Sugar Coated — How the Sugar Industry Duped the World

This write-up was previously published July 21, 2018, and has been updated with new details.

1000’s of studies spanning quite a few many years show excessive sugar damages your well being,¹ nonetheless the sugar marketplace correctly buried the proof and misdirected the community with manipulated science. In accordance to the sugar business, sugar is a harmless resource of electrical power and may possibly even be an critical component of a healthier “well balanced” diet program.

Dr. Cristin Kearns, a dentist and fellow at the College of California, produced headlines when she published a paper² detailing the sugar industry’s historical impact on dietary recommendations.

Proof also displays how the sugar marketplace motivated the scientific agenda of the Nationwide Institute of Dental Analysis (now the Nationwide Institute of Dental and Cranial Study), which back in 1971 designed a countrywide caries application, downplaying any hyperlinks amongst sugar consumption and dental caries.³

The documentary, “Sugar Coated” — which options Kearns, investigative journalist Gary Taubes, creator of “The Scenario In opposition to Sugar,” and Dr. Robert Lustig, a main qualified on sugar rate of metabolism and weight problems — investigates the sugar industry’s after solution PR campaign, displaying how it normalized excessive usage by deflecting evidence implicating sugar as a cause of sick well being. As famous in the film’s summary:⁴

“In purchase to continue on sweetening the world’s foodstuff provide, so securing ongoing profits, the sugar industry turned to the pretty very same deceptions and strategies lifted from the tobacco marketplace. Applying huge sugar’s possess inner documents on this strategy, ‘Sugar Coated’ reveals the nicely-oiled tips of the trade to confuse the public about what is truly driving the international pandemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disorder.”

Processed Foods Is the Most important Supply of Extra Sugars

In the earlier 3 a long time, being overweight rates have doubled and Variety 2 diabetic issues has tripled. How did this take place? Evidence implicating sugar has steadily mounted, but as pointed out by Taubes, definitive evidence has remained elusive. The deficiency of indeniable evidence — and the manufactured lack of consensus — is what has retained the sugar industry motoring forward, at each transform deflecting suspicions by pointing out conflicting proof.

Fueling uncertainty has been the primary defense tactic that has permitted the sugar sector to prosper although overall health stats plummet. “If the evidence gets definitive, they’re accomplished,” Taubes suggests. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, teaches that sugar — when consumed in the surplus amounts we’re consuming these days — acts as a metabolic poison.

Lustig would not seriously see himself as the “anti-sugar man,” stressing he is really anti-processed food stuff. The thing about processed meals is they incorporate large quantities of added sugar. Seventy-four p.c of packaged foodstuff contain extra sugars, which conceal below at least 61 different names, quite a few of which are unfamiliar. Examples involve barley malt, dextrose, maltose and rice syrup, just to title a several.

Metabolically, having said that, there is no change concerning these sugars, Lustig claims. Even well being foodstuff and infant foodstuff can have shockingly substantial quantities of processed sugars.⁵ Consider Kiwi Strawberry Vitaminwater, for instance, which contains a whopping 26 grams of sugar, even though a Nature’s Bakery Fig granola bar has 19 grams.⁶

What Is Moderation?

Lustig stresses it is the extreme usage of sugar that is harmful, not the sugar in and of itself. But how a great deal is much too significantly? At which position does it become a “poison”? Sugar in “moderation,” he claims, would be 6 to 9 teaspoons (25 to 38 grams) of additional sugar a working day.

This is about the max that your physique can properly and proficiently course of action. Europeans take in, on ordinary, 17 teaspoons of additional sugar a day. The American common is 19.5 teaspoons a working day. For historic point of view, in 1812, folks ate approximately 9 grams or just above 2 teaspoons of sugar per working day.⁷

According to a 2014 review,⁸ 10% of People eaten 25% or a lot more of their daily energy in the kind of additional sugars, and individuals who eaten 21% or additional of their every day energy in the form of sugar were twice as most likely to die from heart condition compared to individuals who bought 7% or significantly less of their day by day calories from included sugar.

