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RIP: British Scientist John Yudkin - The man who tried to warn us about the perils of sugar.. Source(s) : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/diet/1

• agumonkey 10y ago
  A story every scientist should now. For its own sake.
• infodroid 10y ago
  Another good discussion of Yudkin's work and how it was received: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...
• gtrubetskoy 10y ago
  Along with Robert Atkins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Atkins_(nutritionist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Atkins_(nutritionist)
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    If you ask people to this day, they'll say Atkins died of his own diet. That was actually a total lie run by Harpers magazine. They corrected the mistake in the following edition, but the damage had been done. Although there is little evidence to support it, the running conspiracy theory is that PR people in various arms of the food industry paid for that article. Edit: Adkins died because he slipped on a piece of ice during a snow storm and cracked his skull.
    • merpnderp 10y ago
      To be completely fair, he slipped on the ice likely as a complication from heart disease. His doctors swear that his arteries and heart were the healthiest they'd seen for someone that age except for the infected portion.
      • Cyph0n 10y ago
        I don't get it: heart disease causes people to slip on ice?
        • codeddesign 10y ago
          No, his body was fighting the heart disease but with the slip on the ice his body was not able to recover from both at the same time. In other words, he was an old man and with the new injury his body was not able to recover.
        • dredmorbius 10y ago
          Compromised health tends to make effective responses to hazardous environmental conditions more difficult. Heart disease can affect strength, balance, coordination, mental function, and any number of other responses, much as a cold or flu or pnemonia can. You might care to review the recent video footage of a notable candidate visibly collapsing whilst being aided into a waiting van for transport, as a consequence of pnemonia. A condition more generally understood to affect the lungs than major skeletal muscles, but here clearly a contributing factor. Think systemically, please. Especially if you're in tech.
          • Cyph0n 10y ago
            > Think systemically, please. Especially if you're in tech. Which is why I would follow Occam's Razor in this scenario instead of using a convoluted theory to explain why someone slipped on ice. "Simple is better than complex." [1] [1]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
            • 10y ago
    • DanTheManPR 10y ago
      I had no idea - I had dismissed the Atkins diet for years because I had heard that Atkins himself was morbidly obese and died from a heart attack (neither is true according to his Wikipedia article).
      • wutbrodo 10y ago
        Chalk one up for the idea that it's usually not worth basing decisions on vaguely-heard rumors (especially in the age of Google).
• PieterH 10y ago
  My mother (1973, Edinburgh) bought "Pure, White, and Deadly," and we all read it. I was ten or so. Yudkin attacked white flour, white (processed) fat, and above all white sugar. It made perfect sense to us all, and cutting back on sugar became a slow, yet consistent part of our lifestyle. We never ate that much anyhow. I stopped eating sugar entirely at 15. I still recall the book's cover. Edit: it took me a lot longer to cut fruit juice from our diet. I was so convinced by that "natural" label. Until I realized my daughter, who'd drank a lot of juice growing up, was addicted to sugar. Then we cut it out. My other kids, not addicted. I was fooled for so long... The sugar industry has a lot to answer for. It is IMO comparable to the tobacco industry's suppression of cancer studies. Yet worse, because the effects of high-sugar diets are doing more damage, to more people, and last generations. Think of the hundreds of millions of children who have eaten high sugar diets since they were babies... lifelong damage to their health. A hundred years of damage, these executives and corrupt scientists caused.
  • frozenport 10y ago
    Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high.
    • forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      > Sugar does have some nutritional value, and is a hallmark of primate diet. Tobacco is an addictive insecticide that won't even get you high. This statement reflects a glaring ignorance of both scale and science. First of all, sugar is a hallmark of a primate diet only in complex not in simple forms, which is not the kind being referred to here. By nutritional value do you mean has calories? So does Vodka. And what at all do the calories have to do with the scale of harm?
      • vecinu 10y ago
        Does this not include sugar found in foods? Are those considered complex? Is eating natural sugar found in fruits as bad as eating refined/processed sugar?
• drumttocs8 10y ago
  Ancel Keys was certainly wrong when it came to sugars vs fats. However, he did live to be 100... so there's got to be at least some merit to his ideas, such as the Mediterranean diet, etc.
  • glibgil 10y ago
    No, there doesn't
  • prostoalex 10y ago
    Isn't the merit of the Mediterranean mainly about increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acids through increased consumption of high-fat low-carb foods such as fish, green leafy vegetables, olives, cheeses and olive oils? Which is the complete opposite of low-fat high-carb diet recommended by Keys?
  • Evgeny 10y ago
    There are also heavy smokers and drinkers who live to 100 and more.