The Mother Jones story, Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies, doesn’t seem to be aimed at helping you lose weight or deciding what to feed your kids. It’s more about the way science rides on undercurrents of economics, business and special interests.
One of the authors, Gary Taubes, was the subject of two 2012 Tracker posts. The most recent describes a new research institute he’s starting to support investigation into diet, obesity and disease. The other discusses a controversial New York Times Magazine story he wrote about the deleterious effects of sugar. The web version ran with a headline questioning whether sugar is “toxic”.
That is a strong word, which evokes the death-on-the-spot effects of Drain-o or rat poison. Even Taubes doesn’t quite see it that way. In a video interview included in the story, he reveals that he still gives out Halloween candy.
The Mother Jones story takes a different approach. It's an in-depth examination of the outside forces influencing science, the public health recommendations and ultimately the fact that Americans consume 232 pounds of sugar a year. It would be surprising if this wasn’t contributing to obesity and disease.
Taubes and co-author Cristin Kearns Couzins say they went through “1500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy.”
Here’s a taste of what they learned:
As early as 1962, internal Sugar Association memos had acknowledged the potential links between sugar and chronic diseases, but at the time sugar executives had a more pressing problem: Weight-conscious Americans were switching in droves to diet sodas—particularly Diet Rite and Tab—sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin……By then, the sugar industry had doled out more than $600,000 (about $4 million today) to study every conceivable harmful effect of cyclamate sweeteners, which are still sold around the world under names like Sugar Twin and Sucaryl.
Don Draper and his creative team could learn from the sugar association. Diet drinks now use different sweeteners but that cancer association is burned into the American consciousness.
This story is a revealing peek inside the sausage factory that produces our public health recommendations from the government and major medical groups such as the American Heart Association.
I did wonder at the lede, which described a “brisk” April morning in 1976 when two sugar executives got a big PR award in Chicago. How do they know it wasn’t damp, or even downright frigid? Or balmy? There’s no sign that the award winners were interviewed if they are even still alive. If it did come from a personal recollection, it would have been less distracting had the authors at least mentioned who was doing the recalling. When there’s an impossible description of this sort, I think readers need a hint at where it came from. Everything else in the story is tightly documented, however, and looked to represent an enormous amount of work on the part of the authors.
Leave a Reply