A term for sugar coined by author
William Dufty in his 1975 book
Sugar Blues. Dufty laid much of the blame for the decline in American health, fitness, and economic vitality on white, refined
sugar. He believed it was so bad and so pervasive in our culture that he compared it to
heroin, calling it “white death”.
While refined white sugar provides no real nutritional value and we all probably eat too much, Dufty’s “white death”
thesis gets stretched terribly thin when he steps beyond the rather sensible advice “want to
lose weight? Don’t eat so much sugar,
fatso.” He seems to believe the over consumption of refined sugar is the cause of everything from an increase in car accidents to government corruption to the rise and fall of civilizations. Yeah. World War II, the Crusades, and the
Bubonic plague were all caused by white sugar and the Catholic Church’s evil plan to control
big sugar. Dufty bases much of his arguments on the old “
throw enough mud and some of it will stick” saw than actual, you know, scientific data. He even claims, wrongly, that white sugar and
cocaine are molecularly identical.
See Also
Worlds In Collision