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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.

Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy. They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar's health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.

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Taubes also had a new post on his blog today, HERE.

Related previous posts:

60 Minutes: Is sugar toxic?

Authors@Google: Robert Lustig

Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes

Specialty Health Interviews Gary Taubes and Dr. Thomas Dayspring

FiveBooks Interview: Gary Taubes on Dieting

Gary Taubes on EconTalk

Gary Taubes Talk on Why We Get Fat

Gary Taubes Interview with Jimmy Moore

The Scientist and the Stairmaster

Related books:

Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

The Primal Blueprint

The New Evolution Diet

- 60 Minutes: Is Sugar Toxic?
Link .................... Related link: Sugar: The Bitter Truth Related previous posts: Authors@Google: Robert Lustig Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes Specialty Health Interviews Gary Taubes and Dr. Thomas Dayspring FiveBooks Interview: Gary Taubes...

- Specialty Health Interviews Gary Taubes And Dr. Thomas Dayspring
Found via Jimmy Moore. This was recorded on December 15th of last year. Link Link Link Link Link Link Link ................... Related books: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It The Primal Blueprint The New Evolution Diet Related previous posts:...

- Fivebooks Interview: Gary Taubes On Dieting
Sticking to your new year’s resolutions? Still digesting Christmas lunch? Ignore the conventional advice on losing weight, says the science writer – what constitutes a healthy diet needs to be drastically re-evaluated....................Related books:...

- Gary Taubes On Econtalk
Taubes also posted the third part in his latest series of blog posts HERE (for the first two parts, go HERE and HERE).Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about what we know about the relationship between...

- Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes
Found via Simoleon Sense.On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about...

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