The Sugar Industry Amplified Existing Dogma Rather Than Inventing Doubt
Gary Taubes · #25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us · Nov 30, 2017 · at 1:21:13
Science journalist Gary Taubes compares the defense strategies of Big Tobacco and the sugar industry regarding nutrition and public health research.
0:00 / 0:52exact quote · 52.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Unlike the tobacco industry, so the tobacco industry's job was to somehow try to convince the world that the research community was wrong, and to sow confusion about what the research community was saying. What the sugar industry had to do was remind the research community that what they believed in general was true of sugar in particular. So the obesity researchers were saying a calorie is a calorie is a calorie when it comes to obesity. And if that's true, then sugar is harmless. You can't vilify a food for being too good to eat. You know if it's all about calories. And then the nutritionists and cardiologists were saying dietary fat causes heart disease. So the sugar industry paid nutritionists and cardiologists to write articles saying we believe dietary fat caused heart disease, because they did.”
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…”