The David Gillespie Blog

If you change nothing, nothing will change
January 5, 2014
0

The World Health Organisation has taken a tough stand on sugar. It’s about time we listened.

By | Sugar | 2 Comments

Last week the WHO (World Health Organization) leaked a draft report about sugar. The report will tell the world’s health authorities that they should be severely limiting the amount of sugar we all eat. It will recommend that we consume no more than 5 teaspoons of sugar a day. Given the average Australian is putting away somewhere closer to 35-45 teaspoons a day, it’s a very big call indeed.

The WHO is the health policy unit of the United Nations. Its aim is provide evidence based leadership on health research. It is well funded, free from corporate influence and motivated entirely by a desire to ensure that the 193 UN member countries get the best possible, evidence based, health advice. The WHO doesn’t run a Tick program or receive sponsorship from the processed food industry. Indeed it has even recently taken the extraordinary step of banning one ‘research’ group sponsored by industry from participating in its decision making processes.

Shrinath Reddy, a cardiologist and member of the WHO panel of experts, told the Sunday Times the WHO is moving on sugar because “There is overwhelming evidence coming out about sugar-sweetened beverages and other sugar consumption links to obesity, diabetes and even cardiovascular disease.”

The worldwide burden for those diseases is accelerating very quickly. According to a new report out this week the number of overweight and obese in the developing world has quadrupled since 1980.

A billion people in the developing world are now on the chronic disease express. But don’t worry, we still win. Less than a third of the population in China and India is overweight compared to our two thirds or more. They are just starting to get the hang of this Western Diet Thingy, so expect very big rises in the very near future.

The WHO have looked dispassionately at the evidence and have seen the tsunami of human misery caused by sugar coming for more than a decade They publicly warned that sugar was strongly implicated in obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in 2003.

They then took the extraordinary step of telling member governments that they should ensure their populations limited sugar consumption to a maximum of 10% of total calories (around 10 teaspoons of sugar a day – the same amount you would find in a Coke or a large Apple Juice). They did this despite an overt and vicious public campaign conducted by the Food industry.

The US sugar lobby demanded that the US Congress end its $406 million funding of the WHO. This is the same WHO that co-ordinates global action against epidemics like HIV, Bird Flu and SARS. But the US food industry wanted it destroyed because it dared to suggest we eat less sugar.

The lobbying behind the scenes was even more ruthless. Derek Yach, the WHO Executive Director who drove the sugar reduction policy work told a British documentary crew in 2004, that millions were spent trying to torpedo the policy. US Senators wrote directly to the WHO threatening its very existence. They also threatened the Food and Agriculture Organisation (a sister UN department concerned with food production) with a cut in funding.

In the end the food industry campaign paid off. The WHO removed its 10% recommendation from the final text of its recommendation. It was watered down to a suggestion that people ‘cut the amount of sugar in the diet’.

As one of the people involved at the time, Professor Phillip James, Chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce, predicted “we’ll end up with nice little policies telling [us] to have ‘just a bit less sugar and a little more balanced diet’ the nonsense that’s gone on since the Second World War during which time we’ve had this vast epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and obesity.”

Even the briefest glance at the official dietary guidance on sugar in Australia or the UK will tell you Professor James wasn’t too far from the mark with his prediction. Our guidelines are stuffed with words like ‘moderation’ and ‘balanced diet’ when it comes to sugar.

But the thing about evidence is, it doesn’t go away. And in the 10 years since the WHO last tried to save us from sugar, the evidence has become overwhelming (to quote Dr Reddy).

The WHO got a serious kicking when they tried to suggest a 10 teaspoon upper limit on sugar consumption, so you can imagine that the evidence they have reviewed must be truly overpowering to have them step up to the plate again. But this time they want the limit to be 5% (5 teaspoons) or less. I hope they’re wearing their flak jackets because I suspect a whole heap of blood money from the processed food industry is pouring into ‘lobbyists’ pockets as we speak.

The WHO is not running down sugar because it hates sugar farmers. It is not doing it because it likes getting mauled by the US Government (and its sponsors). It’s doing it because we will all suffer immensely if we don’t act on its advice.

I don’t know if the WHO can withstand the punishment they are about to receive. And I have no confidence that their recommended limit will make it through the firestorm of food industry sponsored ‘science’ which will suddenly surface. But I do know that when good people decide the evidence is so powerful that they should say it anyway, then the rest of us better be bloody listening.

December 28, 2013
0

That Sugar Film

By | Sugar | No Comments

http://vimeo.com/71478142

‘That Sugar Film’ is a feature documentary being made by Madman Entertainment and Old Mates Productions. It is a bold and colourful ride exploring all things sugar. We look at sugar’s prevalence in society and see if it is having any major effects on the mind and body.

As part of the film, our host and director, Damon Gameau, who has eaten little to no sugar in the past 2 years is putting himself through a ‘Super Size Me’ inspired adventure of consuming 40 teaspoons of sugar per day found in common food and drinks. This is only marginally above the average daily amount consumed by teenagers world wide.

He will be monitored by a team of doctors and scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the USA. He will also head out on an international journey and be joined by many familiar faces who are willing to look at sugar a little more closely.

While Damon is taking part in the experiment he will be keeping a daily diary of what items he has consumed to reach 40 teaspoons a day. Take note that there will be little consumption of perceived ‘junk’ food but rather he will be highlighting the hidden sugars that are found in many ‘healthy’ marketed products.

Directed by Damon Gameau

Produced by Rory Williamson and Nick Batzias

December 3, 2013
0

Correction to Fruit Fix Post

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar | 3 Comments

I’m nothing if not responsive to reader requests. Richard Andersen has written to express some concerns about my recent post on Uncle Toby’s Fruit Fix bar. Richard is General Counsel (a lawyer) for Nestle Australia Ltd and he says that Nestle is worried that you might have misunderstood some things in my post. So in the interests of clarity and fairness, in this post, I’ll go through each of Nestle’s concerns and correct the record.

Righto, off we go – Nestle says that I “represent[ed] … that the Fruit Fix Strawberry variant contains only strawberries … The front of pack clearly describes the product as ‘… apple, strawberry and grape snack’, which you have failed to mention in your post.”

Well true enuff Richard, you’ve got me there mate. I didn’t recite the front label of the pack. I just went ahead and referred to the product by the name Uncle Toby’s used to describe it on their site (I didn’t actually buy a packet of the stuff!). So for the record folks, Fruit Fix Strawberry is an apple, strawberry and grape snack. It does not under any circumstances contain just strawberries, so don’t go thinking it does.

Richard then says that Nestle is concerned that comparing the sugar content of a strawberry to a fruit fix is misleading because Fruit Fix also contains apples and grapes. I don’t want anyone being mislead so here is the full comparison (including apples and grapes – SFF is Strawberry Fruit Fix):

Protein: Strawberry 1% Apple 0% Grape 1% SFF 1.3%

Fat: Strawberry 0% Apple 0% Grape 0% SFF .5%

Sugar: Strawberry 4.6% Apple 10.4% Grape 15.5% SFF 72.7%

Fibre: Strawberry 2% Apple 2.4% Grape .9% SFF 7.3%

The highest sugar concentration is 15.5% which is still a long way from 72.7% so I’m not sure what point Nestle is trying to make. Even if Strawberry Fruit Fix contained nothing but grapes, you’d still need to eat almost half a kilo of them to get as much sugar as 100g of Fruit Fix, but there you go, full disclosure.

Next Nestle was concerned that I “… make an inference that additional sugar has been added to the product … The product uses fruit puree and juice, which are inherently high in natural fruit sugars”.Notice how they underlined the word natural, I think it must be a magic word. Lawyers always underline magic lawyer words.

I can’t see where I have suggested that sugar is ‘added’ in the original post. But just in case anyone is confused, I unequivocally state that I don’t think any ‘additional sugar has been added to the product’. There’d be barely any room for anything else if they did, given all the sugar that’s already there.

No, I’m happy to accept Nestle’s word that the sugar in Fruit Fix comes entirely from fruit. Nestle seems to think that a molecule of sugar that was in some way associated with a piece of fruit in a prior life is an entirely different kettle of fish than one which found its genesis in a piece of sugar cane (like grapes, sugar cane is about 15% sugar in its natural state). I think this must be some sort of grass-ism (sugar cane is a grass).Nestle appear to believe that fructose molecules from fruit come from a better neighbourhood than those from grass. Apparently once being part of a piece fruit earns them the special label ‘natural’ as opposed to those (I guess) unnatural ones which were once part of a piece of sugar cane.

Nestle also takes exception to me suggesting that they are telling lies by emblazoning their product with ‘1 Serve of Fruit’ and advertising the product as a healthy and nutritious snack. They point out that unlike me, Nestle have carefully ensured they know the legal definition of the word ‘fruit’.

Silly old me. You see when someone says ‘1 Serve of Fruit’, I think of an apple or maybe a banana. But that’s where I’ve gone wrong according to Nestle. No, what I should be doing is reaching for my handy copy of The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating where I will discover (once I drill down to the fine print) that fruit juice and fruit puree are also considered to fit the definition of ‘fruit’. Since Fruit Fix is made from both of those ingredients, it is therefore ‘fruit’.

So when you define the words just the right way, Nestle is telling God’s honest. Personally I think it would be more honest to emblazon the box with ‘Five to Sixteen equivalent serves of sugars that were once part of a piece of fruit’ but I can see how the Nestle marketing people might not go for that.

Unfortunately Nestle didn’t give me their definition of ‘healthy and nutritious’ so I’ll just have to rely on common sense for that one. I take the phrase to mean the food will promote good health (or at least not bad health). And this is where Nestle and I will have to disagree on the ‘truth’. Nestle maintains that a food which is almost three quarters sugar (and the majority of that, fructose) promotes good health. But there over 3,000 published studies which say exactly the opposite.

The latest one (published just last month in the Journal of Clinical Investigation) reported on a study at the University of California where 32 overweight and obese people were persuaded to try a 10 week diet which was either 25 percent fructose or 25 percent glucose. Fructose and glucose are the two sugars that bind together to make table sugar. So ‘sugar’ is half fructose and half glucose (yes, even when it comes from fruit rather than cane).

The people on the fructose diet ended up with increased (1.5kg) abdominal fat, higher triglyceride levels (which leads to heart disease) and 20 percent higher insulin resistance (which leads to Type II Diabetes) after just 10 weeks! None of this happened to the group on glucose.

The University of California research is just the latest in a long line of studies which say the same thing. Sugar (or at least the fructose half or it) is highly dangerous to humans. And there is no shortage of research which shows that fat in the blood (the higher triglyceride levels) from fructose leads to obesity, heart disease and type II diabetes.

The ‘sugar’ in the Fruit Fix is likely to contain significantly more fructose than table sugar, coming as it does from condensed fruit juices. So Nestle are telling parents that it’s good to feed their kids something which consists of large amount of a substance which has been proven to cause obesity, heart disease and diabetes (to name a few of the problems). That does not fit my definition of ‘healthy and nutritious’, so in that sense I believe Nestle is lying when it says that Fruit Fix is a ‘healthy and nutritious’ alternative to fruit.

I guess to lie you must know that what you’re saying is not true. And I have assumed that Nestle would be aware of the research on fructose. I do sincerely hope that their defence (as one of our biggest food suppliers) is not that they weren’t aware of the dangers of sugar.

It’s a free country. Nestle has just as much right to sell high sugar, fruit flavoured confectionary as the next guy (actually a Mars Bar, for example, has considerably less sugar – ‘just’ 55.3%). What they should not do is tell us that it is a healthy and nutritious snack while they’re at it. And the Heart Foundation shouldn’t be aiding and abetting this deceit by stamping the product with its Tick of approval.

November 28, 2013
0

The gig is up

By | Sugar | No Comments

Last month Credit Suisse issued a blunt warning to the processed food industry in general and the beverage industry in particular. The gig is up. Well, they didn’t say that exactly, but there can be no other way to read their pragmatic financial assessment of the state of play in the sugar wars.

The processed food industry has done their best to muddy the waters on the science linking sugar to heart disease, obesity and type II diabetes, but it doesn’t fool the team of 20 financial analysts for one second. You see, financial folks don’t need to worry about the prevailing nutritional dogma or whether they will get the next research grant. All they worry about is money and whether their clients are making enough of the stuff.

They ask if it could possibly be coincidence that Mexico is the third largest consumer of sugary soft-drink and ranked second for obesity. They speculate that maybe, just maybe, the same coincidence could explain Italy at #35 for soft-drink and #25 for obesity. But they are convinced that coincidence can’t be further stretched to explain how in every US State, obesity levels correlate exactly with the total sugar consumed from soft-drink (it varies quite a bit because the denizens of richer states consumer more diet soda and aren’t quite as fat as those which inhabit the poorer states).

Realising that the proving anything in human nutrition is virtually impossible (especially when folks making billions out of sugar are funding a lot of it), the financial wingnuts decide to ask doctors what they think. This is a world first as far as I am aware. They actually asked the doctors treating these diseases at the coal-face what they reckon the cause is. And the results confirm that if sugar’s role in disease is a mere coincidence, it’s got the medicos fooled too.

Eighty Six per cent of EU doctors (and 98% of US doctors) are convinced that sugar makes us fat. Ninety two per cent are convinced it causes Type II diabetes (96% in the US). Four out of five doctors also believe that sugar is addictive. And that’s a bit of a shame because less than 40% of them say they have anything more than minimal training in nutrition. Since they are spectacularly unqualified to help, fully 90 per cent of EU doctors think the government should do something to reduce sugar consumption (but only half of them think it will).

Bringing all this back to money (as is their wont), the bean counters then tally up the winners and losers. They point out that, at $140 billion per annum, the cost of type II diabetes to the US health system is already more than $60 billion per annum higher than for tobacco related costs. Worse than that, it is growing at over $6 billion a year – and that’s just one consequence of sugar consumption. Credit Suisse estimate that up to 40% of the $1 trillion annual US health budget is now being gobbled up in sugar related chronic disease.

Even so, the Swiss number crunchers are fairly certain governments will do absolutely nothing to protect their citizens from the food industry. They point out that sugar is the second most lobbied commodity in the world (after oil). Just growing the stuff employs 350,000 people in Europe (and a further 15 million in China). To them it seems a safe bet that no politician will act to endanger those jobs, let alone the millions of jobs that depend on the down-the-line uses of sugar in soft drinks and processed food.

Unfortunately the victims (that would be us) seem to be getting wise to the link between sugar and disease. And this, Credit Suisse predicts, means that the processed food industry will soon need to ‘self-regulate’ if it is to avoid financial Armageddon (a drop in sales, that is).

In other words, we can expect to see Big Sugar start to behave a lot like Big Tobacco when the alarm bells started ringing about lung cancer. Any reader old enough to remember when the only thing that made a telephone portable was installing it in a car, will surely remember these gems from a forgotten age:

Nicotine is not addictive; the link between lung cancer and smoking is not proven; and the tobacco industry does not target children with its advertising.

They may even feel a nostalgic tear well up as Big Sugar dusts off Big Tobacco’s playbook with these little beauties:

Sugar is not addictive; the link between disease and sugar is not proven; and Big Sugar does not target children with its advertising.

And they’ll no doubt add those tactics to the already ubiquitous ‘blame the consumer’ (it’s all about personal responsibility you see) and ‘disrupt the regulators’ (make sure government committees are stacked with people with strong links to the food industry) which they have already begun to deploy.

Credit Suisse is rather more optimistic about self-regulation than am I. They imagine a future consisting of Big Sugar voluntarily removing sugar and then dancing into the sunset arm in arm with a thin and healthy consumer.

Solid science linking tobacco to lung cancer was first published in 1950. In 1994, the CEO’s of all the US tobacco companies were still testifying to congress that there wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t until 46 US States successfully bludgeoned them with overwhelming legal force in 1998 that they agreed to pay for some of the harm they cause. Even so the Tobacco companies remain extremely profitable businesses that continue to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of addicts worldwide.

The science is now in on the links between sugar and chronic disease. Those diseases are crippling our health system and destroying the lives of billions of people. But if the tobacco precedent is anything to go by, nothing will be done about it until someone with very deep pockets takes up the fight. Got a minute Rupert?

November 28, 2013
3

You know the world has gone mad when coke has less sugar than mayo.

By | Sugar | 4 Comments

Goodman Fielder have released their new 99% fat free mayonnaise just in time for the salad days of summer. The only problem is that it has more in common with a can of coke than mayonnaise. So why is allowed to be called mayonnaise and why does it have a Heart Foundation tick?

No one is sure who came up with the first recipe for mayonnaise. The Spanish reckon it came from Mahon in Spain and was nicked by the French in 1756. The French reckon they had it for ages before that. They say it was named after the Duke of Mayenne when he took the time to finish his chicken and mayo sanger before the Battle of Arques in 1589.

But wherever it came from there is general agreement on the recipe. You grab an egg yolk and whisk in olive oil. It’s a cool bit of chemistry for two such simple ingredients. The oil and the water in the yolk create an emulsion which is stabilised by the proteins and lecithin in the yolk. If you want to get all fancy you can drop in a bit of mustard or lemon juice to give it a sharper tang.

And that’s all there is to one of the yummiest and most widespread condiments in the world today. Except apparently if you are a food conglomerate trying to make a fat free mayo. Given that 80% of the product is fat (Olive Oil) this presents a wee problem. Don’t worry though, there is a solution, pack it with sugar instead.

Goodman Fielder’s new Praise Creamy Mayonnaise is 99% Fat Free. And while the label claims this is ‘Mayonnaise’, the ingredient list doesn’t look like anything the Duke of Mayenne was likely to be using. There is neither egg nor Olive Oil involved in its construction. Indeed the primary ingredient (besides water) is sugar. Here’s the full ingredient list (in descending order of use in the product):

Water (about 70%),

Sugar (26.8%),

Vinegar,

Thickener (1442),

Salt,

Vegetable Gums (415, 460, 466),

Lemon Juice,

Sunflower Oil (0.8%),

Spices,

Colour (171, Lutein),

Food acid (citric),

Flavour.

Based on the volumes of each ingredient used, this ‘mayonnaise’ is really just a sugar water emulsion flavoured with a bit of salt, vinegar and Sunflower Oil (0.8% of the total volume – there’s more lemon juice than oil in this baby).

Just for the kicks of it let’s compare the ingredients of the substance labelled as mayonnaise with coca-cola. Coke contains (in descending order)

Water [89%] (tick),

Sugar [10.6%] (tick – but only about a third as much)

Colour (Caramel 150d), (tick)

Food Acid (338), (tick)

Flavour, (tick)

Caffeine. (nup – none of that in the mayo-ish stuff, for now)

This white-sugar-syrup (I can’t bring myself to call it mayonnaise any longer) has almost 3 times the sugar content of coca-cola. But unlike coke, it is marketed as health food. It proudly bears an Australian Heart Foundation tick of approval. And that’s a bit odd. Because just last week the very same Foundation re-launched its campaign to ban sugary drinks in schools, hospitals and sports centres and heavily tax them everywhere else. But by now we’re used to this kind of cognitive dissonance (and casual disregard for our health) from the Heart Foundation.

Mayonnaise is a food consisting of fat and egg yolk. The similarity between that and what appears in this bottle of sugar-water begins and ends with the word mayonnaise on the label.  It is an appalling abuse of our trust that our labelling laws allow this kind of outright deceit.

If this sort of boondoggle were permitted elsewhere you would be buying petrol made from used chip fat and cotton shirts made of the floor sweepings at the local barber shop (or, heaven forbid, waxing parlour). That kind of carry-on would immediately land the vendor in court, but when it comes to what you shove in your gob apparently anything goes.

Since our food regulators obviously care naught for accuracy in labelling, this example suggests you need to exercise real caution if you plan to buy packaged food. Ignore the front of the pack and peer closely at the ingredient list (bring your good glasses) if you want to have any hope of knowing what’s in the ‘mayo’ you’re being sold.

Of course you could always just buy an egg and some olive oil and get on the end of a whisk for a few minutes. Then you’d know the full ingredient list and the sugar content would be exactly 0.

November 14, 2013
0

Peter FitzSimons stops eating sugar

By | Media, Sugar, Television | 9 Comments

Peter FitzSimons has battled with sugar and weight gain. The former Wallaby piled on the kilos after he hung up the boots.

Now at age 50, he takes on the challenge to cut sugar from his diet, with amazing results. Peter’s investigation asks is sugar really bad for you, or is it the victim of bad PR?

Read more about the Sunday Night story which shows how Peter lost 20 kilograms in just 10 weeks by not eating sugar.

“This is a life-changing book. I’m now 25 kilos lighter – simply by understanding and embracing the principles in Sweet Poison.”

Peter FitzSimons  

Peter FitzSimons is a well-respected columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald, is the Chair of the Australian Republican Movement and has written over 27 best-selling books.

Get the Book

Four years on, Peter has now lost 45kgs.  As he says:

“What I am is a bloke who was once fit enough to play Test rugby at 114 kilograms, before blowing out to a shattering 152 kilograms four years ago … who has now made his way back to 106 kilograms.”

He has now released his own book about exactly how he applied what he found in Sweet Poison.

October 25, 2013
0

The Gig is Up

By | Sugar | 3 Comments

Last month Credit Suisse issued a blunt warning to the processed food industry in general and the beverage industry in particular. The gig is up. Well, they didn’t say that exactly, but there can be no other way to read their pragmatic financial assessment of the state of play in the sugar wars.

The processed food industry has done their best to muddy the waters on the science linking sugar to heart disease, obesity and type II diabetes, but it doesn’t fool the team of 20 financial analysts for one second. You see, financial folks don’t need to worry about the prevailing nutritional dogma or whether they will get the next research grant. All they worry about is money and whether their clients are making enough of the stuff.

They ask if it could possibly be coincidence that Mexico is the third largest consumer of sugary soft-drink and ranked second for obesity. They speculate that maybe, just maybe, the same coincidence could explain Italy at #35 for soft-drink and #25 for obesity. But they are convinced that coincidence can’t be further stretched to explain how in every US State, obesity levels correlate exactly with the total sugar consumed from soft-drink (it varies quite a bit because the denizens of richer states consumer more diet soda and aren’t quite as fat as those which inhabit the poorer states).

Realising that the proving anything in human nutrition is virtually impossible (especially when folks making billions out of sugar are funding a lot of it), the financial wingnuts decide to ask doctors what they think. This is a world first as far as I am aware. They actually asked the doctors treating these diseases at the coal-face what they reckon the cause is. And the results confirm that if sugar’s role in disease is a mere coincidence, it’s got the medicos fooled too.

Eighty Six per cent of EU doctors (and 98% of US doctors) are convinced that sugar makes us fat. Ninety two per cent are convinced it causes Type II diabetes (96% in the US). Four out of five doctors also believe that sugar is addictive. And that’s a bit of a shame because less than 40% of them say they have anything more than minimal training in nutrition. Since they are spectacularly unqualified to help, fully 90 per cent of EU doctors think the government should do something to reduce sugar consumption (but only half of them think it will).

Bringing all this back to money (as is their wont), the bean counters then tally up the winners and losers. They point out that, at $140 billion per annum, the cost of type II diabetes to the US health system is already more than $60 billion per annum higher than for tobacco related costs. Worse than that, it is growing at over $6 billion a year – and that’s just one consequence of sugar consumption. Credit Suisse estimate that up to 40% of the $1 trillion annual US health budget is now being gobbled up in sugar related chronic disease.

Even so, the Swiss number crunchers are fairly certain governments will do absolutely nothing to protect their citizens from the food industry. They point out that sugar is the second most lobbied commodity in the world (after oil). Just growing the stuff employs 350,000 people in Europe (and a further 15 million in China). To them it seems a safe bet that no politician will act to endanger those jobs, let alone the millions of jobs that depend on the down-the-line uses of sugar in soft drinks and processed food.

Unfortunately the victims (that would be us) seem to be getting wise to the link between sugar and disease. And this, Credit Suisse predicts, means that the processed food industry will soon need to ‘self-regulate’ if it is to avoid financial Armageddon (a drop in sales, that is).

In other words, we can expect to see Big Sugar start to behave a lot like Big Tobacco when the alarm bells started ringing about lung cancer. Any reader old enough to remember when the only thing that made a telephone portable was installing it in a car, will surely remember these gems from a forgotten age:

Nicotine is not addictive; the link between lung cancer and smoking is not proven; and the tobacco industry does not target children with its advertising.

They may even feel a nostalgic tear well up as Big Sugar dusts off Big Tobacco’s playbook with these little beauties:

Sugar is not addictive; the link between disease and sugar is not proven; and Big Sugar does not target children with its advertising.

And they’ll no doubt add those tactics to the already ubiquitous ‘blame the consumer’ (it’s all about personal responsibility you see) and ‘disrupt the regulators’ (make sure government committees are stacked with people with strong links to the food industry) which they have already begun to deploy.

Credit Suisse is rather more optimistic about self-regulation than am I. They imagine a future consisting of Big Sugar voluntarily removing sugar and then dancing into the sunset arm in arm with a thin and healthy consumer. But I think history suggests a different path lies ahead.

Solid science linking tobacco to lung cancer was first published in 1950. In 1994, the CEO’s of all the US tobacco companies were still testifying to congress that there wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t until 46 US States successfully bludgeoned them with overwhelming legal force in 1998 that they agreed to pay for some of the harm they cause. Even so the Tobacco companies remain extremely profitable businesses that continue to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of addicts worldwide.

The science is now in on the links between sugar and chronic disease. Those diseases are crippling our health system and destroying the lives of billions of people. But if the tobacco precedent is anything to go by, nothing will be done about it until someone with very deep pockets takes up the fight. Got a minute Rupert?

August 21, 2013
0

Is the Heart Foundation’s advice killing us?

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 13 Comments

This week the authors of a major ongoing assessment of our health released their 12 year update. It’s a sobering document. We are all getting fatter and very much sicker at an alarming rate. But the really disturbing thing is that the Australian Heart Foundation’s advice is making things worse not better.

The AusDiab (Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle) study has been monitoring the health of a random selection of 11,000 Australian adults since 2000. The results of the 12 year follow-up were published this week.

The update shows that the number of us with Type II Diabetes has increased by 41%; that obesity has increased by 22%; that almost half of us now have chronically high blood pressure (this is despite a 30% increase in the use of medication to control it); and that the average 25 year old gained 7 kg on the scales and 7 cm round the waist; all in just over a decade.

During all of the period of the study (and for many years before that), the Heart Foundation has campaigned for changes to our food supply that they say would combat exactly those problems. They wanted the saturated animal fats removed from our food and replaced with seed oils (described on the label as ‘vegetable oil’, ‘canola oil’, ‘sunflower oil’, ‘safflower oil’, ‘soy oil’, ‘rice bran oil’ or ‘grapeseed oil’). And they have had considerable success. All fast food outlets now fry in seed oils. There are no products on the supermarket shelves which use animal fat. And in every food category there is at least one major brand that has been certified by the Foundation (with a Tick) as being low in saturated fats.

They have won the war on animal fat and ensured that it has been almost completely replaced by oils extracted from seeds. There is just one remaining bastion of saturated fat, butter. But don’t worry, the Foundation has a plan there too, eat more margarine. They reckon that once you overcome the taste of margarine you’ll soon be enjoying the “great benefit” of more “omega 6.” Omega 6 fats are a significant component of seed oils (vegetable oils) but are very rare everywhere else in nature. The only problem is that research is telling us that they the Heart Foundation has gotten it very, very wrong on these fats.

One of the key pieces of research they rely on for the supposed benefits of margarine (and seed oils in general) has recently been reanalysed. This new analysis has turned our understanding of the heart health benefits of margarine (and in particular the omega-6 fats which are a primary ingredient) upside down. The researchers were able to recover lost data about the exact fats fed to the volunteers in the original Study and then apply modern statistical techniques to that data.

What they found was truly disturbing. Not only was there no benefit to the people substituting margarine for butter, doing so significantly increased the risk of death from heart disease (by 70%) because of the huge increase in omega-6 fat consumption in the margarine chomping group.

The margarines used in that trial have similar levels of omega-6 fats to those (and just about everything else) being promoted by the Heart Foundation for the last three decades. Based on this research, the Foundation is actively encouraging people to consume something that almost doubles the risk of death from heart disease. Let me say that again just so it’s clear. The research says that following the Heart Foundation’s advice almost doubles your risk of death from heart disease.

Extraordinary though that is, it is not the worst of it. These are also exactly the same fats that other research has repeatedly shown to double our risk of breast cancer. And I’m not just talking about rat studies here (although there are more than enough of them). I’m talking about at least 7 major human population studies and 2 long term controlled trials (human again) which all come to exactly the same conclusion. The more omega-6 fat (found primarily in vegetable oil) you consume the more likely you are to suffer from breast cancer.

Worse than that, the rat studies are showing up something that (thankfully) no-one dare try on humans. When you feed pregnant mothers this stuff, their female pups have double the rate of breast cancer – even though they don’t consume any vegetable oils after birth.

This makes the heart Foundation’s chosen marketing vehicle especially horrific. You see, rather than simply run an ad telling us to eat margarine, they’ve decided to create a social media storm with the express purpose of getting mums to consume the exact substance that the research resoundingly shows doubles the rate of breast cancer and nearly doubles their risk of death from heart disease. And if the rat studies are right, those mums (trying to do the very best for their families) may be making very dangerous choices for their unborn daughters.

As if this were not bad enough, the Foundation continues to persist with a bizarre stance on the question of sugar. Last Thursday, the ABC’s venerable science program, Catalyst ran a special feature on the dangers of sugar. It detailed the, now well established, evidence that sugar is not only responsible for the obesity epidemic but is also strongly implicated in a long line of chronic disease including Type II Diabetes and Heart Disease.

Part of the program examined the very high levels of sugar embedded in foods which bear the Australian Heart Foundation’s tick of approval. Professor Michael Cowley, a physiologist and obesity researcher from Monash University expressed surprise that the Heart Foundation would endorse breakfast cereals (for example) that were almost a third sugar. In response, the Heart Foundation said that they ignore the sugar content of foods because (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) they believe it doesn’t make us fat or give us diabetes or heart disease.

The Australian Heart Foundation has spent the last 54 years working to gain our trust as an adviser. Our trust is something you can’t buy, but the processed food industry has found a way to rent the Heart Foundation’s healthy halo. It’s called the Tick Program. Processed foods can gain endorsement from the Heart Foundation by doing what they were going to do anyway. They wanted to use seed oils instead of animal fats because they are loads cheaper. Tick. They wanted to use tons of sugar because food with sugar sells better than food without. Tick.

The only problem is that, through the Tick Program, the Heart Foundation now finds itself in the position of having endorsed hundreds of products that the science says are very dangerous to our health. And it receives a nice chunk of change from the program every year ($2.9m in 2011).

That, girls and boys, is what we lawyers call a conflict of interest. When doctors experience a conflict of interest (say by accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies), the regulators tighten the rules and (no matter how much it hurts the doctors) puts the brakes on the gravy train.

The same thing happens in just about any profession we depend upon for expert knowledge. We have to be able to trust people we pay to know more than us about a specialist subject. And no matter how morally astute they believe they are, we cannot allow them be led into temptation by conflicts of interest. If we do, we can never be sure if they are giving us advice based on the best evidence or on their own financial interest.

There are now very persuasive reasons to worry about the Heart Foundation’s advice that we should consume seed oils (vegetable oils). And there is just as compelling evidence that ignoring sugar is taking a daily toll on the health of all Australians.

I know it’s embarrassing that the Heart Foundation got it wrong on omega-6 fats and sugar. But they need to suck it up and change their position. Because it is much better to admit being wrong and do something about it than let another 40 women contract breast cancer or another 270 people contract Type II diabetes (and that’s just the toll today – the same toll will be exacted tomorrow and the day after that too).

We don’t need the guardians of our health defending the indefensible. We need them, well, guarding our health without fear or favour (especially without favour). This is not about pride. It’s about doing the right thing and stopping the appallingly dangerous advice – now.

While you wait for the Heart Foundation to do the right thing, here is some simple, free, advice for anyone wishing to avoid heart disease, cancer and Type II Diabetes:

  1. Do not eat any processed food (food in a packet) which has a Heart Foundation Tick – it is more than likely full of sugar or seed oils or both
  2. Do not eat anything that has been deep fried unless you know it was done in olive oil, coconut oil, macadamia nut oil or animal fat.
  3. Avoid any other processed food that contains seed oil.
  4. Avoid any other processed food that contains more than 3g per 100g of added sugar

Warning: following this advice may cause you to live to a very old age, so make sure you’ve got some superannuation

March 30, 2013
0

We owe our kids more than a future full of transplants

By | Sugar | 10 Comments

According to a report released this week, liver disease now affects more than six million Australians.  The doctors who commissioned the report want the taxpayer to give them more money to manage sufferers.  Fortunately we now know what causes the vast majority of liver disease and that it can be reversed simply by telling people not to eat sugar.  But I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to become the recommended treatment.

Liver diseases fall into two main groups, those caused by viruses (Hepatitis – currently afflicting about 518,000 Australians), and, accounting for the other 90 odd per cent of cases, those caused by ‘lifestyle’ (5.5 million people).

The lifestyle group is usually further divided into drinkers (who have the same symptoms but have a history of consuming  more than 2 standard drinks per day for women or 3 for men) and everybody else.  According to the report, Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease now affects 6,203 people but Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) afflicts a massive 5,538,677 Australians.  That’s a pretty big number for a disease was first identified just 30 years ago.

As the name suggests, NAFLD starts out as an accumulation of fat in the liver.  It can then progress through various disease stages and ultimately end in cirrhosis requiring a liver transplant (if you’re lucky enough to find a donor).   There are very few symptoms until the later disease stages, so most people are unaware that they have it all.

NAFLD is frequently described as the liver component of the metabolic syndrome (elevated blood fats, insulin resistance and obesity), because it’s rapid growth has paralleled the same runaway growth in each of the diseases which are a consequence of the syndrome.  More than 90% of obese people and up to 70% of people with Type II Diabetes have NAFLD.

The number of people with NAFLD is accelerating at a tremendous rate.  Even worse, the age of onset is declining rapidly.  A study published last week revealed that the number of US teenagers with the disease more than doubled in the last 20 years and now affects almost 11% of US children aged 12-19.  If those rates translate to Australia (and there’s every reason to think they might) this means the average high school classroom now contains three children suffering from chronic liver disease.  Every classroom.  Three kids.

Even though one of the liver’s functions is to make fat from any excess carbohydrates we consume, the fat is normally exported for storage in all the places that make our jeans too tight.  NAFLD starts when the liver’s ability to export fat is overwhelmed.  The excess fat remains in the liver and begins to create the human version of foie gras.  The best way to make this happen in ducks and geese is to overfeed them (by shoving a metal tube down their throat) with carbohydrates (like corn or dried figs).

Humans get a little twitchy if you reach for the tube and corn, so overfeeding us has to be accomplished with a little more finesse.  In people, all but one carbohydrate triggers an insulin response which (unfortunately for those expecting to make a bit of human foie gras) shuts down appetite and stops us eating too much.

The one carbohydrate which subverts this handy appetite control feature is fructose.  So you might expect that a bit of effort has been put into seeing if fructose (and its primary modern delivery vehicle, sugar or sucrose) might be the source of the sudden explosion in NAFLD.

And you wouldn’t be disappointed.  In the last five years research that proves that sugar is the culprit has been pouring in.  Scientists have of course shown that you can give ducks (hmm, I wonder why they chose that experimental animal) and rats NAFLD using fructose.  And a recent series of human studies have also shown that the consumption of soft drinks is strongly associated with the onset of NAFLD (and I don’t think we can blame the water or the bubbles).  But if that wasn’t enough, a pair of very recent trials from Scandinavia have put the icing on the cake.

The first trial involved feeding four groups of people four different drinks (Coke, skim milk, Diet Coke and a still mineral water).  After 6 months of this, the Coke group had massively (140%) increased liver fat (as well as significantly increased blood pressure, cholesterol and blood triglycerides).  The folks knocking back Diet Coke and water were pretty much the way they were at the start (just in case you thought it might be the water or the bubbles) and the milk drinkers had even slightly improved their liver fat status.

A similar story unfolded in the second trial.  Some very unfortunate volunteer humans were put on the path to NAFLD (27% increase in liver fat) in just three weeks by overfeeding them chocolates, pineapple juice, soft drinks and sports drinks.  The good news is that the disease was easily reversed with diet (although it did take 6 months).

The trials are done, the evidence is clear.  Fructose consumption causes NAFLD in exactly the same way that alcohol causes Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.  NAFLD’s alcoholic cousin can be usually be reversed by ensuring the patient avoids alcohol.  So are the experts demanding that GPs be told to adopt a similar practice for fructose?  Nup.

No, what they want is for the government to spend more money on, well, them.  This week’s report calls for a $6 million dollar a year program (run by the doctors who commissioned the report) to increase awareness of liver disease and a $7.5 million dollar a year community care program to help people who are suffering with liver disease.

Now I’m sure these are admirable programs and I’m sure they’ll go some way to alleviating a little bit of the suffering caused by the overwhelming epidemic of chronic liver disease.  But when the cause is clear and the solution even clearer, we can do much better than throw a bit of cash at some liver doctors.

NAFLD currently has at least a quarter of the population on an expressway to a liver transplant (if the rest of the metabolic syndrome doesn’t get us first).  Yet it can be easily and effectively reversed with a pathetically simple piece of advice – don’t eat sugar.  Those charged with keeping us well, need to immediately start giving that advice rather than lobbying for a better ambulance  to park at the bottom of the cliff.