Ameri-145 : Creating a National Eating Disorder
cans had elevated cholesterol levels and that doctors should begin check-ing their cholesterol levels in early adulthood. Those found to be “at risk”
should cut down on saturated fats—under their doctor’s supervision, of course.²⁴
Finally, in January 1973, the FDA caved in. It began allowing food labels to carry their cholesterol and saturated fat content and to say that eating foods low in cholesterol and saturated fats and high in poly unsaturated fats would help lower cholesterol levels.²⁵ Although they could still not say directly that this would prevent heart att acks, there was no need to do so. As Edward Pinckney, a disgusted preventative medicine physician, wrote:
The consumer’s understandable fear of heart disease and impending death is being exploited by certain health groups as well as by an industry whose profi ts have more than doubled as a direct result of its implied promise that heart disease can be forestalled through use of its products. The very word
“polyunsaturated” has become synonymous with protection against heart disease just as “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” have been made to intimate doom.
Yet, he said, there was no proof at all that cholesterol in the blood caused heart disease and especially that dietary change would make any diff erence.²⁶
However, naysayers like him were drowned out by the lipophobic cho-rus. The AHA soon raised the ante by telling all Americans to double their consumption of polyunsaturated fats and reduce their meat con-sumption by one-third.²⁷
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poverished Russian-Jewish immigrants to London, Yudkin was able to earn a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge followed by an MD thanks to a series of scholarships. During World War II, he served as an army physician in West Africa, where he did some highly regarded vitamin re-search. He then became a professor of nutrition at the University of Lon-don. In 1958 he came to national prominence with a best-selling book, called Th is Slimming Business, that att acked “yo-yo dieting” and said that the best way to lose weight was to cut back on carbohydrates, especially sugar.³⁰
The year before, Yudkin had joined those who criticized Keys for us-ing WHO data from only six countries to support his dietary fat/heart disease theory. He pointed out that had Keys used the data that was avail-able from ten additional countries, it would have shown that there was a bett er relationship between coronary mortality and consumption of sugar than of fat. The best relationship of all, though, was between the growing number of coronary deaths in the United Kingdom and the increase in radio and television sets. Of course, Yudkin made this last point to show that a close association between events does not neces-sarily mean cause and eff ect. However, he added that the rising number of TV sets did refl ect growing affl uence, and that the rise in coronary heart disease was likely connected with the things that went along with it—namely, increased smoking, obesity, “sedentariness,” and, he strongly suspected, sugar consumption.³¹
Yudkin then tried to get fi rmer backing for his theory by comparing the sugar intake of men hospitalized with coronary heart disease with that of a number of healthy men. Here he found that fi rst-time heart att ack suff erers consumed twice as much sugar as those who had not suf-fered heart att acks. (No one, he pointed out, had ever shown that there was any diff erence in fat consumption between people with and without heart disease.) He then conducted laboratory experiments on rats that seemed to show that eating sugar greatly increased their levels of triglyc-erides, which were said to contribute to heart disease.³²
Yudkin’s fame, along with his quick wit and engaging personality, ensured wide coverage of his ideas.³³ The lipophobes, supported by Britain’s powerful sugar industry, tried deriding him in the media. (He successfully sued one of them for calling his work “science fi ction.”) Ul-timately, though, they brought him down by using their infl uence with research granting agencies to drain him of research funding. He did manage to get some funding from the dairy industry, but not enough.
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In 1970 he was persuaded to retire from his professorship with the un-derstanding that the university would provide him with facilities to set up a research institute. Instead, he was given a poky litt le offi ce and no further support.³⁴
But having his legs cut from under him as a researcher could not sup-press Yudkin. In 1972 he published a scaremongering book on sugar’s supposed dangers called Pure; Sweet and Dangerous; Th e New Facts about the Sugar You Eat as a Cause of Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Other Killers that sold very well in both Britain and America.³⁵ As a result, in 1974 embat-tled American egg producers brought him over for a media tour. There he repeatedly pointed out that not one study had ever demonstrated a cause-and-eff ect relationship between dietary cholesterol and heart at-tacks. The head of the AHA responded by saying that studies were in the works that would do this and reiterated its warnings against eating more than three eggs a week.³⁶ When Yudkin pointed out that many countries with elevated levels of heart disease also had high levels of sugar con-sumption, the AHA responded with a curt rejoinder saying that there was no experimental evidence proving that the two were correlated.³⁷ (Of course, this was also true of their diet/heart theory.)
