I'm in mourning for all the avocadoes I've passed up in my life. All the poached eggs I sealed my mouth against, the chicken skin I discarded. I long to go back and forgive those humble foodstuffs, so dense with delicious fat, a substance the diet gurus claimed would make me fat, too, if I dared to swallow them.
But fat is finally being exonerated after a decades-long campaign to hold it responsible for the dramatic rise in heart disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes in much of the developed (and latterly the developing) world. Most recently, an article published in the New York Times revealed the scheming culprit in fat's downfall: sugar.
According to the report, historical documents show that in the 1960s the sugar industry paid scientists to downplay the link between heart disease and sugar consumption, and to pin the blame on saturated fat instead. The consequences of this unethical behaviour are scandalous: five decades of nutrition research — and the dietary guidelines we all follow today — tainted by the sugar industry's interference.
I'd reached my own conclusion about the dangers of sugar through necessity, when my then-17-year-old son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. His otherwise excellent hospital care team gave him some appalling advice: continue eating carbohydrates while injecting appropriate units of insulin (the hormone needed to catalyse carbohydrates into glucose). His dietician even used chocolate milk and sweetened yoghurt as examples of some of the 'healthy' foodstuffs he could include in his diet.
But sugar — which is added to most of the processed products we consume, and which is present to a greater or lesser degree in all carbohydrates including bread, milk, fruit and vegetables — raises the level of sugar in the blood. In diabetics, this shows up on their glucose monitors each time they prick their fingers and test their blood.
Raised glucose levels are worrying: they cause nerve damage which can lead, ultimately, to blindness, gangrene and kidney disease.
But sugar also has a malign effect on the metabolic systems of the healthy. As Ian Leslie writes in his outstanding essay, The Sugar Conspiracy in The Guardian:
'Refined carbohydrates break down at speed into glucose in the blood, prompting the pancreas to produce insulin. When insulin levels rise, fat tissue gets a signal to suck energy out of the blood, and to stop releasing it. So when insulin stays high for unnaturally long, a person gains weight,