I implore
you to read this article from The Guardian. The information is
eye-opening and a true testament to the damage we are unknowingly doing to our
bodies. For some time now, the health industry has been leaning towards diets
that are low in sugar: The Mediterranean Diet, The Paleo Solution, The
South Beach Diet, etc. This article explains why we should have turned to this
trend BEFORE we were taught the low-fat craze. One of the quotes that I thought
was particularly striking was the following, "One researcher told me that,
ultimately, perhaps nothing needs to be done about obesity, as obese people
will wipe themselves out." Yikes! We can do better, America.
"Why
Our Food Is Making Us Fat"
Jacques
Peretti
The
Guardian
Up a rickety staircase at the Newarke Houses
Museum in Leicester, England hangs a portrait of Britain's
first obese man, painted in 1806. Daniel Lambert weighed
53st (335kg) and was considered a medical oddity. Too heavy to work, Lambert
came up with an ingenious idea: he would charge people a shilling to see him. Lambert
made a fortune, and his portrait shows him at the end of his life: affluent and
respected – a celebrated son of Leicester.
Two hundred years on, I'm in a bariatric
ambulance (an alternative term for obese, favoured by the
medical world because it's less shaming to patients) investigating why the UK
is in the midst of an obesity crisis.
The crew pick up a dozen Daniel Lamberts every week. Fifty-three stone is
nothing special, it's at the lower end of the weight spectrum, with only the
80st patients worthy of mention when a shift finishes. The specially designed
ambulance carries an array of bariatric gizmos including a "spatula"
to help with people who have fallen out of bed or, on a recent occasion, an
obese man jammed between the two walls in his hallway. As well as the
ambulance, there's a convoy of support vehicles including a winch to lift patients
onto a reinforced stretcher. In extreme cases, the cost of removing a patient
to hospital can be up to £100,000, as seen in the recent case of 63st teenager
Georgia Davis.
Why are we so fat? We have not become greedier as a race. We are
not, contrary to popular wisdom, less active – a 12-year study, which began in 2000 at Plymouth
hospital, measured children's physical activity and found it the
same as 50 years ago. But something has changed: and that something is very
simple. It's the food we eat. More specifically, the sheer amount of sugar in
that food, sugar we're often unaware of.
The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was
facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but
just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to
survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very
powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz,
an academic from the farming heartland of
Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical
plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the
human race.
Butz pushed farmers into a new, industrial scale of production,
and into farming one crop in particular: corn. US cattle were fattened by the
immense increases in corn production. Burgers became bigger. Fries, fried in
corn oil, became fattier. Corn became the engine for the massive surge in the
quantities of cheaper food being supplied to American supermarkets: everything
from cereals, to biscuits and flour found new uses for corn. As a result of
Butz's free-market reforms, American farmers, almost overnight, went from
parochial small-holders to multimillionaire businessmen with a global market.
One Indiana farmer believes that America could have won the cold war by simply
starving the Russians of corn. But instead they chose to make money.
By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan
to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass
development of high fructose
corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it's often
referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus
corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but
it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass
production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw,
meat. It provided that "just baked" sheen on bread and cakes, made
everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years. A silent
revolution of the amount of sugar that was going into our bodies was taking
place. In Britain, the food on our plates became pure science – each processed
milligram tweaked and sweetened for maximum palatability. And the general
public were clueless that these changes were taking place.
There was one product in particular that it had a dramatic
effect on – soft drinks. Hank Cardello, the former head of marketing at Coca-Cola, tells me that
in 1984, Coke in the US swapped from sugar to HFCS (In the UK, it continued to
use sugar). As a market leader, Coke's decision sent a message of endorsement
to the rest of the industry, which quickly followed suit. There was "no
downside" to HFCS, Cardello says. It was two-thirds the price of sugar,
and even the risk of messing with the taste was a risk worth taking when you
looked at the margin, especially as there were no apparent health risks. At
that time, "obesity wasn't even on the radar" says Cardello.
