Robyn Williams:

Do you know, I'm old enough to remember that shocking book called Pure, White and Deadly, written by Dr John Yudkin in the 1970s. I had him on The Science Show back in 1977, all about sugar and why it's very bad for you.

Now we have a successor. It's

Sweet Poison, written here by David Gillespie, who's not a doctor but a lawyer, and loathes sugar as much as Yudkin did. Here's why.

David Gillespie:

In 1865, much of what is today inner suburban Brisbane was home to vast sugar cane farms.

The farms were located there because Britain had a problem. They'd finally worked out how to make commercial quantities of refined sugar and then those pesky Americans had a civil war, stopping cane imports dead. But the demand for the white gold was insatiable and the edict went out to the empire: turn all arable land over to the production of sugar.

In the inner eastern suburbs of Brisbane, cane was planted as far as the eye could see and a floating refinery (somewhat aptly named The Walrus) plied the creeks turning out over 1,000 kilograms of sugar every day. But it was still expensive, and wasn't being eaten every day by anyone but Queen Victoria and her mates.

By 1910, sugar-based foods were starting to sneak into our diets. Cadbury had just started shipping its Dairy Maid Chocolate bar, the first-ever packaged chocolate product. In the US, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were still garage operations  run out of sheds behind the pharmacies of their inventors, but were growing fast. But you still wouldn't be able to buy breakfast cereal in Australia for another 14 years. And the only place you'd be tasting fruit juice you hadn't squeezed yourself was in Church on Communion Sunday. In fact it would be 40 years before you could buy canned orange juice at all in Australia.

There weren't many overweight people. In fact four out of every five people you'd meet were downright skinny by today's standards. There was no such thing as heart disease and the medical specialty of cardiology wasn't even going to be necessary for another 25 years.

Obviously no-one was getting rich selling diets or gym-memberships. There wasn't even enough interest in diets to start a woman's magazine. The first copy of

Women's Weekly wouldn't be rolling off the presses for another quarter of a century and it would be more than half a century before the first Weight Watchers meeting would happen.

Jump forward 50 years to the 1960s and things had changed a lot. Sugar was everywhere. Coke and Pepsi had grown into goliaths of the food industry. Fruit juice could be bought, refrigerated and drunk at every meal. Chocolate bars had become the lifeblood of the huge Cadbury Empire. Imitators like Nestle and Mars weren't far behind.
 
The range of breakfast cereals had grown from the corn flakes offered in the 1920s, to thousands of high sugar concoctions. Breakfast cereal sales were doubling every nine years. That wasn't the only thing doubling. The number of overweight people in the population had doubled in just 50 years.

Heart disease was endemic, with two out of every three deaths being caused by it. A health disaster was clearly in progress, so cardiologists were trained at a rate never seen before for any profession. Medical schools were endowed with fortunes. Drug companies launched massive research programs with government money helping to grease the wheels.

To help understand why we had all suddenly gotten so fat, a new profession was invented: Human Nutrition. At the urging of the newly minted experts we all went on low-fat diets and took