Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies: How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill? – By Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens
ON
A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association
stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the
public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the
forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of
the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry
had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on
sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes,
and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose
weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and
Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to
eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could
see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack
O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public
relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the
coup they'd just pulled off.
Their
winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations
firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers
had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might
exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual
budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of
Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the
association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to
allay the public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold,
and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly
supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made
it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in
coming years."
The
story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by
"opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public." Over the
subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New York Times in
1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly
innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes
Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. Research on the suspected
links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late
1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. So
effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus
exists about sugar's potential dangers. The industry's PR campaign corresponded
roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric
sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup
(HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic
diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United
States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than
tripled.
Taubes also had a new
post on his blog today, HERE.
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