The risk was almost tripled among the those people who eaten 25% or much more of their energy from sugar. That indicates at the very least 10% of the grownup population in the U.S. are in this tripled-chance category.

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Type 2 diabetes⁹ and heart disease are not the only ramifications of a high-sugar diet. By triggering insulin resistance, excessive sugar consumption drives virtually all chronic diseases, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease,¹⁰ cancer and dementia.^11,12 Research¹³ shows even mild elevation of blood sugar — a level of around 105 or 110 — is associated with an elevated risk for Alzheimer’s.

Moderating your sugar intake is extremely difficult, if not impossible, if you’re eating processed foods and snacks. The film shines much needed light on the fraud that passes for “healthy snacks,” such as fruit gummies, which contain sugar derived from concentrated fruit juice, water and a few added vitamins. While the sugar is derived from fruit, there’s nothing left of the nutrients in the whole fruit. You might as well just give your child a few sugar cubes. There’s really no difference.

How and Why Sugar Replaced Fat

The records unearthed by Kearns reveal that as far back as 1964 — a time when researchers had begun suspecting a relationship between high-sugar diets and heart disease — John Hickson, a sugar industry executive, introduced a plan for how to influence public opinion.

Using the same tactics employed by the tobacco industry, Hickson’s plan was to counter adverse findings with industry-funded research, along with directed “information and legislative programs.” “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors,” he wrote.

One of the strategies used to deflect accusations that sugar caused disease was to shift the blame to saturated fat. In the early 1970s, the sugar industry faced proposed sugar legislation that would impose limits on the sweet stuff.

They also worried about the potential impact of “Pure White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It,” a book published in 1972 by British nutritionist John Yudkin, in which he presented decades of research pointing at dietary sugar, not fat, as the underlying factor in obesity and diabetes.

As proposed by Hickson, the sugar industry countered Yudkin’s work with a secretly funded white paper called “Sugar in the Diet of Man,” which claimed sugar was not only safe but actually important for health. Again, the key to success laid in preventing a consensus from taking root. As long as there was confusion and uncertainty about sugar’s role in health, regulators were forced to give sugar a free pass.

Sugar Apologists and Defenders Bought, Paid for by Industry

Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, who chaired the department of nutrition at Harvard, played a key role in defending the sugar industry and disseminating its propaganda, all while hiding his close ties to the industry. Stare spoke out against critics on radio and television, claiming breakfast cereal with milk was a healthier breakfast choice than bacon and eggs, for example.

Another major sugar apologist was Ancel Keyes who, with industry funding, helped destroy Yudkin’s reputation by labeling him a quack. The smear campaign was a huge success, bringing sugar research to a screeching halt.

Another Harvard-based nutrition scientist identified in Kearns’ historical analysis as someone paid to produce research for the sugar industry was Mark Hegsted, Ph.D. In 1977, while heading up the nutrition department at the United States Department of Agriculture, Hegsted helped draft an early document that eventually became the U.S. dietary guidelines.

In the decades after, U.S. health officials urged Americans to adopt a low-fat diet to prevent heart disease as a result, people switched to processed low-fat, high-sugar foods instead. This, it turns out, is the real recipe for heart disease, yet by taking control of and shaping the scientific discussion, the sugar and processed food industries managed to keep these facts under wraps all these years. The end result is clearly visible in the health statistics of today.

Sugar’s Law of Attraction: The Bliss Point

With saturated fat enlisted as the dietary villain, the processed food industry had to figure out how to remove the fat while maintaining taste. The solution was to add sugar. The ill-advised low-fat craze is a major reason why processed foods are loaded with so much added sugar. Another reason has to do with the creation of food addiction.

The food industry goes to great lengths to scientifically calculate the exact combination of ingredients that will make you crave a product, known as the Bliss Point. Howard Moskowitz, Ph.D., a longtime food industry consultant, is known as “Dr. Bliss.” A Harvard-trained mathematician, Moskowitz tests people’s reactions and finds the optimal amount of sugar for a product.¹⁴

Moskowitz’s path to mastery began when he was hired by the U.S. Army to research how to get soldiers to consume more rations in the field. Over time, soldiers were not consuming adequate rations, finding their ready-to-eat meals so boring that they’d toss them half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed.

