Dr Dean Diaries
A Whistleblower on Sugar
I know all about being a whistleblower – this blog is about that story and how I weathered the storm and continued developing the rest of my thesis that leads to the present day Maui ReSet Study where I proved that taking seven of my Foundational Formulas can reverse years of dangerous health trends and extend lifespan and healthspan.
Sugar Was Not My Friend
Trigger Warning: This is not a fun blog to read and it wasn’t a fun blog to write – it’s about how sugar totally defined my trajectory in medicine by getting me attacked by my licensing body. Let’s dive in!
I’ve made it clear in this blog series that sugar has been heavily sprinkled throughout my life. My last blog exposed the detrimental effects of sugar on me and on my patients. But if you get the sugar out, you watch the anxiety and the fog lift. I was already starting to form the beginning of my full thesis – that yeast overgrowth is a root cause of autoimmune and many other health conditions – and eliminating sugar gives you a fighting chance to recover your health. The brain fog can be directly from too much sugar but also from yeast toxins that are produced by feeding yeast its favorite food.
Now, in 2026, sugar is finally being recognized as the cause of inflammation, heart disease as well as the obvious road to diabetes. Fifty years ago, the sugar industry covered up studies showing that sugar is actually a primary cause of heart disease and they made fats and cholesterol the enemy. You can read all the details in my sugar books that I list below.
Early in my medical practice I had so much success helping people reclaim their health by getting them off sugar that I decided to write a book on the subject. It was to be my second book after When You Can’t Reach the Doctor that I wrote about in a previous blog. As I was finishing the final draft I was asked to do a segment on The Dini Petty Show on CTV, a Canadian television. It was around Christmas on December 11, 1989, and the topic was overindulgence over the holidays and how to counter it. Dini wanted me to talk about sugar and its effects.
A few months earlier I had spoken about Candidiasis/Yeast Overgrowth on Dini’s show. I might have mentioned during the show that I was writing a book on sugar. So at Christmastime, with a studio was packed with school children, I was going to burst their dreams of sugar plums dancing in their heads.
I came prepared with my research and my props. In front of a stunned audience, I spooned out the 10 teaspoons of sugar in a can of soda and the 27 teaspoons in a milkshake.
A scientist in Montreal on friendly terms with a sugar lobby group in Ottawa apparently was not impressed. He and the lobby group enlisted a Toronto doctor who didn’t know me and had never seen the show, to write a letter of complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO).
The CPSO is a licensing body for physicians and has a mandate to “protect the public and guide the profession.” They really had no authority to accept a complaint from the sugar industry. However, at that time the CPSO was staging an all-out war against natural medicine in Ontario.
The CPSO was not concerned about the dangers of sugar and the need alert the unsuspecting public. They only seemed to care about keeping the status quo, supporting the sugar industry, and admonishing doctors who were not conforming to the ‘standard practice of medicine.’ The standard and accepted practice for a primary care doctor is to prescribe drugs and refer patients to specialists for more drugs.
Behind the scenes and certainly without my knowledge, the sugar complaint proceeded and escalated. I was not asked to appear before a complaints board, I did not hire a lawyer to defend me. I thought it was such a frivolous complaint that wouldn’t have any standing but I did send the CPSO a draft copy of my sugar book, which they chose to ignore along with its hundreds of supporting references.
Three and a half years after the anonymous doctor filed his complaint , on May 25, 1993, the CPSO reprimanded me for making “misleading statements about sugar and sugar substitutes … and their relationship to diabetes, infection, osteoporosis, hyperactivity, and addiction.” The reprimand continued, “Dr. Dean is hereby admonished regarding sensational and scientifically unsubstantiated comments.” With bells and whistles, my reprimand was duly printed in the CPSO quarterly report to Ontario doctors – it was a tacit warning that doctors should not tell their patients that sugar may be bad for them!
Due to that injustice and what happened later, I lost the taste for finishing that sugar book until my Team at RnA ReSet turned it into a 3-volume series on sugar in 2026: Exposing Sugar Toxicity: A Clinical Perspective, Detox Your Body: The Sugar-Free Plan, The Sugar-Free Kitchen.
Going in for the Kill
With a foot in the door and hot on the heels of the sugar complaint, the CPSO, I believe, sent a ‘plant’ to my office in July 1990. I saw this ‘plant’ once, a young man accompanied by his mother. I sent him for allergy testing. He lodged a complaint about me that was completely fabricated. His complaint was that I refused to give him a homeopathic remedy for his allergies – but, being a ‘plant,’ if I had given him a remedy without allergy testing, that would have been the complaint.
Based on that incredible falsification, the CPSO leapt at the chance to enter my offices without warning and took 36 patient charts, with which they could go on a ‘hunting expedition’ to find something wrong with my practice and remove my license.
The CPSO took the files from my office, on December 1991, four days before I was due to leave on a one-year sabbatical, which I had been planning for two years! After several months my charts were returned, with no charges being laid. A year passed, and there was still no word from the CPSO about my case. My lawyer corresponded with the CPSO and was told that they were not proceeding.
