This article presents an interesting takedown of "The Case Against Sugar".
http://www.stephanguyenet.com/bad-sugar ... nst-sugar/
Personally, I think Taubes is a great writer who has done a lot of good in pointing out that we shouldn't simply follow FDA dogma. Still, he seems like he's taking this whole crusade against sugar a little too far.
According to well-regarded obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet, Taubes excludes from his books any research he doesn't like. This becomes pretty funny when Taubes conveniently leaves out results from research his own organization is currently funding if the results contradict the narrative he's trying to push.
From the piece:
"Taubes upbraids the research community for its belief that body fatness is determined by calorie intake, rather than the impact of foods on insulin. He supports the latter proposition with semi-anecdotal observations from Africa suggesting that a group of people eating a high-sugar diet supplying “as little as sixteen hundred calories per day” were sometimes obese and diabetic.
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."