Few would argue that excess refined sugar is pernicious to our health. However, hardly anyone is aware of the manipulation and deceit initiated and perpetuated by the sugar industry to insulate us from this truth.

Gary Taubes, an investigative journalist with a strong science background, has written an excellent book, "The Case Against Sugar," which expertly documents how the manipulation of facts occurred.

"Beginning in the early '90s, I started reporting on public health and, indeed, a lot of the rigorous methodology that I have been told was absolutely fundamentally necessary to get a reliable result was considered sort of a luxury that you didn't have to do in public health research.

It's too hard. It's too expensive, so you don't have to do it. As a result … a lot of the fundamental tenets — our belief system about what constitutes a healthy diet — is based on very shaky evidence," Taubes says.

By the late '90s, Taubes was investigating the ideas that salt causes high blood pressure and dietary fat causes heart disease, which resulted in a pair of award-winning reports for the Journal of Science. In 2001, he published The New York Times Magazine cover story, "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"

In the years since, Taubes has been wholly focused on nutrition research, which resulted in three books. The two preceding "The Case Against Sugar" were "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health," and "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It."