking the Sugar Habit today!
