Sugar's Turn

[Guest guest]

Sugar's Turn

http://www.laleva.cc/food/who_sugar.html

 

The tobacco industry waged a two-decade fighting retreat against the

medical evidence that linked smoking to cancer, heart disease,

emphysema and other illnesses. Millions died prematurely who might

well have quit if the tobacco lobby's PR people and tame scientists

had not laboured day and night to fudge the issue and confuse the

customers. Big Tobacco may now be facing its Waterloo in the United

States, as the courts award bigger and bigger settlements to its

victims or their survivors, but the long rearguard action did keep

the profits rolling in for twenty extra years. And now it's Big

Sugar's turn.

 

Last Wednesday in Rome the World Health Organisation and the UN Food

and Agriculture Organisation jointly launched an independent expert

report on diet which stated, among other things, that free (that is,

added) sugar should not exceed ten percent of the calories in normal

daily food intake.

 

The US-based Sugar Association has gone into overdrive to discredit

the report, demanding that US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson use

his influence to get the WHO-FAO report withdrawn, and 'sugar

caucus' Congressmen are threatening to cut off the annual

contribution of $406 million that the United States pays to the WHO

if it doesn't back down.

 

You have to admire the cheek of industry representatives who can

maintain with a straight face that it's perfectly all right for 25

percent of the average person's calories to come in the form of free

sugar, even as they have watched an alarming proportion of the US

population turn into blubbery, lumbering Michelin-tyre men and women

over the last generation. But then, if the pay was right they'd

probably be willing to argue that 25 percent ground glass in the

diet was all right.

 

Not that refined sugar is 'white death', as the purists would argue.

Nobody's trying to ban the stuff, and in moderate quantities it

probably does no more harm than many other foods we eat quite

happily. Nor is anybody trying to limit the amount that people

consume: if you want sugar to be 50 percent of your caloric intake,

no health police will come round from the WHO to stop you. The WHO-

FAO report just points out is that there is a relationship between

the hugely higher modern levels of sugar consumption, and the wave

of obesity that has swept over the developed world and is now

reaching the

poorer countries (so that you often get malnutrition and obesity in

the same person), and the fact that the burden of chronic disease in

the world is rising fast. Of the 56.5 million reported deaths

worldwide in 2001, 59 percent were caused by chronic diseases.

 

Most people intuitively understand that there is a link between

obesity and some chronic and ultimately fatal ailments like diabetes

and cardiovascular diseases: you see a lot of very fat people around

these days, but not that many very old fat people. The science is

there to back these observations up, but people hardly need it. What

is less visible is the link between excessive sugar consumption and

obesity, because most of the sugar is consumed invisibly in the form

of fast foods and soft drinks. And the sugar industry will do

whatever it can to stop that link being made public and official.

 

This is not the first round in the struggle. Professor Philip James,

the British expert who headed the International Obesity Task Force

that wrote the first WHO report on diet and nutrition in 1990,

discovered that the sugar industry had hired one of Washington's top

lobbying companies when it realised the expert committee was going

to recommend a ten percent limit. " Forty ambassadors wrote to the

WHO insisting that our report should be removed, on the grounds that

it would do irreparable damage to

the developing world, " he recalls, and there was also enormous

pressure from the US State Department. But the WHO didn't back down

then, and it hasn't backed down this time either.

 

The WHO assembled thirty international experts to draw up its

report, including the leading US scientist on obesity, and it is in

no sense an attack on sugar by the health nazis. It is about the

health benefits of a diet that is relatively low in saturated fats,

sugars and salt, and high in vegetables and fruits -- hardly

revolutionary stuff. Its recommended 10 percent limit on sugar

intake duplicates guidelines that have already appeared in 23

different national reports. But if people followed those

guidelines, a huge proportion of the sugar industry's market would

disappear, so of course it fights it.

 

It fights using the strategy that was pioneered long ago by the

tobacco industry, and later copied by the industrial interests that

wanted to deny the phenomenon of global warming. Set up one or more

institutes with misleading names to throw doubt on the evidence --

the International Life Sciences Institute, founded by Coca-Cola,

Pepsico, General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and Kraft, is now

accredited to both the WHO and the FAO -- and use the Washington

lobby system for all it's worth. Big Sugar will probably lose the

argument in the long run, but twenty extra years of

profits are worth fighting for. 'Deceive and delay', as President

Bush said in another context.

 

The only odd thing is this. It is not the poor countries where

people live from the sugar that are leading the fight. It is the

sugar industry in the rich countries, where people are dying of it.

 

___________________________

 

Gwynne Dyer, Ph.D., is a London-based independent journalist whose

articles are published in 45 countries.For more on Gwynne Dyer,

please read his GBN interview

http://www.gbn.org/SubjectDisplayServlet.srv?taxId=104

 

 

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