Is it just me or is Big Sugar starting to sound a lot like Big Tobacco?
Last week Coca-Cola wheeled out their version of a wholesome mum and a brand new website to “bust” the myths surrounding Coke. Putting aside the choice of Kerry Armstrong as a prime example of Australian mum-hood, the core messages were:
- Caffeine is not addictive;
- The link between metabolic syndrome (obesity, heart disease, diabetes) and Coke is not proven; and
- Coca-Cola does not target its advertising at children.
As a former litigator on behalf of Big Tobacco, the spin gave me pause to reminisce. Not since those days have we been able to wallow in the spectacle of giant corporations spending large amounts of money convincing us that black is indeed just a somewhat less bright shade of white.
Any reader old enough to remember when the only thing that made a telephone portable was installing it in a car, will surely remember these gems from a forgotten age:
- Nicotine is not addictive;
- The link between lung cancer and smoking is not proven; and
- The tobacco industry does not target children with its advertising.
I’m sure all of us are open minded enough to take Coca-Cola at their word on Caffeine. Everybody knows that we queue for hours to buy coffee just because we like the taste of hot, bitter water.
Equally, I’m sure we’re prepared to acknowledge that any child that happens to find a Coca-Cola ad appealing is some sort of aberrant juvenile misfit. Ads full of jiggling teenagers superimposed on a soundtrack of top 20 songs are clearly targeted at the over fifties.
But, small minded though I probably am, I can’t swallow the line that a food whose only constituent (besides water) is sugar is not proven to cause disease. Dr Reeves over at The Beverage Institute for Health & Wellness (BIHW) would no doubt take issue with my ill informed ignorance.
The doctor wants a “randomized controlled trial … that actually proves that consuming soft drinks causes metabolic syndrome” before she signs on to this mad idea that sugar makes you fat. I’m sure that the fact that the BIHW was established and funded by Coca-Cola has nothing to do with her perspectives on the matter at all.
Well, good news Dr Reeves, your friends over at PepsiCo have just paid for such a study to be done. The 28 June issue of New Scientist reports that Peter Havel at the University of California persuaded 33 overweight and obese people to try a 10 week diet which was either 25 percent fructose or 25 percent glucose.
Fructose and Glucose are the two building blocks of sugar. Previous work had observed that sugar was very bad news. This experiment was about figuring out which bit was doing the damage in humans.
Those on the fructose diet ended up with increased (1.5kg) tummy fat, higher fatty triglycerides (which leads to heart disease) and 20% higher insulin resistance (which leads to Type II Diabetes). None of this happened to the group on glucose.
Perhaps the result wasn’t quite what PepsiCo was expecting because they clearly had to scratch around in the bottom of the marketing spin barrel to come up with this response:
This is a very interesting and important study, but it does not reflect a real-world situation nor is it applicable to PepsiCo since pure fructose is not an ingredient in any of our food and beverage products.
Bravo! A clear contender for this year’s “every cloud has a silver lining” public relations award. It’s a pity our digestive systems don’t see things quite the same way as the folks at PepsiCo.
In a separate study, Havel’s team took a look at whether you needed to be eating “pure fructose” or merely something which contained it (like sugar). They compared the immediate effects of consuming meals containing equal quantities of sugar, pure fructose or pure glucose. Blood triglyceride levels were all elevated to a similar level 24 hours after consuming fructose and sugar but not glucose. So it doesn’t seem to matter whether you package the fructose up as sugar or eat it uncut, it will still give you metabolic syndrome.
I don’t see Dr Havel getting a gig at the BIHW anytime soon, do you?
I worked on an international OH&S fibre toxicology review in the decade up to 2001, and quickly learned that in the good ol’ USA you could buy any research outcome you wanted.
The only effective filter to what we termed US ‘junk science’ was the eventual peer review of all research outcomes, by recognised researchers prepared to operate under internationally accepted protocols.
The US ‘junk science’ research community added, I estimate, five years and around US$50 million in additional costs, to the project’s successful completion.
Funny thing about that fructose, as it is rarely used on it’s own. In fact, in the early 1990’s Coca-Cola won the right to label high-fructose corn syrup as “sugar” in its products. The argument being If they are all types of sugar, why should manufacturers be legally bound to differentiate between “cane sugar” as an ingredient and “high-fructose corn syrup?” They are both sweeteners, aren’t they?
High-fructose corn syrup is a sweetener which is made up of corn syrup, which is a sweet, liquid by-product of the corn/grain industry, and fructose, a fruit sugar which is extracted and then processed into a powder form. It is also very cheap — much cheaper than natural cane sugar, of which Australia is the world’s second largest producer. Fructose is twice as sweet as cane sugar and about fifty times as sweet as corn syrup. It is readily disolved into corn syrup and makes a liquid sweetener a tenth of the price of natural cane sugar. By being allowed to use high-fructose corn syrup as “sugar” in its products, Coca-Cola can increase its profit margins by using cheaper ingredients.
There is, however, a drawback to all of this. Where corn syrup and cane sugar are both easily digested in the intestine, fructose must be broken down by the liver. When the body encounters high-fructose corn syrup its first response is to burn the glucose in the corn syrup –because it is easier than converting it and storing it as fat. The opposite is true about the fructose. It is easier to store fructose as fat than it is for the liver to digest it. This is why in the study of those taking only fructose compared to those taking glucose, the fructose group had increased body fat storage. Used in combination with corn syrup, the body gets a hit of glucose (corn syrup) and then a massive dose of fructose, which is not immediately needed and is quickly shuttled off to be stored as fat.
One can wonder if the current diabetes epidemic would exist if cane sugar were not replaced
oh naughty coke! seriously it is just you