But another health issue was on the radar: heart disease, and in
the mid-70s, a fierce debate was raging behind the closed doors of academia
over what was causing it. An American nutritionist called Ancel Keys blamed
fat, while a British researcher at the University of London Professor John Yudkin,
blamed sugar. But Yudkin's work was rubbished by what many believe,
including Professor Robert
Lustig, one of the world's leading endocrinologists, was a concerted
campaign to discredit Yudkin. Much of the criticism came from fellow academics,
whose research was aligning far more closely with the direction the food
industry was intending to take. Yudkin's colleague at the time, Dr Richard
Bruckdorfer at UCL says: "There was a huge lobby from [the
food] industry, particularly from the sugar industry, and Yudkin complained
bitterly that they were subverting some of his ideas." Yudkin was, Lustig
says simply, "thrown under the bus", because there was a huge
financial gain to be made by fingering fat, not sugar, as the culprit of heart
disease.
The food industry had its eyes on the creation of a new genre of
food, something they knew the public would embrace with huge enthusiasm, believing
it to be better for their health – "low fat". It promised an immense
business opportunity forged from the potential disaster of heart disease. But,
says Lustig, there was a problem. "When you take the fat out of a recipe,
food tastes like cardboard, and you need to replace it with something – that
something being sugar."
Overnight, new products arrived on the shelves that seemed too
good to be true. Low-fat yoghurts, spreads, even desserts and biscuits. All
with the fat taken out, and replaced with sugar. Britain was one of the most
enthusiastic adopters of what food writer Gary Taubes,
author of Why We Get Fat, calls "the low-fat dogma", with sales
rocketing.
By the mid-80s, health experts such as Professor Philip
James, a world-renowned British scientist who was one of the first
to identify obesity as an issue, were noticing that people were getting fatter and
no one could explain why. The food industry was keen to point out that
individuals must be responsible for their own calorie consumption, but even
those who exercised and ate low-fat products were gaining weight. In 1966 the
proportion of people with a BMI of over 30 (classified as obese) was just 1.2%
for men and 1.8% for women. By 1989 the figures had risen to 10.6% for men and
14.0% for women. And no one was joining the dots between HFCS and fat.
Moreover, there was something else going on. The more sugar we
ate, the more we wanted, and the hungrier we became. At New York
University, Professor Anthony
Sclafani, a nutritionist studying appetite and weight gain, noticed
something strange about his lab rats. When they ate rat food, they put on
weight normally. But when they ate processed food from a supermarket, they
ballooned in a matter of days. Their appetite for sugary foods was insatiable:
they just carried on eating.
According to Professor
Jean-Marc Schwarz of San Francisco hospital, who is currently
studying the precise way in which the major organs of the body metabolise
sugar, this momentum creates "a tsunami" of sugar. The effect this
has on different organs in the body is only now being understood by scientists.
Around the liver, it coalesces as fat, leading to diseases such as type-2
diabetes. Other studies have found that sugar may even coat semen and result in
obese men becoming less fertile. One researcher told me that, ultimately,
perhaps nothing needs to be done about obesity, as obese people will wipe
themselves out.
The organ of most interest, however, is the gut. According to
Schwarz and Sclafani, the gut is a highly complex nervous system. It is the
body's "second brain", and this second brain becomes conditioned to
wanting more sugar, sending messages back to the brain that are impossible to
fight.
The Sugar Association is
keen to point out that sugar intake alone "is not linked to any lifestyle
disease". But evidence to the contrary appears to be emerging. In
February, Lustig, Laura
Schmidt and Claire Brindis of the University of California wrote an opinion
article for the journal Nature citing the growing body of scientific
evidence showing that fructose can trigger processes that lead to liver
toxicity and a host of other chronic diseases, and in March, the New York
Times reported a study that had been published in the journal Circulation,
which found that men who drank sweetened beverages most often were 20% more
likely to have had a heart attack than those who drank the least. David Kessler, the former
head of the US government's most powerful food agency, the FDA, and the person responsible for introducing
warnings on cigarette packets in the early 90s, believes that sugar, through its
metabolisation by the gut and hence the brain, is extremely addictive, just
like cigarettes or alcohol. He believes that sugar is hedonic – eating it is
"highly pleasurable. It gives you this momentary bliss. When you're eating
food that is highly hedonic, it sort of takes over your brain."
