Hospital Records Show US Diabetes Rates Were Almost Nonexistent Before 1850
Gary Taubes · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · Nov 30, 2017 · at 13:17
Science journalist Gary Taubes discusses historical hospital records and epidemiology regarding diabetes diagnoses in 19th-century American cities.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 35.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And you find out, for instance, in the U.S. That diabetes rates, ah, in, were virtually nonexistent, even though it was a very, a relatively easy disease to diagnose You saw very little sign of it pre-eighteen 50, and even, for the most part, pre-eighteen seventies, and then the numbers in hospitals, and you could see this in hospital records, and in Boston, and Mass General, or in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital. The diabetes diagnoses in hospitals go from, like, literally zero a year.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Gary Taubes
Nutrition Science Is Not a Functioning Scientific Discipline
“I don't believe nutrition science is a functioning science. That it lacks many of the characteristics that a functioning science has to have, particularly the sort of critical, rigorous back and forth between scientists where they're attacking each other's ide…”
Nutrition Research Lowered Its Standards Due to the Difficulty of Human Trials
“Very difficult, if not impossible, to do right, and so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge, and this just became sort of, ah, inculcated throughout t…”
The Medical Community Has No Idea How to Solve the Obesity Epidemic
“And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive, unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases, and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it, and e…”
Explaining Obesity With Calories Is Like Explaining Wealth With Dollars
“This idea that excess calories is what makes us fat, Is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this before. It's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game …”
Chronic Metabolic Disease Stems From Refined Foods, Not a Lack of Fiber
“You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates. You can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those ot…”