Through this research, Moskowitz discovered “sensory-specific satiety.” What this means is, big flavors tend to overwhelm your brain, which responds by suppressing your desire to eat more.

However, this sensory-specific satiety is overridden by complex flavor profiles that pique your taste buds enough to be alluring, but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells your brain to stop eating. The magic formula gives you “the bliss point,” enabling the processed food industry to make very deliberate efforts to get you to overeat.

Sugar Limits Finally Included in US Dietary Guidelines

The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans included the recommendation to limit sugar to 10% of your total daily calories,¹⁵ but we still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, the 2021 updated guidelines did not address added sugar consumption, despite recommendations from an advisory panel to lower the recommendations to no more than 6% of your total calories.¹⁶

Therefore, the former guidelines still stand, meaning, for a 2,000 calorie diet this amounts to 10 to 12 teaspoons, or just over the amount found in one 12-ounce can of regular Coke. Based on the evidence from some studies, even this amount can trigger health problems, but it’s certainly better than no limit at all. Other health organizations have gone even further.

The National Institutes of Health now recommends kids between the ages of 4 and 8 limit their added sugar to a maximum of 3 teaspoons a day (12 grams). Children aged 9 and older should stay below 8 teaspoons. The American Heart Association recommends limiting daily added sugar intake to:^17,18

• 9 teaspoons (38 grams) for men
• 6 teaspoons (25 grams) for women
• 6 teaspoons (25 grams) for toddlers and teens between the ages of 2 and 18
• Zero added sugars for kids under the age of 2

Twenty-five grams of sugar per day is my recommended limit for men and women alike, with the added caveat that if you have insulin or leptin resistance (overweight, diabetic, high blood pressure or taking a statin drug), you’d be wise to restrict your total fructose consumption to as little as 15 grams per day until you’ve normalized your insulin and leptin levels.

Sugar Industry’s Response to Sugar Limits

Not surprisingly, the sugar industry’s answer to all of these sugar limits was to create yet another study¹⁹ to refute the validity of the recommendations and keep the uncertainty going.^20,21,22,23 As reported by Science Daily,²⁴ the industry-funded study from McMaster University claims that the evidence for prior knowledge in how sugar intake is proportionate with weight gain, across nine public health guidelines, is “low quality.”

This review was funded by the North American branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a trade group representing the Coca-Cola Co., Dr Pepper Snapple Group, the Hershey Company, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and many others. In conclusion, these industry-funded science reviewers found that:²⁵

“Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence. Public health officials (when promulgating these recommendations) and their public audience (when considering dietary behavior) should be aware of these limitations …

At present, there seems to be no reliable evidence indicating that any of the recommended daily caloric thresholds for sugar intake are strongly associated with negative health effects. The results from this review should be used to promote improvement in the development of trustworthy guidelines on sugar intake.”

Ironically, the only “limitation” listed for this study²⁶ was that “The authors conducted the study independent of the funding source, which is primarily supported by the food and agriculture industry.” Essentially, what they were saying is that, yes, the study was funded by the food industry, but trust us, we were completely impartial.

A corrected version of the disclosure statement revealed ILSI actually both reviewed and approved the scope of the protocol for the study.²⁷ AP News also discovered that one of the authors, Joanne Slavin, a professor at University of Minnesota, failed to disclose funding in the amount of $25,000 from Coca-Cola in 2014.

Slavin also did not disclose a grant received from Quaker Oats, owned by PepsiCo, nor did she include her work on a 2012 ILSI-funded paper on sugar guidelines. Meanwhile, she did disclose a grant from the Mushroom Council.