Settling a Score
The following story ties in dramatically with the ‘raid’ on my office. An environmentally sensitive patient of mine was exposed to toxic carpet adhesive at her place of work. It was on a weekend when new carpet was being installed while she was on site completing a project. Her employer sent her to a workman’s compensation doctor to assess her disability claim. He contacted me and said he wanted to re-expose her to the adhesive to “make sure” that was the offending substance. Lord Sufferin Cats, how could anyone be that stupid to purposefully try to make a patient sicker to “prove” she was entitled to compensation. I refused and probably with some heat. Not long after, it was that same doctor that raided my office taking a random 36 files to “investigate” my practice. Quite a ‘coincidence’ isn’t it.
My year-long sabbatical to study a new medical modality, which I’ll tell you about in a future blog, turned into a permanent position for me in New York when the doctor I was working with, died suddenly and left me to complete his work. The CPSO, however, had apparently not forgotten about me. In mid-July 2005, almost five years after my files were taken (but then returned) without my knowledge and without me being in attendance, the CPSO stole my no longer active license.
I did not lose my license, I did not misplace it. The CPSO lied so they could make up a false story and say a license I no longer had was revoked. These are short-sighted, angry people, who want to control medicine and are terrified of anyone who isn’t in lock-step with their agenda.
The CPSO essentially ‘revoked’ a nonexistent license. I no longer had an Ontario license at the time it was ‘taken.’ I was no longer living in Ontario. I was no longer practicing in Ontario. I had stopped paying the Ontario license renewal fee when I realized I would remain in New York. I did, however, hold a California medical license.
The CPSO was not trying to ‘protect patients’—their intent was to send a warning to other doctors to stay within the bounds of allopathic medicine. Notice of my license revocation was duly reported in the CPSO quarterly report as was my sugar reprimand. I only found out about my case when a friend called me in New York to express her shock after reading the report.
In the aftermath of my license removal in Ontario, I hired a Toronto lawyer who spoke with a CPSO lawyer. I was made the following offer: I could nullify the revocation of my license if I agreed to sign a stipulation that I would denounce natural medicine. If I committed to doling out prescriptions for drugs that I knew had side effects and refused to give my patients the safe options afforded by herbal, homeopathic, and naturopathic medicine, I would be ‘free’ to practice in Ontario.
That would be tantamount to tying my arms and legs together, gagging me, and ripping my heart and soul out. I refused. Knowing what I know about modern medicine and comparing that to natural medicine, it would be like a soldier killing innocent victims on the orders of an insane general. Somebody in the chain of command had to take a moral stand.
Realistically, in late 1995, I could not afford the million dollars it would take to defend myself and I was needed in New York to run an AIDS and Chronic Fatigue study. I was in an incredible bind and I chose to stay in New York and help people instead of returning to Toronto to fight an unwinnable war.
Licensed in California
As I mentioned I held and still hold a license to practice medicine in California. That came about because my medical school had an incredibly tough curriculum. Here’s how bad it was – to pass our third year exams we had to pass 4th year American Boards, which most of us did. When I did my internship in Toronto, I flew down to New York and sat for the other half of the American Boards and therefore had the qualifications to apply for a state medical license. I chose to apply in California.
Back to my Delicensing Story
Shortly after I found out from a friend that my license had been stolen in Ontario, the California State Licensing Board sent me a letter saying that Ontario had notified them that I was unfit to practice medicine and advised them to revoke my California license. I immediately hired a lawyer in California and successfully saved my California license by providing the California authorities with the facts about my case in Ontario, which they concluded were riddled with inconsistencies and procedural errors including lying about getting in touch with me. This was a novel move for the California State Licensing Board, which usually just follows the direction of another jurisdiction. The California Board’s ruling only served to underscore the complete fabrication of the case against me by the CPSO.
Doctors Will Not Speak Out
My ‘sugar adventure’ underscores the lengths to which the sugar industry and modern medicine will go to retain their monopoly control over our health, taste buds, and purses. You would be right to suspect that doctors live in fear of having a complaint lodged against them. Therefore, publicizing cases where a natural medicine practitioner goes against the allopathic standard practice of medicine is likely to keep other doctors from stepping out of line.
Patients, on the other hand, assume that doctors would tell them if sugar, environmental pollution, prescription drugs, or any other substance were dangerous. However, since it can cost them their medical license, most doctors are unwilling to pay the price. Fortunately, there are few health professionals who will tell the truth. However, most doctors know very little about nutrition and do not themselves realize the dangers of sugar.
Many of the clinicians during my medical training were overweight, smoked, drank gallons of coffee, and ate junk food. I mentioned in a previous Dean Diary blog that during my internship a gastroenterologist brushed aside my suggestion that his bag of chips, coffee, and cigarettes could be the cause of digestive problems. We now know about the dangers of ultraprocessed foods and merely stopping them and eating organic foods as much as possible can be life saving. That’s why, when I moved to Maui in 2008, I became involved with a biodynamic, organic farm. I’ll tell you more about that in future blogs.
The very next blog will be the story of how I ended up doing an AIDS and Chronic Fatigue study in Manhattan. My mother told friend that I was doing missionary work in New York, such was the negative spin on life in the big city!
This content is for educational purposes only and discusses nutritional and lifestyle support for normal structure and function of the body. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. Consult a qualified healthcare professional for personal medical guidance.
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