tobacco. It’s not the nicotine that’s toxic, he said; it’s the tars that are toxic. All cigarettes are toxic.
So, I asked him point blank: “Dr. Lustig, are you saying that the standard of evidence for the toxicity of sugar and the disease-causing effects of sugar are the same as for tobacco?” His response? “Absolutely.”
The Hard Stuff
If this is true, why don’t people make the connection between sugar and disease? Dr. Lustig’s point of view is that people have been sold a bill of goods for the past 40 years about the effects of sugar, a product that, he says, has been designed specifically to make money for the food industry while hurting the people who consume it.
It’s time to change the paradigm, Dr. Lustig says. Is he right?
Well, something’s got to change, considering that in my home country of New Zealand, nearly 65 percent of adults and 33 percent of children are now clinically overweight or obese. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics says that, as of 2014, more than 70 percent of adults are overweight or obese, and 17 percent of children and teenagers are clinically obese.
And as I look around, I’m wondering how much is sugar implicated in all of this.
Dr. Lustig notes that if you ask the question, how much sugar does my body need? the answer is zero. “There are no biological processes that require dietary sugar,” he says. “Your liver has a capacity to metabolize a finite amount. A little is okay; a lot is not. When you overwhelm your liver’s capacity to metabolize it, you get in trouble. And that’s where we are now.”
He reckons this is because sugar is being slipped into everyday food without our knowing it.
This has me thinking: How much sugar is in the food that we normally buy? I went to a regular supermarket to have a look.
Some of the stuff is obvious. Your chocolatey, nutty Nutella spread has two teaspoons of sugar. That’s something you’d expect. But I wouldn’t expect Marmite, a non-sweet spread that is popular in New Zealand, would have any sugar in it. In fact, it has 28 grams in one small container, or seven teaspoons of sugar. Tomato Catsup has just over a teaspoon of sugar per squirt. Mayonnaise—the light kind with the Heart Foundation checkmark on it—for every squirt onto your plate, there’s a teaspoon and a half of sugar!
I like tuna. I was surprised to learn that a can I picked up at the supermarket contained almost a teaspoon of sugar per serving. The old family favorite, baked beans? Per serving, there’s almost four teaspoons of sugar!
I expect loads of added sugar in fizzy drinks, but it came as a surprise to find out fruit juice is packed with it as well. Sugar occurs naturally in fruit, which is good. But when it’s juiced, you get seriously concentrated sugars. It seems there’s no escaping the stuff.
What’s becoming really clear to me as I scrutinize all the food I would normally buy is not so much that sugar is hidden, but that it’s hidden in plain sight. It’s in almost everything. Without knowing it, I’ve actually ended up eating quite a lot of sugar without really even thinking about it.
Which got me wondering: Why is sugar in just about everything? And who decides how much?
Choices by the Food Industry
I went to talk to Melanie Walshe, a food technologist for McFoodies LTD. Melanie works with food companies to develop their food products, from Muesli bars to salad dressings to pre-packaged meals.
Deciding how much sugar to put in, she says, is “trial and error. You taste the product, and you might tweak the formulation a bit to make sure that everything tastes just right.” The product is then taken to a panel of tasters. “Are they qualified tasters? Who are the people on this panel?” I asked her.
“In smaller companies, it’ll generally be the marketing manager and maybe even the office staff—anyone that you can kind of rope in to come and taste it. A larger company might be able to afford to run sensory panels to get feedback from their actual consumers,” Melanie explained.
The marketers are supposed to know what the consumers want, so if they’ve done their job properly, they’ve done the research.
I get why it’s in ice creams and cakes, I tell her, but why is sugar in everything?
“It’s cheap,” she tells me, “so often it’s used to re-balance the cost of a product—for example, a dressing. And if it was an oil-based dressing, you’d take some of the oil out because it’s an expensive ingredient, and bump up the sugar.”
So, companies are looking for the cheaper products, and to make the cheaper products, they expect to put in more sugar to reach that cheap price.
“Yes,” Melanie affirms. “Marketers have a view that consumers won’t go beyond a certain price point.”
So, is the amount of sugar in food really about consumer demand? Or is it about profits?
As Dr. Lustig points out, “The food industry has been upping and upping the dose over the past century and in particular in the past 30 years, and they found that when they did that, we bought more. So this is their juggernaut. This how they are making money, they don’t want to stop, and they won’t stop until they are remanded to stop. The question is, who is going to remand them? That’s the question for debate.”
Making the Right Choices at Home?
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