Review Shows Massive Research Bias Based on Funding

If you’re at all inclined to take Slavin and her coauthors on their word, consider the following study published in November 2016: The paper, “Do Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Cause Obesity and Diabetes? Industry and the Manufacture of Scientific Controversy,”²⁸ reviewed 60 studies published between 2001 and 2016 to examine the links between funding and study outcomes.

“We comprehensively surveyed the literature to determine whether experimental studies that found no association between sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity- and diabetes-related outcomes (negative studies) are more likely than positive studies to have received financial support from this industry,” they write.

The results? Of the 60 studies, the 26 that found no link between sugary drinks and obesity or diabetes were all funded by the beverage industry of the 34 that did find a relationship, only one had received industry funding. In conclusion, they noted that: “This industry seems to be manipulating contemporary scientific processes to create controversy and advance their business interests at the expense of the public’s health.”

Some of the studies giving sugar a free pass have industry fingerprints clearly visible all over them. For example, one paper²⁹ came to the highly unlikely conclusion that eating candy may help prevent weight gain. The source of the funding reveals the basis for such a bizarre conclusion: The National Confectioners Association, which represents candy makers like Butterfingers, Hershey and Skittles.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi-backed research has also come to the highly improbable and irresponsible conclusion that drinking diet soda is more helpful for weight loss than pure water.³⁰

When you consider that following the proposed sugar guidelines (restricting sugar to 5 or 10% of daily calories) would cut junk food companies’ profits by half,³¹ it’s easy to see why they’re willing to go to such obnoxious lengths to try to mislead you about the science. Greed is no excuse, however, and it’s high time everyone stopped buying into the sugar industry’s carefully plotted misdirection campaigns.

Crush Your Sugar Addiction

Sugar causes very real damage to your body and cells, and the addiction to the substance is also very real. There are several strategies you can use to reduce or eliminate your intake of added sugars, while still enjoying your meals and feeling satisfied after eating.

Educate yourself on the health impacts of sugar — Making permanent changes to your lifestyle and nutritional choices is easier when you know the why behind the change. You can see a quick list of the 76 different ways sugar negatively impacts your health in my previous article, “The Truth About Sugar Addiction.”

Reduce net carbs — Your net carbs are calculated by taking the total grams of carbs and subtracting the total grams of fiber. By keeping your net carbs below 100 grams per day, and for a healthier diet as low as 50 grams per day, you will reduce your cravings for sweets. To learn more, including the importance of cycling in higher amounts of net carbs once you’ve become an efficient fat burner, see “Burn Fat for Fuel.”

Eat real food — If a food is boxed, canned or bottled, it’s likely also been processed and may include added sugar. Whole, organic, non-GMO foods provide your body with the nutrition you need to function optimally and natural sugars bound to fiber that reduces your net carbs.

Read labels — On processed foods you do purchase, scour the label for ingredients that represent sugar to evaluate the total amount. The less sugar you eat, the less you’ll crave.

Use safer sweeteners — Not all sugar substitutes are created equally. Avoid using artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. Safer alternatives include Stevia, Lo Han Guo (also spelled Luo Han Kuo), and pure glucose (dextrose). Contrary to fructose, glucose can be used directly by every cell in your body and as such is a far safer sugar alternative. It will, however, raise your net carb intake.

Reduce the sugar you add gradually — If going cold turkey hasn’t worked for you in the past, try slowly reducing the amount of sugar you add to your drinks. This helps give your taste buds time to adjust to drinking your favorite tea or coffee without the added sweetener.

Increase healthy fat intake — Fat increases satiety, reducing cravings for something sweet afterward. Avocados, coconut oil, nuts and seeds increase your healthy fat content, fill you up and reduce your sweet cravings.

Include fermented foods — Fermented foods support your digestive health and improve your gut microbiome, and the sour taste naturally helps reduce your sweet cravings.

Try Turbo Tapping — Emotional and stress eating is not uncommon. Using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), you can address your stress levels and the discomfort you may feel from giving up junk foods in your diet. Turbo tapping is a form of EFT designed specifically for sugar addiction and is well worth a try if you’re struggling to give up soda and other sweets.