John Yudkin

John Yudkin ( born August 8, 1910 in London, † July 12, 1995 ) was an English physiologist and nutritionist. He claimed that between sugar consumption and the number of infarct cases there was a connection.

Life

He grew up in London, the son of an Orthodox Jewish family that had fled from pogroms in 1905 from Russia. His father died when he was seven years old. His mother moved the five sons under difficult conditions.

In 1933 he married Milly Himmelweit who had come to England because of the threat of persecution of the Jews from Germany. The marriage lasted more than 60 years. The couple had three sons.

Work

He received his doctorate under Marjorie Stephenson (1885-1948) in bacteriology and already got by international scientific recognition. However, his interest was in food science. To work in this field, there was in the 1930s only to train as a doctor. 1938 Yudkin was the Dunn Nutrition Laboratory worked and researched the vitamin A and riboflavin. He examined the relationships between sugar in the diet and various degenerative diseases. During the Second World War, he served as a medical officer in West Africa and dealt there with further studies.

In 1945 he became a professor of physiology at the University of London. He advised the government of the young state of Israel on nutritional issues and was a dedicated rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

It is due to that the Bachelor of Science and Master of Science were established in nutritional sciences at the University of London. From 1954 until his retirement in 1972, he was professor of food science in London.

Since 1957, he showed that the consumption of sugar and sugary sweeteners is closely associated with coronary heart disease. He became internationally known for his book Pure, White and Deadly, which appeared in 1974 under the title Sweet but dangerous also in German.

Robert H. Lustig, a professor of pediatric endocrinology with a focus on obesity in children seen in Yudkin a pioneer who recognized the damaging effect of sugar, long before the underlying physiological processes were known. He provided the most recent edition of the book Pure, White at Deadly 1986 with its own Preface and initiated in 2012 a new edition.

Publications

• Sweet, but dangerous. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1974 ( German edition ).