'The Case Against Sugar,' Gary Taubes, Investigative Science & Health Journalist
What this video covers
Recorded April 25, 2018, this is Gary Taubes delivering the 7th Annual C. Everett Koop Distinguished Lecture at Dartmouth — an academic medical-center venue, co-sponsored by the C. Everett Koop Institute, the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. The occasion is his book The Case Against Sugar, and Taubes uses the lecture to lay out both the book’s historical argument and its policy argument: that the sugar industry shaped public policy and the research agenda, and that sugar is a likely driver of weight gain, diabetes, and associated chronic diseases.
The talk is structured as investigative narrative rather than a diet pitch. Taubes traces how the sugar industry worked to steer nutrition science and policy, and argues that the public was misled about what drives obesity. He gives the Yudkin-versus-Keys story its full arc: by the 1970s, John Yudkin’s sugar hypothesis was gaining enough traction to draw congressional hearings on sugar and chronic disease — and then, he says, “it evaporated,” because Ancel Keys, the dominant nutrition authority and champion of the dietary-fat dogma, ridiculed Yudkin in print. If fat was the problem with modern diets, Keys’s position implied, sugar couldn’t be.
At over 80 minutes, this is one of the fullest single-sitting presentations of Taubes’s sugar thesis, delivered to a medical-school audience rather than a low-carb conference crowd.
Key points
- Taubes argues the sugar industry influenced public policy and the research agenda, steering attention away from sugar’s role in disease.
- He presents sugar as a likely driver of weight gain, diabetes, and related chronic diseases — framing this as a probability case from the evidence, not settled proof.
- The lecture traces the history of how sugar became central to the American diet and how industry funding shaped what got studied.
- Taubes contends the public was misled by decades of nutrition messaging that blamed fat while exonerating sugar.
- He argues for informed decision-making about sugar at both the individual and societal level, including reconsidering dietary guidelines and policy.
- Taubes closes by discussing how individuals and society should think about making informed decisions on sugar — framing it as a question of evidence and policy, not personal virtue.
- In the Q&A, asked whether artificial sweeteners are safer than sugar, Taubes answers yes: borrowing a 1976 National Academy of Sciences point, he notes that getting a year’s worth of sweetness from saccharin means consuming a third of a pound instead of a hundred pounds of sugar — and adds that stevia can serve as a “parachute,” a crutch off sugar, though ideally people lose the sweet tooth entirely.
- The Koop Institute’s own framing is part of the event’s texture: its mission targets the products that drive chronic disease — tobacco, alcohol, energy-dense foods, opiates, guns — and its introducer compares Taubes to C. Everett Koop himself, “fearless” in taking on a powerful industry.
- The venue and sponsorships — a named distinguished lecture at an Ivy League medical school — mark how far Taubes’s arguments had moved into institutional settings by 2018.