Sugar Blues is a book by William Dufty that was released in 1975 and has become a dietary classic. According to the publishers, over 1.6 million copies have been printed. A digest called Refined Sugar: the Sweetest Poison of Them All was prepared by Dufty, see. Dufty uses the narrative form to delve into the history of sugar and history of medicine. He mentions whistle blowers, such as Semmelweiss, to remind readers of the discontinuities in standard science. He also delves into the history of Cuba, history of slavery, history of tobacco and tobacco curing to present the sociology of sugar. The status of sugar, as a product of refining, was compared to drugs: Later, the euphemism, "made from natural ingredients", is cited as equally applicable to heroin and sugar.
Contents
The book has 14 chapters, 78 references, five pages of notes, and a 10-page index. The book reviews the history of the world from the point of view of sugar, sounding the alarm of its deleterious and debilitating effects. The chapters are: ;It is necessary to be personal ;The Mark of Cane ;How We Got Here from There ;In Sugar We Trust ;Blame it on the Bees ;From the Nipple to the Needle ;Of Cabbages and Kings ;How to Complicate Simplicity ;Dead Dogs and Englishmen ;Codes of Honesty ;What the Specialists Say ;Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet? ;Kicking ;Soup to Nuts
Mentions
Dufty's wife, Gloria Swanson, traveled the United States to promote the book in 1975. A student of depression avoidance included Sugar Blues as one of its "books which treat either primarily or in particular chapters the role of nutritional and dietary factors in the promotion of mental well-being and prevention of disorder...on the role of diet in particular disorders...functional hypoglycemia." John Lennon’s personal assistantFrederic Seaman described Lennon’s diet in the book The Last Days of John Lennon. When Seaman started in the job, Dufty’s book loomed large: A food science educator listed Sugar Blues as a sample text to stimulate critical thinking necessary to become a food scientist: A practitioner of integrative medicine, Tris Trethart MD, was interviewed by the medical journalIntegrative Medicine and he explained: Censorship analyst Heather Hendershot and historianMark Pendergrast have criticized the book for comparing sugar to drugs and suggesting its role in a variety of illnesses including bubonic plague. The extreme range of maladies Dufty assigns to sugar has been used to make the indictment appear absurd:
