Have you felt the floor tilting under your feet lately? There are always stories popping up about what we should and shouldn’t eat, little shockwaves most of us have learnt to be skeptical about. But could this be something bigger?

Is sugar worse for you than fat? I watched a television documentary on this not long ago, but it was inconclusive. This is interesting, because when the presenters, a pair of identical twin doctors, ate two very different diets over a month, their results were very different to longer, bigger and more controlled studies.

I had already made my mind up on this one, having read what Mr Gary Taubes has to say on the subject after a minute dissection of pretty much any reputable information and data he could get hold of.

Prof. John Yudkin’s book ‘Pure White and Deadly’ was re-published recently with a foreword by Dr Robert Lustig (his research has led to the opening of a clinic to treat obesity in children and infants) . It is a more old-fashioned read, but short (and sweet!) and more pertinent than ever.

I recommend these books and those by Lustig if you need to read up on this – it is harder to find supportive science for the all-pervasive ‘fat is bad’ hypothesis because it’s been around for so long, the original data being rather old (and flawed, according to a growing number of doctors and scientists).

Remember, there are libraries if you can’t afford all these books! Or share them with friends. I don’t worry about ‘super foods’ and minor adjustments in my diet too much, I think this is far more important, because these are big food groups, which involve the biggest changes to human diets in recent history. Sugar, and sugar-producing foods (carbohydrates) are a novelty in the human diet. Fats have been eaten and relished for millenia – go figure.