Sucrose is increasingly being considered a causative agent in Western lifestyle diseases. Epidemiological studies show an association between sugar consumption and many lifestyle diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Sugar consumption increased significantly in the United Kingdom in around 1850, due mainly as a result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions in England. Since this time consumption has continued to increase. Epidemiology is often difficult to interpret and other factors could also explain the increase in the prevalence of Western lifestyle diseases during this time period. However, the presence of two World Wars during this time frame is a useful tool to be able to interpret the association between sugar and Western disease because during the wars rationing was implemented. Cardiovascular disease rates also dropped during both wars and this provides tantalising clues as to what might be responsible for the current cardiovascular epidemic in developed countries.
The suggestion that the diseases of the Western nations are caused by excessive carbohydrate intake is slightly disingenuous. In reality, the carbohydrate intake must be separated into refined and unrefined carbohydrates, the latter containing sugars. There is plenty of nutritional evidence that high carbohydrate diets, when as whole grains, are beneficial to the health. However, increasing refined carbohydrates may indeed cause Western disease. However, data on sugar consumption during World war one is limited and other dietary factors also changed during World war 2, including total energy and total fat. Therefore it is very difficult to attribute a cause to the reductions in the disease rates during the wars. More recently it has been shown that refined carbohydrates cause detrimental glycaemic effects and this in turn leads to insulin resistance and disease. Therefore rationing of refined carbohydrates in the war may have potentially caused the reduced cardiovascular disease rate, but this cannot be said with certainty.
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