Sweet and Vicious—The Case Against Sugar

The science writer Gary Taubes was being his provocative self as he has been in the past about the field of epidemiology and about dietary components and chronic diseases. The occasion for his latest report came as the cover story about sugar for a health and wellness issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine in April.

Taubes has been persuaded that sugar is toxic by the evidence and arguments made principally by Robert Lustig of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. The mechanism envisaged is for high levels of sugar consumption to cause fat to accumulate in the liver, followed by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome which in turn can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. According to Taubes, sugar and high fructose corn syrup “…could be toxic, but they take years to do their damage. It doesn’t happen overnight. Until long term studies are done, we won’t know for sure.” And some cancers such as breast cancer may also be one consequence of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Taubes confesses in the article that sugar scares him. “I’d like to eat it in moderation, I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade…Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do.”

Cell Phones and Cancer—A Journalist’s Highly Regarded Review of the Evidence

In a review article of cell phones and brain cancer which an epidemiology colleague has called a model of balanced investigation and presentation, Columbia University’s Siddhartha Mukherjee, has concluded that “…as of now, the evidence remains far from convincing.” He bases this conclusion on the fact that casting a wide-net to incriminate cell phones “has yet to find solid proof of risk for cellphone radiation. And while more definitive studies are needed, he raises the possibility that even these studies might not give us the degree of proof we want.

 In the article, he seeks to remind those who may be disappointed by the failure to incriminate cell phones that we need standards by which not only to rule in carcinogens, but also to rule them out. Otherwise, he says, the effect is like crying wolf too often. People get numb to your warnings. Thus, failing to rule potential carcinogens in or out leads to a degeneration of our scientific language about cancer.

This Time Harvard Study Says Coffee May Reduce The Risk of Cancer

Senior epidemiologists easily remember the study reported in the NEJM on March 12, 1981 by investigators at Harvard about a possible relationship between coffee and pancreatic cancer. The report is infamous in the annals of epidemiology because of the publicity it received and because the association is often referred to by epidemiologists as the example of a false positive association. At the time, the lead investigator and well known epidemiologist Brian MacMahon was quoted as saying that he had stopped drinking coffee.

Now it is ironic that another report should come from Harvard, this time pointing to the potential benefits of coffee in protecting against the most lethal or advanced forms of prostate cancer. Investigators studied 47,911 men in the Health Professionals Follow Up Study who reported their coffee consumption patterns every four years between 1986 and 2008. Over this period, 5,035 cases of prostate cancer were found, including 642 that were lethal. In the Harvard study, consuming six or more cups daily produced an 18% lower risk of any form of prostate cancer and a 60% lower risk of developing lethal prostate cancer. The risk reductions were found with either regular or decaffeinated coffee.

The authors did not go out on a limb to recommend coffee drinking as a cancer preventive measure at this point, stating “it is premature to recommend that men increase their coffee intake to reduce advance prostate cancer risk based on this single study. However, our findings are potentially important given the lack of identified modifiable risk factors for advanced prostate cancer.”

CDC Tongue In Cheek Blog Post Gets Wide Circulation

You just never know. CDC routinely posts information on its public health preparedness blog and gets a few thousand hits. Then it posts one about preparing for a “zombie apocalypse” and the servers crash because so many people want to read about the upcoming disaster. In the process, hopefully they learn what it takes to be prepared for a public disaster and CDC gets its message, or at least part of it, across to a wide range of Americans. Go figure. Perhaps epidemiologists and other scientists with a message to convey that is not getting through, say on climate change or autism and vaccines could use this approach. Maybe a tongue in cheek post about how Gravity Is Not A Law After All or How Evolution Has Not Really Happened.  To read the original “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” visit

 http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/