Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/04/the-guardians-article-on-the-sugar-conspiracy/
I mentioned yesterday that whenever something comes out saying that “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong,” it’s a sign that some skepticism may be in order.
Here is another example: The article on the “sugar conspiracy“ by Ian Leslie published in The Guardian. This strongly criticizes the work of Ancel Keys, whose work was largely but by no means exclusively responsible for the diet-heart hypothesis linking excessive intake of animal fats to heart disease risk.
I love conspiracy theories as much as anyone else and appreciated how the author made his case for this one. My sense of his article was that it had grains of truth (Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns, for example, report that Keys had funding from the sugar industry). But the overall thrust of the article seemed excessively hyperbolic and based on selective picking of the data (cherry-picking).
Going through the piece line by line to identify errors and misinterpretations was not something I thought worth the trouble.
Fortunately, someone else did.
Katherine Docimo Pett, a master’s degree candidate in biochemical and molecular nutrition at Tufts University, who blogs as Nutrition Wonk, sent me her detailed critique of the paper. She explains:
So I decided to look into the Seven Countries Study and I found a number of occasions where “The Sugar Conspiracy” misinterprets the evidence. So buckle you…