16 Facts About John Yudkin

John Yudkin FRSC was a British physiologist and nutritionist, and the founding Professor of the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, London.

John Yudkin gained an international reputation for his book Pure, White and Deadly, which warned that the consumption of sugar is dangerous to health, an argument he had made since at least 1957.

John Yudkin was raised in the East End of London in an Orthodox Jewish family that had fled the Russian pogroms of 1905.

John Yudkin won scholarships to Hackney Downs School, and another from there to Chelsea Polytechnic.

John Yudkin matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge as a scholar, and graduated in biochemistry at the age of 20 in 1931.

John Yudkin worked for his PhD in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge under the supervision of Marjory Stephenson, a pioneer of research in bacterial metabolism, who funded his work.

In 1933 John Yudkin married Milly Himmelweit, who had recently left Berlin to escape the worsening political situation.

John Yudkin began clinical studies at The London Hospital in 1935, while continuing to teach in Cambridge one weekday and at weekends.

John Yudkin completed his medical studies in 1938, and was appointed Director of Medical Studies at Christ's College.

John Yudkin found that the Army had devised a uniform diet for its soldiers in the four British West African colonies.

The first students were admitted in 1953, and in 1954 the Department of Nutrition was officially opened and John Yudkin's Chair was converted into a Professorship of Nutrition.

John Yudkin showed that in most patients weight could be well controlled by restricting dietary carbohydrate.

Unlike his colleague Thomas L Cleave, Yudkin believed sugar was more harmful than refined grains and refused to use the term "refined carbohydrates" because it gave "the impression that white flour has the same ill effects as sugar".

John Yudkin retired from his Professorship in 1971 and left the college in 1974.

John Yudkin continued to write popular articles in lay magazines, having by now become a household name.

John Yudkin began to collect antiquarian books, specialising in medicine, nutrition and the culinary arts; after his death much of his collection was given to the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.