In London, Dr Tony
Goldstone is mapping out the specific parts of the brain that
are stimulated by this process. According to Goldstone, one of the by-products
of obesity is that a hormone called leptin ceases to work
properly. Normally, leptin is produced by the body to tell you that you are
full. However, in obese people, it becomes severely depleted, and it is thought
that a high intake of sugar is a key reason. When the leptin doesn't work, your
body simply doesn't realise you should stop eating.
Leptin raises a big question: did the food industry knowingly
create foods that were addictive, that would make you feel as though you were
never satisfied and always wanted more? Kessler is cautious in his response:
"Did they understand the neuroscience? No. But they learned experientially
what worked." This is highly controversial. If it could be proved that at
that some point the food industry became aware of the long-term, detrimental
effects their products were having on the public, and continued to develop and
sell them, the scandal would rival that of what happened to the tobacco industry.
The food industry's defence has always been that the science
doesn't prove its culpability. Susan Neely,
president of the American Beverage Association, a lobby group for
the soft-drinks industry, says: "there's a lot of work to try to establish
causality, and I don't know that I've seen any study that does that." But
it looks as though things might be changing. According to Professor Kelly
Brownell at Yale University, one of the world's foremost
experts on obesity and its causes, the science will soon be irrefutable and we
may then be just a few years away from the first successful lawsuit.
The relationship between the food industry and the scientists
conducting research into obesity is also complicated by the issue of funding.
There is not a great deal of money set aside for this work and so the food
industry has become a vital source of income. But this means that the very same
science going into combating obesity could also be used to hone the products
that are making us obese. Many of the scientists I spoke to are wary about
going on the record because they fear their funding will be taken away if they
speak out.
The relationship between government and the food industry is
also far from straightforward. Health secretary
Andrew Lansley worked, until 2009, as a non-executive director
of Profero, a marketing
agency whose clients have included Pizza Hut, Mars and PepsiCo. In opposition,
Lansley asked public health expert Professor Simon
Capewell to contribute to future policy on obesity. Capewell
was amazed at the degree to which the food industry was also being consulted:
the equivalent, he says, "of putting Dracula in charge of the blood
bank". Lansley has made no secret of his work for Profero, and denies a conflict
of interest, saying that he did not work directly with the company's clients.
And the government argues, not unreasonably, that it's essential to have the
industry on board to get anything done. But the relationships are not always
kept at arms length. Professor James was part of a WHO committee to recommend global limits
on sugar in 1990. As the report was
being drafted, something extraordinary happened: theUS secretary of
state for health Tommy Thompson flew to Geneva to lobby on behalf of the sugar
industry. "Those recommendations were never made," says
James.
In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is currently planning to reduce soft
drink super-sizing while last week, a former
executive at Coca-Cola Todd Putman spoke publicly about the
need for soft drink companies to move their focus to "healthy
products". But it's not going to be easy to bring about change. A previous
attempt to bring in a soda tax was stopped by intense lobbying on Capitol Hill.
The soft-drinks industry paid for a new ward at Philadelphia Children's
Hospital, and the tax went away. It was a children's obesity ward.
Why has Kessler, when he has had such success with his warnings
on cigarette packets, not done the same thing for processed foods high in
sugar? Because, he tells me, when the warnings came in on cigarettes, the game
was already up in the west for the tobacco industry. Their new markets were the
far east, India and China. It was no concession at all. The food industry is a
different matter. For one thing, the food lobby is more powerful than the
tobacco lobby. The industry is tied into a complex matrix of other interests:
drugs, chemicals, even dieting products. The panoply of satellite industries
that make money from obesity means the food industry's relationship to obesity
is an incredibly complex one.
Anne Milton, the
minister for public health, tells me that legislation against the
food industry isn't being ruled out, because of the escalating costs to the
NHS. Previous governments have always taken the route of partnership. Why?
Because the food industry provides hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions
in revenue. It is immensely powerful, and any politician who takes it on does
so at their peril. "Let's get one thing straight," Milton tells me,
however. "I am not scared of the food industry."
And
I believe her, because now, there is something far bigger to be frightened of.
Eventually, the point will be reached when the cost to the NHS
of obesity, which is now £5bn a year, outweighs the revenue from the
UK snacks and confectionery market, which is currently approximately £8bn a
year. Then the solution to obesity will become very simple.
