Chris Knobbe, M.D. - Obesity & diabetes: is it the sugar, ‘carbs,’ vegetable oils, or all three?

AHS22 Since the late 19th Century, we’ve observed exponential growth of overweight, obesity, and diabetes. In the U.S. alone, overweight and obesity have risen at least 35-fold since 1900, while diabetes has risen 35-fold since 1935. It has become fashionable to blame sugar, carbohydrates, or both for these disorders, which are now of pandemic proportions. Furthermore, the interest in both the “low-carb” community and published science has seen an almost infinite increase in recent years. But will dropping sugars and carbohydrates solve the problem? In the U.S. we’ve observed carbohydrate consumption falling since 1997 and sugar consumption falling since at least 2004, while obesity elevated from 33% to 42.5% and diabetes elevated from about 4% to 13% during this same interval (2000-2018). Seed oil consumption, on the other hand, continued to rise. Other countries have similarly challenging data for the ‘sugar-’ or ‘carb-hypothesis’ of obesity and diabetes. Answers to these vexing problems may lie in longitudinal observational data observed in “Nature’s laboratory.”