I’m reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health,” a book by Gary Taubes. I have always had it on my wish list, but I was able to pick it up for half-price at a Waldenbooks recession (store closing) sale. Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard and aerospace engineering at Stanford before becoming a medical and nutrition journalist.

The book is written with a scientific approach, and essentially, his argument is that refined carbohydrates are the problem – white flour, easily digested starches, sugars – and that the key to good health is not counting calories but choosing the right kind of calories. He even has a great chapter on Dr. Atkins and how he antagonized the medical and nutritional establishment with his research and successful books.

In his chapter titled “Sugar” he states that the single most profound change in the Western diet over the years has been the “dramatic increase of fructose consumption.” Throughout the 1980’s, he notes, the government, via the Surgeon General and the National Academy of Sciences, consistently advocated that sugar had no harmful effects in the diet. This was shortly after the introduction of HFCS-55 (high-fructose corn syrup) in 1978. Here are some snippets of his about the evils of high-fructose corn syrup:

Although HFCS-55 if effectively identical to sucrose upon digestion, the industry treated it, and the public perceived it, as a healthy additive, whereas sucrose carried the taint of decades of controversy. Because fructose is the predominant sugar in fruit … it is often referred to as “fruit sugar” and appears somehow healthier simply by virtue of association. And, of course, fructose was perceived as healthy because it does not elevate blood sugar and has a low glycemic index.

As a consequence, high-fructose corn syrup could be used as the primary sweetener, and often the primary source of calories, in products that had the outward appearance of being healthy or natural, or were advertised as such, without revealing the products to be little more than sugar, water, and chemical flavoring. This includes sports drinks such as Gatorade, the fruit juices and teas such as Snapple that appeared nationwide beginning in the late 1980s, and low-fat yogurts, which also exploded in popularity with the condemnation of fat in the diet.

By defining carbohydrate foods as good or bad on the basis of their glycemic index, diabetologists and public-health authorities effectively misdiagnosed the impact of fructose on human health. The key is the influence of glucose or fructose not on blood sugar but on the liver. Glucose goes directly into the bloodstream and is taken up by tissues and organs to use as energy; only 30-40 percent passes through the liver. Fructose passes directly to the liver, where it is metabolized almost exclusively. As a result, fructose “constitutes a metabolic load targeted on the liver…”

…Given time, high-fructose diets can induce high insulin levels, high blood sugar, and insulin resistance, even though in the short term fructose has little effect on either blood sugar or insulin and so a very low glycemic index.”

From an article on the Weston A. Price Foundation website: “The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar,” says Dr. Field, “but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”

Some related links:

- Metabolic Danger of High-Fructose Corn Syrup – Life Extensions Foundation

- The Murky World of High-Fructose Corn Syrup – Westin A. Price Foundation

- Does High-Fructose Corn Syrup Have to Be in Everything? – LRC’s Wilt Alston

- My blogs on how government brought us trans fats and aspartame (as a favor to Donald Rumsfeld, who was CEO, President, and Chairman of G.D. Searle, and his friend Donald Kendal, chairman of Pepsi).