Commentary: Lactose and ischaemic heart disease: a sweet hypothesis … but nothing more!

In 1964 John Yudkin and colleagues1 published a report on sucrose intake by patients with vascular disease and control subjects. The mean sugar intake of the patients was nearly twice as high as that of the control subjects and much of the additional sugar appeared to have been taken in cups of tea and coffee. This focus on sucrose is strangely inconsistent with the far-reaching conclusion drawn in an earlier paper by Yudkin2 that it is ‘difficult to support any theory which supposes a single dietary cause of coronary thrombosis … (and) it is suggested that relative over-consumption of food associated with reduced physical exercise, may be one of several causes of the disease’.