"Scientifically, The Case Against Sugar suffers from a condition Steven Pinker has called the “Igon Value Problem”. This term describes the tendency of certain science journalists to arrive at obtuse conclusions due to a superficial understanding of their subject matter (3). There are many examples of this in The Case Against Sugar, but the underlying theme is that Taubes misunderstands (or chooses not to apply) the scientific method itself...
Besides its misapplication of Occam’s Razor, the passage above manifests the Igon Value Problem in a second way: the diseases in question are actually not all correlated with one another, or even with sugar intake. Statistics demonstrating this are readily available. For example, sugar intake is higher today in the US than it was in the 1970s, and while obesity has increased three-fold, coronary heart disease mortality has declined by over 60 percent (4, 5, 6). Taubes neglects to inform the reader that sugar intake has been declining since 1999 in the US, a period over which obesity and diabetes rates have increased substantially (7, 8, 9)...
A person who actually wants to get to the bottom of this question should conduct their investigation in a very different manner. The first order of business is to look up the relevant metabolic ward studies, which are the most tightly controlled diet studies available. These studies consistently show that calorie content is the only known food property that has a meaningful impact on body fatness. This is true across a wide range of carbohydrate-to-fat ratios and sugar intakes, and a correspondingly wide range of insulin levels (17).
What makes Taubes’s oversight so extraordinary is that he was involved in funding one of these metabolic ward studies, which compared two diets that differed more than tenfold in sugar content. The results showed that a 25 percent sugar, high-carbohydrate diet caused slightly more body fat loss than a 2 percent sugar, very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet of equal calories (18). Despite these clear and consistent findings, Taubes continues to insist that calorie intake is not an important determinant of body fatness, and he offers the reader questionable evidence in support of this while omitting high-quality evidence to the contrary. All while exuding righteous indignation about the scientific community’s misguided beliefs."
Sugar shaming is exhausting; searching for the one thing to cut out is a great way to cause health crises
FB: "Science is imperfect, and scientists are as well. Pioneers such as John Ioannidis, Brian Nosek, Vinayak Prasad, Adam Cifu, Chris Chambers, and David Allison are making a good faith effort to identify flaws in the scientific process and address them. Journalists have an important role to play here as well, by helping to identify problems and raising awareness about how to fix them. Taubes also views science as flawed, but primarily where it disagrees with his personal beliefs. Rather than contribute to the solution, Taubes adds to the problem by promoting an unscientific thought process that systematically excludes opposing evidence."
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