Despite the AHA’s clever att empt to tar him with the same brush he applied to them, Yudkin did manage to reinforce sucrophobia in Amer-ica. It had originally received a major boost in 1970, when the Senate nutrition committ ee aroused fears that sweetened breakfast cereals were making children addicted to sugar, causing hyperactivity and deleteri-ous health consequences for the rest of their lives. It then widened its net, hearing testimony on how the addiction began with sweetened baby foods, moved on into hard stuff in the Kellogg’s boxes, and ended up cre-ating a nation of sugar addicts. In his 1975 best-seller Sugar Blues, William Duft y invoked comparisons to heroin, calling sugar addiction “the white plague” and confessing that his fi rst taste of it had led him down “the road to perdition”—stealing from his mother to buy candy to feed his addiction.³⁸
Ultimately, though, the sucrophobes were no match for the lipo-phobes. While Yudkin, Duft y, and the rest ultimately had litt le impact on the American sweet tooth, the lipophobes’ had an enormous eff ect on its fat tooth.³⁹ From 1956 to 1976, per capita butt er consumption fell by over half and egg consumption dropped by over a quarter. Consumption of margarine doubled from 1950 to 1972 and that of vegetable oil rose by over 50 percent in the ten years from 1966 to 1976.⁴⁰ Given the slow pace
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at which consumption of core foods in a national diet normally changes, these are very impressive statistics.
In 1976 the lipophobes capped their apparent victory by bringing the U.S. government on their side. That year the Senate committ ee on nutri-tion began hearings on “Diet Related to Killer Diseases.” The committ ee chairman, Democratic senator George McGovern, was already a convert to the diet-heart theory, as was its senior Republican member, Charles Percy. Percy had been much impressed by the fi ndings of Alexander Leaf, a Harvard gerontologist who had returned from the Hunza Valley in 1973 and att ributed the Hunzakuts’ extraordinary longevity to, among other things, the paucity of animal fats and dairy products in their diets.
The intrepid senator had then trekked there himself. On his return, he published an article in Parade magazine, titled “You Live to Be 100 in Hunza,” confi rming that the secret to Hunza longevity was plenty of ex-ercise and the meager amount of animal fat in their diet.⁴¹
The committ ee’s bias was revealed at the very outset, when it elicited testimony saying that an incredible 98.9 percent of the world’s nutrition researchers believed that there was a connection between blood choles-terol levels and heart disease.⁴² Aft er a mere two days of hearings, Nick Mott ern, an ex–labor reporter with no scientifi c training who lionized Keys, was assigned to write up the committ ee’s report. The result, pub-lished early the next year as Dietary Goals for Americans, enshrined the diet-heart dogma into national nutrition policy. It called for Americans to increase their consumption of carbohydrates and to decrease their consumption of fats by 25 percent. Saturated fats were to be cut even more, by over one-third, mainly by cutt ing back on red meat.⁴³
Livestock producers, alarmed that this would require a 70 percent re-duction in meat consumption, managed to have the fi nal report replace the call to severely limit red meat with one to “choose meats, poultry, and fi sh which will reduce saturated fat intake.”⁴⁴ But the report was al-ready preaching to the converted. That year an amazing three out of four Americans told pollsters that they were concerned about the amount of cholesterol in their diets.⁴⁵ And worry they might. By then, the AHA and others were telling them to limit their average daily cholesterol intake to less than 300 milligrams—not much more than the 250 milligrams in one large egg yolk.⁴⁶
The beef producers’ success in having the dietary guidelines altered ended up doing them litt le good. The year 1976 turned out to be the his-toric high point for American beef consumption. It declined by about
149 : Creating a National Eating Disorder
30 percent over the next fi ft een years, before leveling off to its current level.⁴⁷