Sugar Blues is a book by William Dufty that was released in 1975 and has become a dietary classic. According to the publishers, over 1.6 million copies have been printed. Dufty uses the narrative form to delve into the history of sugar and history of medicine. He mentions whistle blowers, such as Semmelweiss, to remind readers of the discontinuities in standard science. He also delves into the history of Cuba, history of slavery, history of tobacco and tobacco curing to present the sociology of sugar. The status of sugar, as a product of refining, was compared to drugs: Later, the euphemism, "made from natural ingredients", is cited as equally applicable to heroin and sugar. (page 148)

Contents

The book has 14 chapters, 78 references, five pages of notes, and a 10-page index. The book reviews the history of the world from the point of view of sugar, sounding the alarm of its deleterious and debilitating effects. The chapters are:

Mentions

Dufty's wife, Gloria Swanson, traveled the United States to promote the book in 1975. A student of depression avoidance included Sugar Blues as one of its "books which treat either primarily or in particular chapters the role of nutritional and dietary factors in the promotion of mental well-being and prevention of disorder...on the role of diet in particular disorders...functional hypoglycemia (Duffy [sic] 1975)." John Lennon’s personal assistant Frederic Seaman described Lennon’s diet in the book The Last Days of John Lennon (1991). When Seaman started in the job, Dufty’s book loomed large: A food science educator listed Sugar Blues as a sample text to stimulate critical thinking necessary to become a food scientist: A practitioner of integrative medicine, Tris Trethart MD, was interviewed by the medical journal Integrative Medicine and he explained: Censorship analyst Heather Hendershot and historian Mark Pendergrast have criticized the book for comparing sugar to drugs and suggesting its role in a variety of illnesses including bubonic plague. The extreme range of maladies Dufty assigns to sugar has been used to make the indictment appear absurd: