The David Gillespie Blog

Apparently I’m not getting my Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) of sugar.  According to the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes I encountered in the supermarket this morning, I am supposed to be eating 90g of the stuff every day (or almost 33kg a year). 

Hang on!  I should be eating almost 22 teaspoons of sugar every day?!  Where do they get that from?  I had to find out more.

You won’t find it on their packs, but the answer is buried on the Kellogg’s site under the FAQ for Health Professionals.  They say:

Sugar – 90g – Based on 18% of total energy. This is in line with the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults [2003] which recommend to consume only moderate amounts of sugars and foods containing added sugars, and is consistent with the target stated by the Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission [1987]

I added the links into that quote to make it a bit easier for you to check than Kellogg’s did.  The first report does not set a target of 90g per day or indeed any target at all. It just says you should moderate your intake of sugars. 

The second report is so old that it isn’t available on the internet so I can’t tell you what it says.  But given the first report was written 16 years later and doesn’t mention any guidelines from that older report, I don’t hold out much hope for finding the 90g figure in it either.  And even if it did contain such a recommendation, I wouldn’t put much trust in it given the mountain of human metabolism research that’s been done since then.

Perhaps Kellogg’s pulled the 90g from The Daily Intake Guide produced by its industry lobby group, the Australian Food and Grocery Council.  That guide also uses the 90g figure.  It says that the value is ‘derived from the Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand’ [2006]. 

That document prepared by Department of Health and Ageing and does not set any RDI for sugar at all.  It simply notes that the World Health Organisation recommended a level of not more than 10% of energy from sugar in its 2003 Report on Diet and Chronic Diseases.

So in short, I’m at a loss as to where Kellogg’s (and everyone else who signed on to the AFGCs nutrition labelling system) got the figure of 90g of sugar from.  But I do know that putting that on a packet of cereal makes it seem ok that a standard serve (by that I mean what your kids actually eat not what the pack calls a standard serve) contains up to five teaspoons of sugar.  After all, that’s less than a quarter of your RDI.

Calling it an RDI gives legitimacy to the figure as if it’s an essential nutrient without which we would expire.  No-one needs to eat 3kg of sugar a year, let alone 33kg! 

It’s time for food manufacturers to stop playing ducks and drakes with food labelling.  The RDI for sugar should be 0g per day and the amount the food exceeds that should be clearly labelled.

Anyone who’s read Sweet Poison would agree that you’d have to be pretty stupid to eat sugar. But research published this month in Diabetes Care establishes a direct link between consuming fructose and ‘impaired cognitive function’. Put more directly, sugar makes you stupid.

2,977 people suffering from Type II Diabetes, aged 55 years and older took part in the study.   They were subjected to a 30-minute battery of tests designed to measure things such as how fast they performed calculations and how well they multi-tasked.  Some of the tests also measured the accuracy of their memory.  

Paul Lucas, Queensland’s Deputy Premier has a weight problem. His jeans don’t fit but that’s not really the issue. Portly Paul’s boss, the botox pumpin’, half marathon runnin’, Premier is his real problem.

Captain Bligh wants her crew to shape up or ship out before the next election. There’ll be push-ups on the poop deck and calisthenics on the quarter-deck if Bligh gets her way. Concerned that her front bench will soon all be visible on satellite pictures, the Premier wants Queensland’s leaders to show the rest of us how a little bit of exercise can turn them back into able-seamen first-class.

The new ministerial lard reduction policy is very much in line with Queensland’s current ‘Find your 30’ fitness campaign. It exhorts everyone to find 30 minutes of activity every day so they can stop being so obese (perhaps not an exact quote). And is a response to reports like the one released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in October.  That report revealed that in the last decade alone the number of overweight and obese Australians jumped from 41.1 percent in 1998 to 59.3 percent now.

The usual response to this kind of report is that we haven’t been doing enough exercise. But according to the Australian Sports Commission, in 2006, two thirds of us exercised at least once a week and almost 43 percent of us participated in sport three or more times a week. These numbers should be treated with caution as they are based on self-completed survey forms. We all tend to exercise more when filling out survey forms.

As with most things, money may be a more reliable indicator. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, between 1998 and 2004, we spent almost 20 percent more on physical activity including a whopping 92 percent increase in the number of gym memberships we purchased. 

Even in the US, where all kinds of unwelcome records are being set for obesity, the figures don’t match the spin. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of students participating in high school athletics has just increased for the 19th consecutive year. And it’s not just the kids. Like us, their parents have been spending up big on sports gear. Sporting apparel sales are up 35.3 percent since 2000 and sports shoe sales are up 44.2 percent. Sports equipment sales more than doubled between 1990 and 2008 (from $30b to almost $70b).

Perhaps we are just enrolling in gyms and filling our cupboards with gym equipment and gear to make us look like we exercise – it happens. A better test would be a fitness activity that we pay for only when it is really used. Personal training is a very high growth industry in the US and Australia. In 1999 there were 127,310 personal trainers in the US. That figure had almost doubled to 219,990 in 2007. Australian data shows a similar trend. In the 2006 census, 13,800 people said there were employed as fitness instructors up from 7,669 in the 1996 census.

The numbers don’t lie. Most of us are exercising much more than we used to, but we’re still getting fatter at an alarming rate. If only being thin were simply a matter of running around the corridors of power for an extra half an hour a day.

The problem with exercise is that it just doesn’t burn that many calories. And any calories that it does use are very easily replaced with very small changes in diet. A quick bit of maths on a calorie counter tells us that the average overweight pollie will burn up to 100 more Calories in their daily 30 minutes of moderate exercise than they would have if they had been sitting in Parliament. The small packet of Chico Babies that Premier Bligh likes to keep in her ministerial car contains almost five day’s worth of Calories at that burn rate. So why not skip the Chicos and the two and half hours of jogging and call it a day?

Even in the 1940s, doctors supported the self evident proposition that if you exercise more you will eat more. Most of the medical profession quite logically suggested that bed rest was more likely than exercise to help with obesity. One leading medical textbook at the time even famously quoted a study which showed that lumberjacks ate twice as much as tailors and concluded that ‘Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal’. It shouldn’t then come as much of surprise that study after study since then has failed to establish any direct link at all between weight loss and exercise.

This message was hijacked in 1960’s by influential French-American Nutritionist, Jean Mayer. Aided and abetted by the newly created sports shoe and sports clothing industries, the ‘exercise makes you thin’ message gained momentum to the point where today we are faced with incessant state sponsored cajoling towards exercise as a solution to our obesity problem.

Logic says exercising to lose weight shouldn’t work and science backs that up, but neither is relevant to a politician wanting to look like they are doing something. But before Captain Bligh sends us all for a long walk on a short plank for failing a fat fold test, let’s take a look at what the research really says. Exercise won’t stop you getting fatter but being choosy about what you put in your mouth very definitely will.

Published in The Australian

At this time of year thoughts inevitably turn to resolutions.  First on the list for most of us is a determination to be a mere shadow of our former selves next Christmas.

The experts tell us the way to achieve that is with diet and exercise.  Times are tough and getting tougher so before we madly sign up to the latest fad diet or enrol at the local gym, it’s worth taking a moment or two to think about how much it all might cost. 

A few years ago, Forbes Magazine (the influential US mag for the leaders of the business world), decided to take a good hard look at the numbers (as business people often do).  They looked at the 10 most popular diets in the US, calculated how much the special foods required would cost and averaged out the membership cost (if there was one).  They then compared this to the average amount spent by a single person on food ($84 per week).

They found that being on a diet cost up to $210 per week (or $126 more than not being on a diet).  If you sign up to a gym you can add an extra $20 a week to that.  If you’re feeling really gung ho you can add a personal trainer for an extra $80 a session.

But in the spirit of all good resolutions, let’s assume we can manage to stick to the plan for 12 months.  Over a year we can expect to spend an additional $6,552 on food and an extra $1,040 on gym membership for a total cost of $7,592 without the personal trainer or $11,752 with the trainer (assuming you train with them for one hour per week).

US Government research suggests that most of us are back to where we started (or worse) within a year.  So the eleven and a half grand would probably be better spent putting down a deposit on a house (ok well that’s not really enough but perhaps some nice shoes?).

Traditional diets don’t work and cost a fortune, but there is a better way.  Sweet Poison describes a lifestyle change which anybody can make without costing them a cent (except for the book of course).  If anything, you will spend less on food as your appetite control is restored to normal.  There’s no gym fees to pay. In fact if you don’t feel like it you need not exercise at all.  There’s no meetings to attend and no program fees to pay.  There’s no special food to buy and there’s no menu plan to stick to.  All you need to do is avoid things which taste sweet.  The End.  That’s it – oops, now I’ve spoiled the ending … 

Astute readers of these pages may have noticed a conspiracy afoot in recent times. The children of Queensland have been scheming to embarrass the Education Department. Without fear or favour the juvenile delinquents have relentlessly failed to be educated. The result is that Queensland has demonstrated a resounding lack of achievement in national educational benchmarks.

Not one to be cornered by mewling infants, Premier Bligh tore a page from Populist Leadership for Dummies and immediately appointed a new ‘Czar of making it look like something is being done’ (at least until the next election). But the new Fixer, Melbourne-based Professor Geoff Masters, may find he has bitten off more than he can chew when discovers the latest innovation in Queensland education.

From the start of this term it is compulsory for all Queensland primary school students to attend to schooling for half an hour less per day. We’ve suffered through some pretty bizarre educational theories in Queensland in the last thirty years or so, but not even the most wacky has proposed that exposing children to less education will make them smarter.

Recent research out of Johns Hopkins University suggests that exactly the opposite is true especially for the most disadvantaged in our classrooms. The more exposure a child gets to formal education the more likely they are to achieve better results in standardised tests. This is true of any child but the impact is more profound in the children of low and middle income earners.

However our fearless leaders are not about to have their policies derailed by mere research based on long term, large cohort studies. As part of its Smart Moves policy, the Queensland Government will require that all primary school children participate in 30 minutes of compulsory ‘moderate intensity’ physical activity from today. This time is to be taken out of class time, thereby reducing actual teaching time by about 10 percent.

Prompted by exploding childhood obesity numbers, the thinking behind the policy is obviously that if our kids can’t be smart at least they’ll be thin. Everyone knows that looking good is more important than acing tests, particularly in the Sunshine State. Clearly we’ll need to throw out our Smart State number plates.

If only being thin were simply a matter of running around the playground for an extra half an hour a day. Unfortunately, the research once again fails to support the policy makers. Presumably one of the sources for the idea is the joint guideline on physical activity published by the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine in August 2007. After reviewing the available evidence, they recommended that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.”

Noticeably absent from the guideline is any suggestion that exercise would definitely lead to any weight reduction. The best they could come up with was: “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling…“

The problem with exercise is that it just doesn’t burn that many calories. And any calories that it does chew through are very easily replaced with microscopic changes in diet. As Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan once famously calculated, a hundred and ten kilo man will burn just three Calories walking up a flight of stairs. “He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!”, said Newburgh.

A quick bit of maths on a calorie counter tells us that the average child will burn about 75 more Calories in 30 minutes of moderate exercise than they would have if they had been sitting in a classroom. That’s about the same number of Calories as the small fruit juice popper which their parents will inevitably feel they require after bouncing around in the sun for half an hour.

None of this is to suggest that there are not good health reasons for exercise, merely that weight loss shouldn’t be the primary motivating factor. But the reality is that, as Newburgh and a slew of those that followed found, exercise actually makes us hungrier and prone to eating more. This is perhaps why the American Heart Association was less than fulsome in its support of the concept.

It’s time the Premier spent less time pounding the pavement in search of a win in the Bridge to Brisbane and more time hitting the books. Our children do not need less time in the classroom. And they certainly don’t need to be missing school to satisfy a mythology about obesity (and how to cure it) which has no foundation in reality. If we don’t want to be printing ‘Fat and Dumb State’ on our number plates, then it’s time to start looking at what the science really says rather than creating yet another feel-good review to get us past today’s ugly headlines.

Published in The Courier Mail 

Everyone knows children should be wary of strangers offering boiled lollies. We should all be equally wary when an industry that makes billions from selling sweets to our children brings us the good news that our kids aren’t really obese.

A couple of weeks ago Kate Carnell, CEO of the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) declared that it is “simply not true” that Australia is in the grip of a childhood obesity epidemic. Ms Carnell relied on the Australian National Children’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey in support of her argument.

That “study” was a telemarketer “weigh-in” paid for (in part) by the AFGC (Ms Carnell forgot to mention that). The AFGC represents Australia’s “highly processed food industry” and has a mandate to “manage issues relevant to the industry and to promote the industry and the virtues of its products, enabling member companies to grow their businesses”. So Ms Carnell was just doing her job.

It won’t surprise many readers to discover that “weigh-ins” conducted by telemarketers suggest that our children are less fat (and exercise more) than we thought. We’re all a lot thinner when doing surveys with strangers on the phone.

Research on the childhood obesity problem in Australia is pretty thin on the ground. And comparing the available data is difficult because of extreme contrasts in methods (and even the definition of what constitutes an obese child).

One thing all the studies and surveys show is a consistent and alarming trend. Even the AFGC sponsored survey showed an increase in childhood obesity over the last such survey in 1995. This trend is reflected in a slew of more rigorous studies of adult obesity. To suggest that a telemarketer weigh-in (partly funded by a group with a commercial interest in the outcome) disproves that trend is, at best, disingenuous.

Ms Carnell used the survey results as a foundation for her argument against further regulation of advertising of junk food to children. The AFGC opposed voluntary regulation of advertising when it was first proposed as part of the watered down recommendations from the 2002 New South Wales Childhood Obesity Summit. When that didn’t work, the AFGC decided to get in the game rather than stand on the sidelines.

And so, Ms Carnell’s argument is part of a bigger campaign for hearts and minds by the AFGC. It is not a campaign for my heart or mind and probably not yours. I’m not an employee of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and I certainly don’t sit on the Parliamentary Inquiry into Obesity.

The AFGC campaign is not about convincing you and me that Coke (or any other product sold by one of its members) is health food (although if we happen to come away believing that, it’s well and good). No, it’s about convincing the ACMA (and Parliament) that the AFGC’s members do not market unhealthy foods to children. The ACMA is proposing to update its Children’s Television Standards. At the start of its consultations in 2007 it had toyed with the idea of (gasp) regulating the advertising of food and beverages to children. But, after receiving some forceful submissions from the AFGC on the point, has decided now was not the time.

So what is the AFGC worried about? When you read the fine print, the report says that the ACMA won’t regulate for now. But the door has been left well and truly ajar. The ACMA says it may change its mind if anyone comes up with a standard way of labelling foods which are high in fat, sugar and salt. This would then allow them to seriously consider rules aimed at limiting the advertising of such foods to children.

This is where those busy bodies over at the Parliament come in. Their inquiry into obesity is turning up quite a few submissions from folks like CHOICE who want to see a traffic light system of labelling introduced to help consumers identify such foods. The AFGC has attacked CHOICE for daring to propose such a thing, even going so far as to suggest that their researchers cooked the books.

The AFGC doesn’t plan to sit back and meekly let unambiguous labelling be implemented, so a few months ago, the next part of the master strategy was unveiled on the media stage. The AFGC announced they had a plan. They would voluntarily sign up to a code of conduct that says they won’t advertise to kids under 12 years of age.

