John Yudkin

Life & Legacy

John Yudkin FRSC (8 August 1910 – 12 July 1995) was a British physiologist and nutritionist, and the founding Professor of the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, London.
Yudkin wrote several books recommending low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss, including This Slimming Business (1958). He gained an international reputation for his book Pure, White and Deadly (1972), which warned that the consumption of sugar (sucrose, which consists of fructose and glucose) is dangerous to health, an argument he had made since at least 1957. Specifically, he wrote that sugar consumption was a factor in the development of conditions such as dental caries, obesity, diabetes, and heart attack.
Yudkin's failure to incorporate possible confounding factors in his case-control designs was an area of heavy criticism at the time; apart from other unmeasured known risk factors that might affect cardiovascular disease (CVD), data had emerged soon after, suggesting that sugar intake was associated with smoking, a big risk factor for CVD. Yudkin's failure to account for confounding factors led to harsh words from Ancel Keys at the time.
From the late 2000s, there was a resurgence of interest in his work, following a 2009 YouTube video about sugar and high-fructose corn syrup by the pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, and because of increasing concern about an obesity epidemic and metabolic syndrome. Pure, White and Deadly was republished in 2012, with a foreword by Lustig.