Gary Taubes 'The Case Against Sugar'
What this video covers
A Town Hall Seattle appearance from January 2017, coinciding with the release of The Case Against Sugar. The event description sets the tone bluntly: “Sugar is being called the new tobacco,” and it summarizes the book’s case — that recently exposed documents revealed the sugar industry’s backroom efforts to cover up sugar’s harms, that scientists were paid thousands of dollars decades ago to steer the public away from fat and toward exonerating sugar, and that diabetes and obesity (especially among children) have reached epidemic proportions in the meantime.
Taubes opens by insisting he is “not a doctor, not a nutritionist” — he is a journalist obsessed, in his words, with “how hard it is to do science right and how hard it is to get the right answer.” A line he says he quotes in three of his books comes from physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In the talk, Taubes walks through America’s history with sugar, explains what he says the research shows about addiction to sweets, clarifies the arguments against sugar, and — a point he returns to often — corrects what he calls misconceptions about sugar’s relationship to weight. The aim, as presented, is to give the audience a framework for making informed decisions about sugar consumption rather than a diet plan.
Key points
- Taubes argues the sugar industry ran a deliberate cover-up of sugar’s harmful effects, including paying scientists to mislead the public into fearing fat instead.
- He presents sugar as addictive, and contends that addiction framing is supported by the research — a claim his critics dispute.
- Diabetes and obesity are presented as epidemic-scale consequences of rising sugar consumption, with children singled out as especially affected.
- Taubes distinguishes his argument from simple calorie-counting: in his view, sugar’s metabolic effects (not just its calories) are what make it dangerous.
- The “new tobacco” framing is the event’s, not a scientific consensus position — it’s worth reading as advocacy language from the book’s promotion.
- He gives the document story a human face: dentist Cristin Kearns of Denver, who works with low-income diabetics, dug into a defunct sugar company’s archives donated to Colorado State University — the first box she pulled, he says, was labeled “confidential sugar industry documents” — after receiving a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to write about sugar-industry influence on science.
- One of the talk’s more surprising historical claims: sugar was a “critical ingredient” in the American blended cigarette — the “marriage of tobacco and sugar” that made cigarette smoke inhalable, and with it the explosion of cigarette addiction and lung cancer in the first half of the 20th century.
- He attacks the phrase “too much sugar” itself as a tautology: nobody says too much drinking causes liver cancer — they say alcohol causes liver cancer. The question, he argues, is whether sugar causes the disease, not how much is “excess.”
- As with his other sugar talks, the emphasis is on industry accountability and informed choice, aimed at a general civic audience rather than a nutrition-science crowd.