Sugar Blues

Rating:
Summary: Avoid Sugar ! (and the book).
Review: Anything that is not done in moderation causes medical problems including too much water. This is a one note book - the evils of sugar. Please... nobody tell Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts.

So we now have a book that brings in a lot of justification. The book even has historical reasons to justify cutting back on sugar. The ability to prove some of the historical claims in the book is zero. So the author hopes that the reader is slightly gullible and buys the book and swallows (if I may use that pun) all of the explanations. Having said that anyone alive should understand that there is a connection between diabetes and sugar, as they should know (heaven help us if they do not) that smoking will ruin your lungs and throat at best and at worse cause cancer in a fixed percentage of smokers.

The book is 50% correct and 50% loony. Unfortunately it is hard to have both loony and good and have a credible book.

Yes definitely avoid too much sugar. But there is no conspiracy to make you eat the stuff. It is in the food (like Ketchup) because it is cheap and people buy the food with sugar addded.

Avoid too much sugar but also in my humble opinion, avoid the book. Just read the book reviews and draw the simple lesson to cut back and use sugar sparingly and at least in moderation.

Jack in Toronto

Rating:
Summary: Another Good Book On Sugar
Review: Every author I have read who writes about sugar comes across to me as a little paranoid, but after reading their books they have every reason to be. White sugar is probably much more nefarious then most of us imagine. Whatever it is, I am certainly treading on a different ground when I shop\hunt for food.

Some good things about Sugar Blues is there is some quick really simple recipes. There also is a section on how government and industry always seem to work together for their OWN interest and not yours. Caveat emptor.... always! Never forget that and use your common sense.

He also warns that doctors are not your friends. I believe that to be quite true. They are on another paradigm and pity the fool that neglects his health by his bad eating habits and ends up in their care. Read this book and you could avoid being another "white stuff" casualty. I mean doctors do wear white coats don't they?

In other areas the author pushed it a little too hard in my opinion when he said a lot of "unexplainable [car] accidents" in which "millions of American drivers" may be driving under the influence or effect of sugar drowsiness (i.e. hypoglycemia due to hyperinsulin) when driving after a meal, especially after eating restaurant meals which is loaded with sugar. But who knows, it could be true and never has been investigated. Refined sugar is in nearly everything we eat nowadays.

His decrying of sugar is similiar to Nancy Appleton's book, but I wouldn't take both of what they say lightly. The bottom line to me is another "white" food to avoid. That is; white sugar; white flour; white rice; white salt; and white milk (non-raw). All of these foods face extreme processing to lengthen their shelf life, but may end up shorting yours.

Rating:
Summary: Really makes you think about what you eat every day!
Review: I am not quite finished with this book, but ready I would say that I recommend it. The author gives a lot of historicaly information about sugar, including the health, economic and political issues that were (and continue to be )tied to it. He describes his own experiences as a sugar addict and how he overcame that, with wonderful healthly results. My husband and I keep reading each other passages from the book...and I can no longer eat sugar without feeling very bad about it. I am considering serious diet changes due to reading this book. Please read this, because Dufty is not telling us anything new, he is just revealing what has been known for a very long time: sugar is dangerous for human health!

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I first read this book a year ago. I'll say this about it:

Forget the indespensible information on the completely non-existent nutritional value of refined sugar. Forget the anecdotal mind-blowing gems like how mosquitos and other disease carrying insects fly past a recovered sugar addict's body because they are no longer attracted to what was once sweet smelling and tasting blood. Forget the paradigm shift his expose demands on the causes of a significant portion of all automobile accidents in this country. Forget his linking glucose intolerence to diseases--diagnosed, undiagnosed and falsely diagnosed over the centuries--from tooth decay to epilepsy to heart diesase to schizophrenia to lung cancer.

Just ruminate on the historical facts brought out by this man that the hunger for refined sugar, and the subsequent addiction to this mind and body destroying chemical are the architects of:

1) the African Slave trade in Europe and the Americas

2)the disconnected and disjunct philosophies of mind and body health being separate entities in Western medicine (just now being gradually overturned) unlike everywhere else in world history

3)"Pagan"/mental illness-related diseases of mythical, otherwise inexplicable derivation

4) the chemical dependency supply-and-demand relationship and geo-political international trade structure that made everything from the decimation of Native American tribes and lands in the Americas to the drug corporations near dominance of today's American economy, to the Medellin and Sicilian cartels of heroin and cocaine *creating international public policy today* not just possible but INEVITABLE...

In short, Mr. Dufty has written one of the most important books of this century, bar none. He has become a public servant to a level rivalling that of leaders and thinkers like Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther King.

Hyperbole? Of course. But it's impossible not to get emotional about what this man shows us and teaches us. When you see how he puts together all the evidence, like the final moments of a Sherlock Holmes movie, and see how the mysterious pieces of the most tormented periods of both one's personal life and that of human history since the European Middle Ages fit together and relate, it will downright frighten you with its damning simplicity. Anyone who has been touched by alcoholism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, heart disease, depression, obesity, anorexia, drug addiction, diabetes; racism, religious intolerence, alcohol-, car accident- and drug-related crimes; co-dependency-related divorce, dysfunctional families; in short, every citizen of the Western World--which by political proxy is everyone in the world--will read this book and be changed, even if you do have a cup of cola again. I have never even come close to successfully getting rid of sugar in my diet. But the idea that I could change my life, health, soul and sense of the universe completely by achieving it is something that would absolutely never have occurred to me before hand.

If that makes you say "that sounds so *new agey* it makes me want to gag", when you read SUGAR BLUES you'll realize it's the sugar talking!

My favorite line from the movie THE USUAL SUSPECTS is "The devil's greatest trick is making the world believe he doesn't exist." I think his real name is Fear; but maybe his real nickname...is Sugar.

This book cannot just change lives, it has the power to change the world as we know it.

Rating:
Summary: A sledgehammer of truth
Review: In SUGAR BLUES, William Dufty doesn't just lift the historical mask on sugar, he pulverizes it. I have read other books detailing the biological havoc that refined sugar wreaks on the body, but this is the first book I've seen that places sugar in a historical framework and charts its path of destruction over thousands of years, through the rise and fall of civilizations right up to present-day corporate and government duplicity. The results are truly eye-opening, if not shocking. If you thought sugar was just one of life's sweet little nuisances, think again. It has been one of the major levers for the enslavement and control of human beings for millenia.

The portrait of the historical drama of sugar is this book's strength. SUGAR BLUES does have minor weaknesses, however. It's lacking in science, which these days is important to have when challenging the status quo. It also lacks a systematic argument, the chapters often meandering from subject to subject (the chapter on sugar in cigarettes, for instance, ends with a discussion of sugar's role in auto accidents). Finally, the book sputters to its conclusion as Dufty provides a final chapter on recipes that frankly put me to sleep. He should have stuck to his original purpose here and delivered a final, clinching argument. With a new edition, all of these minor wrinkles could be addressed.

That said, this book's value is nonetheless extraordinary. Sugar is so entrenched in most people's lifestyles that it is practically invisible, taken for granted. But if it has caused half the damage Dufty claims it has, then everyone should do themselves a favor and read his book. It doesn't end there; I know from personal struggle that sugar is incredibly hard to kick. But the first step in any change is knowing you have to make it.