The sugar controversy

In 1972, Pure, White and Deadly was published, written by John Yudkin for a lay readership. Its intention was to summarize the evidence that the over-consumption of sugar was leading to a greatly increased incidence of coronary thrombosis, and that in addition it was certainly involved in dental caries, probably involved in obesity, diabetes and liver disease, and possibly involved in gout, dyspepsia and some cancers.

Yudkin ended the first Chapter: "I hope that when you have read this book I shall have convinced you that sugar is really dangerous." This message was extremely unwelcome to the sugar industry and manufacturers of processed foods and these firms employed a number of methods to impede Yudkin's work. The final Chapter of Pure, White and Deadly lists several examples of attempts to interfere with the funding of his research and to prevent its publication. It also refers to the rancorous language and personal smears used by Ancel Keys to dismiss the evidence that sugar was the true culprit.

Keys wrote, for example:

"It is clear that Yudkin has no theoretical basis or experimental evidence to support his claim for a major influence of dietary sucrose in the etiology of CHD; his claim that men who have CHD are excessive sugar eaters is nowhere confirmed but is disproved by many studies superior in methodology and/or magnitude to his own; and his "evidence" from population statistics and time trends will not bear up under the most elementary critical examination. But the propaganda keeps on reverberating..."^[35] "Unfortunately, Yudkin's views appeal to some commercial interests with the result that this discredited propaganda is periodically rebroadcast to the general public of many countries."^[36]

The efforts to discredit the case against sugar were largely successful, and by the time of Yudkin's death in 1995 his warnings were, for the most part, no longer being taken seriously.^{[citation needed]}

Yudkin's arguments and evidence for the dangers of sugar were the focus of several articles in the British Medical Journal of 19 January 2013.^[37]

In 2009, Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School who has a special interest in childhood obesity, made a video called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.^[38] Lustig had independently re-discovered and confirmed Yudkin's findings and, taking aim at Keys^{[citation needed]}, asked his audience, "Am I debunking?"