For four decades we've been led to believe that fat is the ultimate food enemy, but we've been fed a lie: sugar is the real danger !

So what do you know about eating and getting fat? If you’re the average British person then it’s probably something along these lines: eating too much fat will make me obese, clog up my arteries and lead to a heart attack, so I should follow a low-fat diet and eat lots of fruit and vegetables.

Wrong. While you were busy fretting over your saturated fats and dietary cholesterols, there was a far more potent food nasty lurking in your kitchen: sugar. The amount of sugar we eat is now being blamed not just for the obesity epidemic but for heart disease, type 2 diabetes and soaring cancer rates. It’s not just the excess calories we’re consuming; the problem lies in the way we metabolise sugar.

‘We have been sold an absolute lie about food and health,’ says Zoë Harcombe, nutritionist and author of The Obesity Epidemic. ‘It has been put about since the 1970s that fat was the bad guy, yet the only fats we know to be harmful are trans fats, and these are almost exclusively man-made. If the fat occurs naturally then it’s fine – no exceptions. Sugar, on the other hand, when added to food, is almost uniformly bad.’

So why was this information hidden from us? ‘Because,’ says Harcombe, ‘the commercial food producers, who rely on sugar, represent a huge and powerful lobby. It’s not just the obvious brands, such as fizzy drinks manufacturers, that would suffer if sugar were removed from our diets. Sugar is added to just about everything you buy ready-made: bread, sauces, ready meals, drinks, tinned foods… The list is endless.’ Even baked beans can contain two and a half teaspoons of sugar in just half a tin. Furthermore, say campaigners, the low-fat industry (now worth billions) is absolutely reliant on sugar because the only way to stop low-fat food tasting like cardboard is to replace fat with sugar.

We can only guess what John Yudkin, who died in 1995, would have made of the wide acceptance of his ideas. His book Pure, White and Deadly is back in print – this time with an introduction by Robert Lustig. ‘I think he would have been pleased,’ says his biochemist son, Professor Michael Yudkin. ‘Not to say, “I told you so”, but because my father’s great passion was public health and he saw the world being harmed by something he thought was preventable.’

Full story here.

Eddie