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EHeller comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar. You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up. Yes, I suppose the FDA could have encouraged people to consume more high fructose corn syrup and good on the government for not doing that. Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers. He's also constrained by popular science book length limit.
I'm sure the direct content of a nutritional recommendation is getting conflated with the practical effects it has on what people eat, especially in the short-form article context that you start out quoting from (why, by the way is that your jumping off point? It seems totally ill-suited as a best-version of his argument).
Wait, the American Heart Association can get away with assuming that level of sophistication in their (much more general) audience but Taubes isn't allowed to assume we know the government wasn't literally recommending people drink soda and infer that he is complaining about relative levels of emphasis-- the focus on fat over sugar?
I also worry that people who haven't read Taubes will think you're talking about a central argument of his. This entire sugar digression is basically tangential to the bulk of his critque.
I think the point is that the mainstream nutrition is just as against refined sugar as it is fats (they are in the same area in the pyramid). Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite. Taubes and mainstream nutrition largely AGREE, but Taubes paints himself as a contrarian. To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
As an anecdote, when I was school aged in the 80s, my public school's nurse successfully got sugar-added drinks (pop,etc) removed from the school, although the cafeteria continued to serve some very fat-heavy entrees (cheap, processed burgers and what not). I was actually saddened to learn a few years after I finished, under pressure from their vendors, the school put the vending machines and soda fountain back in the cafeteria.
All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the "fat" message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison). Walking through the grocery store, I can find as many "low-sugar" and "sugar- free" items as I can find "low-fat" and "fat-free."
I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books' pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it's about the low-fat prescription.
I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn't a "sugar makes you fat" message.
I think this is where you disagree with the main post (and with me). I know several people who have read Taubes that have no idea what the main stream nutrition advice is (they are steeped in paleo blogs that paint a very dismissive straw man of mainstream nutrition). Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
Then what was bad about it?
So that's an interesting data point. If this is a common view among paleo/low-carb people than I would certainly agree that Taubes is to blame.
I didn't get this impression about his position on sugar from his books. Never thought he departed drastically from the mainstream in terms of advice about sugar consumption. I certainly get this impression from his view on carbohydrates more generally and anti-fat and anti-saturated fat messages( which is what the books are actually about!). If Chris or someone posts something indicating that he is misrepresenting mainstream nutrition science there I'll change my min.
It's hard to reconstruct these things, but Nornagest's comment is basically what I remember. I definitely remember thinking Popsicles were healthier than ice cream because they didn't contain fat.
Can't speak for Jack, but I remember Eighties and Nineties pop-nutrition advice associating sugar consumption (inaccurately) with hyperactivity and (more accurately, but with caveats) with tooth decay. As regards specific sugar-rich foods, I don't recall soft drinks ever being blamed for obesity during my childhood, but candy, cake, and cookies all were at times -- though this might have as much to do with fat as sugar.