Tracing the impact of sugar on health, culture and environment over the years  Premium

A list of books on why sugar is bad for your heath and how to reduce sugar

When nature writer Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published in 1962, there was furious backlash, particularly from chemical firms. In her book, she had carefully laid out how DDT was entering the food chain, arguing for better testing and informed use of pesticides. In her essay on Carson (Burning Questions), Margaret Atwood admits that most people were not ready for the book. “It was like being told that orange juice — then being proclaimed as the sunshine key to ultra-health — was actually poisoning you.”

For Atwood, one of the key lessons of Silent Spring was that things labelled as progressive weren’t necessarily good. “Another was that the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the world around you… and what goes into it — whether eaten or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin — has a profound impact on you.”

India, a sweets-loving nation, will have to reckon with some disturbing findings as a new study shows that an estimated 10.13 crore people in a population of 140 crore could be diabetic, and another 13.6 crore in the pre-diabetic stage. The ICMR-INDAB study, carried out between 2008 and 2020 across the country, is based on an analysis of the prevalence of obesity, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia or bad cholesterol.

According to the current estimate, about 11% of the country’s population is already diabetic with urban India accounting for 16.4% while in the rural population the prevalence is 8.9%.

In The Case Against Sugar (2016), Gary Taubes argues that sugar should not be “let off the hook” when trying to understand why there’s a surge in obesity and diabetes in populations. His argument is that sugars like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup are fundamental causes of diabetes and obesity, using the same simple causality that we employ when we say smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer.

“It’s not because we eat too much of these sugars — although that is implied by the terms ‘overconsumption’ and ‘overeating — but because they have unique physiological, metabolic, and endocrinological (i.e. hormonal) effects in the human body that directly trigger these disorders.”

Damayanti Datta’s Sugar: The Silent Killer (2022) labels India the ‘Republic of Sugar’ because of “our collective penchant” for anything sweet, a uniting factor. The body needs sugar (energy) to keep going, but a surfeit of it will have consequences. India leads the world in “diseases linked to sugar (and the fat with which sugar is inextricably linked): from obesity to diabetes, heart disease to hypertension, cancers to dementia.” If sugar is bad, she asks, why is it so deeply entrenched in our food system? Like the pushback on tobacco and alcohol, why aren’t doctors, activists and policy-makers rising to the sugar challenge? Questions are being raised, and from within the scientific community.