SCIENCE TO LOOK
HARD AT ITSELF IN
SUGAR DEBATE
It came across on the ABC’s Four Corners as
something of a junkie’s confession: ‘I am an addict,
and I know’. Dr Binoy Kampmark from Melbourne's
RMIT University in Melbourne reports
The conservative MP for the Australian
38 JUNE 2018
federal seat of Dawson - George
Christensen - was not mincing
words so much as spouting them in
crude confessional form. Regulating
the sugar industry by means of a
levy or tax ignored personal responsibility. “I think
that a lot of the issue with obesity has got to come
back to telling people that they are personally responsible
for the choices they make.” He was a “fat
bloke” who had made regrettable health decisions.
He had to accept the consequences of those food
choices that found their way down his “gob”.
Christensen is not merely a representative of a
federal seat, but representative of a country that
has found its way to physical hugeness. Australia
has become one of the fattest nations on the
planet, rippling with health worries. Sixty percent of
its populace is overweight or obese and by 2025,
the figure will be 80%. It is such figures that have
officials and those preoccupied with health policy
irate and alarmed.
Christensen’s individualist acceptance is standard
form for industries that have found certain costs
and regulations unnecessary and damaging to the
purse strings. No changes of behaviour, goes the
argument, will be induced by such a sugar levy. But
the sweet lobby in Canberra has moneyed depth
and financial dogmatism to pursue this variation of
freewill gone wrong. “Big industry knows,” observes
former ACT health minister Michael Moore, “that if
you’re going to have influence then you’re going to
have to talk to members of parliament.”
Australia’s representatives, notably those in designated
‘sugar seats’, have been taking note of the
food and beverages lobby for some time. Where
there is a sugar industry, there are votes to be had,
beasts to be propitiated. The Beverages Council’s
Annual Report in 2016 strikes a certain note of pride
in spending a “vast amount of resources” in fighting
proponents of a sugar tax, notably those in the major
political parties. What matters here is the global
profile of the sugar industry, one sustained by the
same tactical profile as the tobacco lobby. Tactics of
minimisation and distortion, packaged by a covering
of legitimacy regarding research and health effects,
dominate the sugar lobbyist’s agenda.
Such research has a long and compromised history
in the annals of nutrition. Along with various
co-authors, Christin Kearns published in JAMA
Internal Medicine a jaw-dropping 2016 study using
documents of the Sugar Research Foundation. The
investigation showed how some five decades of
research on nutrition and heart disease was aggressively
cooked by the sugar industry. “Together with
other recent analyses of sugar industry documents,
our findings,” concluded the authors, “suggest
the industry sponsored a research program in the
1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about
the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the
dietary culprit in CHD (coronary heart disease).”
That’s what you get when dolling out some $50,000
in modern money terms to scientists, even in the
academically rigorous environs of Harvard University.
With appropriate findings cobbled, the result
was a skewed and influential publication in the New
England Journal of Medicine (Aug 1967). No conflict
of interest with the sugar industry was published,
but the brief exonerating sugar as a major risk factor
in CHD was advanced. Marion Nestle of the Department
of Nutrition and Food Studies in NYU did
go softly on the scientists who had conducted
the research in the 1960s. “Whether they did this
deliberately, unconsciously, or because they genuinely
believed saturated fat to be the great threat
is unknown,” she says. That said, “science is not
supposed to work this way. The documents make
this review seem more about public relations than
science.”
Prior to that, sugar barons were already keen to exploit
a deceptive nutritional claim by a simple strategy
of avoidance. The link between sugar-rich diets
and heart disease would be overlooked in favour of
the chosen enemies of dietary fat and cholesterol.
Americans keen on reducing fat in their diets, and
consequential cholesterol formation, could still be
encouraged to consume sugar.
As the SRF president in 1954 claimed in a speech to
the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists,
“If the carbohydrate industries were to capture this
20% of the calories in the US diet (the difference
between the 40% which fat has and the 20% which
it ought to have) and if sugar maintained its present
share of the carbohydrate market, this change
would mean an increase in the per capita consumption
of sugar more than a third with a tremendous
improvement in general health.”
Specific companies in the sugar business remain
the big boys and girls of obfuscation in the world of
nutrition science. In league with them are members
of the nutrition fraternity such as exercise scientist
Steven N. Blair, who find it reluctant on the padding
of appropriate industry sponsorship to libel sugar
and its role in causing obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
Strong patrons, in short, make for poor, or at the
very least, questionable research.
In 2015, The New York Times found that Coca-Cola,
the single dominant producer of sugary beverages,
supplied millions in terms of funding to researchers
to identify (or not, as the case was) links between
sugar consumption and obesity. The focus there