Lustig was certainly putting his academic reputation at risk when he embarked on a high-profile campaign against sugar. A couple of years ago, an out-of-print book published in 1972 by a long-dead British professor suddenly became a collector's item. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic. Yudkin knew a lot more data was needed to support his theories, but what's important about his book is its historical significance," says Lustig. He is the Director of the UCSF Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health Program and also a member of the Obesity Task Force of the Endocrine Society.

Moreover, children from three industrial towns in Scotland were, on average, inferior in the same four measurements to the average Cambridge child, and the children from the poorer families in the Scottish towns were inferior in these measurements to those from the wealthier families. Yudkins ins

By the end of the Seventies, he had been so discredited that few scientists dared publish anything negative about sugar for fear of being similarly attacked. After all, he said, we had been eating substances like butter for centuries, while sugar, had, up until the 1850s, been something of a rare treat for most people.

Experiments with rats showed that the feeding of sucrose led to impaired glucose tolerance (results with human subjects were more equivocal). If ever there was a case that an information democracy, even a very messy one, is preferable to an information oligarchy, then the history of nutrition advice is it.This Slimming Business (1958), which expressed this idea in user-friendly language, proved popular: it was republished in paperback in 1962, reached its fourth edition in 1974, reappeared as Lose Weight, Feel Great in the USA, was translated into Dutch and Hungarian, and spawned The Slimmer's Cook Book in 1961 and The Complete Slimmer in 1964. Baker, Philip; Backholer, Kathryn; Huse, Oliver; Webster, Jacqui; Allemandi, Lorena; Engesveen, Kaia; and Nishida, Chizuru; "Government actions on packaged foods and drinks high in fats, sugars and salt" in Development Initiatives 2018, 2018 Global Nutrition Review, Bristol, UK, Development Initiatives. He secured places for himself and his allies on the boards of the most influential bodies in American healthcare, including the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health. Yudkin was raised in the East End of London in an Orthodox Jewish family that had fled the Russian pogroms of 1905. The president, the physician and the scientist formed a reassuring chain of male authority, and the notion that fatty foods were unhealthy started to take hold with doctors, and the public.