I started this last night and could not put it down.

It's not exactly like Taubes is revealing new information in these early chapters (I am on 6) if we have read Good Calories, Bad Calories. There's similar emphasis on the different directions of North American and European research in the 20th century, with the European branch broken off by WWII. There's the familiar studies of aboriginal populations transitioning to a industrialized diet and getting a host of chronic "diseases of civilization" as a result.

But it is new with the focus on sugar and diabetes and their interplay. That the same quantities of sugar that cost the equivalent of 360 eggs in the late Middle Ages now costs two eggs; that is all we need to know about sugar's increase in our diet as its cost dropped.

But there is lots lots more here; the connection between sugar and tobacco, how as far back as the 1920's bad data convinced diabetic specialists that fat was the problem; and the rise of Calorie In/Calorie Out.

It is kind of funny to read of a scientist in the 1880's saying the same things some driveby commenters on this very board say: "It's cruel to deprive children of sugary treats."

Was the science of sugar affected by sugar's addictive qualities? I ask myself. I think yes: when we have addicts running the experiments!