What’s wrong with the AFGC’s voluntary ban? Surely they’re helping out by jumping the gun? Well, in a word, no. This way they get to define the word “children”. In its initial examination of the need for reform, The ACMA had been dropping disturbing hints about bans that defined a child as anyone under 16 (rather than 12).

Even worse than that, with the ACMA doing the drafting there would be no chance to parachute in weasel words like the ones proposed by the AFGC. An example appears in the wording of the voluntary “ban” itself when it says the ban should be applied “unless those products represent healthy dietary choices … presented in the context of a healthy lifestyle”.

If you want to know what that looks like, you need look no further than Coke’s new website, which is choc-full of healthy lifestyle messages for Coke drinkers.

The AFGC’s hope is that by showing what terribly good corporate citizens its members are, they’ll head the Parliamentary Obesity enquiry and the ACMA off at the pass. Parliament won’t insist on traffic light labelling and the highly processed food industry will avoid the cascade effect of the ACMA implementing actual bans rather than voluntary ones written by the AFGC.

It may seem like the AFGC is jumping at shadows, but they have paid attention to what befell Big Tobacco. They know it’s better to stop this particular train before it leaves the station. If they can’t, they fear it won’t be long before the only place you’ll be able to see a Coke ad will be in the sealed section of an adult magazine.

Published in Online Opinion

ABC’s Steve Austin was kind enough to invite me for a chat on his show this morning. As is usually the case with Steve, he was bristling with the latest news in the world of sugar research. He asked me about a story doing the rounds on the wire last night.

David Paterson has a big problem.  There are too many fat people where he lives and they are sending him broke.  But he has a solution and his solution marks him out as a pioneer.

David is the Governor of New York State and the problem is that the cost of providing even the limited free health care that he provides (called Medicaid) is blowing out as fast as the waistlines of his constituents.  Medicaid provides free health care to the very poorest of America’s citizens.  To qualify they essentially have to have less than $2,000 in assets, no income AND be a child, pregnant, elderly or disabled.

New York currently spends US$2,283 per person per year on Medicaid.  It’s not much by Australian standards, but it’s more than twice the US national average of US$1,026.  This coming year David expects to spend US$45.4 billion (with a B) on Medicaid.  This is a 51% increase in what was spent in 2000. 

A rapidly increasing part of the Medicaid bill is going towards the treatment of Type II Diabetes, heart disease and the other complications associated with obesity. Nearly a quarter of New Yorkers under the age of 18 is obese and almost half the Medicaid budget is spent on those children.  David’s solution is tax the cause of those diseases.  Here’s what his says:  

“To combat obesity, the budget proposes an additional 18 percent tax on non-diet soft drinks to discourage consumption of beverages that contribute to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, with all of the revenues to be dedicated to health care programs.”

Welcome to the future.  David’s solution to a runaway train is to attach lead weights to the caboose rather than turn off the engine.  It’s a solution first proposed by Dr Kelly Brownell,  director of The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale in the early 1980s, but now a cash strapped government has finally gotten desperate enough to do it.

David is not alone in his need to do something about the cost of obesity, he is just the first to hit the panic button.  As more and more governments do the maths, you can expect the covers to come of those panic buttons quickly. 

If you doubt that we will ‘solve’ the problem this way here, you need look no further than the Queensland government’s ‘solution’ to the blowout in public dental costs caused by the consumption of sugar.  Did they ban sugar?  No, they mass medicated us with fluoride. 

Likewise, since David is obviously convinced that sugar is the problem, it might have been logical to consider banning it.  But in a move reminiscent of the ‘cure’ for smoking, he decided to tax it instead.

The interesting thing about David’s new tax is that he didn’t target fats.  I guess the sugar industry’s ‘research’ smokescreen about fat being bad and sugar being good ‘in moderation’ isn’t fooling those who have to pick up the tab for obesity.

As the last of the Christmas pudding subsides from view, many thoughts turn to the inevitable New Years resolution to lose weight.