The David Gillespie Blog

If you change nothing, nothing will change
February 2, 2011
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Heart Foundation says sugar isn’t relevant.

By | Sugar | 19 Comments

The Heart Foundation has finally trashed the last of its credibility.

Last week, (an ecstatic) Nestle announced that it had secured a Heart Foundation tick on 44 of the 46 breakfast cereals it sells in Australia.

The line-up of tick-approved products will now include some of the highest sugar breakfast cereals on sale in Australia. Milo and Milo Duo (both 29.7% sugar), Uncle Toby’s Oats Temptations (up to 34% sugar) and Uncle Toby’s Healthwise for Heart Wellbeing (30% sugar) will join the Kellogg’s Just Right (31.1% sugar) on the list of cereals the Heart Foundation says you should be eating.

The only two Nestle breakfast cereals now lacking the tick of approval are Nesquick (31.7% sugar) and Uncle Toby’s Plus Protein Lift (25.3% sugar). But don’t worry they’ll both be tickety-boo in no time. They’re currently being “reformulated”.

Nestle won’t have to worry about reducing the sugar content while it is reformulating. You see, the Heart Foundation doesn’t care about the sugar content of a tick-approved product.

A fan of my blog shared some his correspondence with the Heart Foundation this week and it revealed some interesting insights into the process.

The Heart Foundation said:

“Sugar is not a criterion because added sugar and natural sugars have similar effects on the body and based on the current level of evidence, sugar is not directly linked to [heart disease], diabetes, or obesity.”

Which is a really odd stance to take because even the briefest glance at the scientific literature would reveal that the cup of evidence against sugar runneth over.

Take for example the recent review of the evidence (published in theAnnals of the New York Academy of Science), which concludes:

“…recent data suggests that fructose consumption in humans results in increased [stomach fat], [fat] dysregulation, and decreased insulin sensitivity, all of which have been associated with increased risk for [heart] disease and type 2 diabetes.”

Perhaps the Heart Foundation forgot to renew its journal subscriptions because its “evidence” proves sugar is not dangerous. If (by evidence) you’re thinking about an extensive literature review (oh say, like the one I just mentioned), you’d be unfulfilled. If you’re thinking about a series of population studies, disappointment is in your future. Even if you’re thinking of a single rat study, you’re aiming too high.

No, the Heart Foundation’s “evidence” appears to be a single graph. The (unattributed) graph shows an increasing trend of obesity plotted against a decreasing trend of sugar consumption. There’s no sign of any evidence about heart disease or diabetes, but perhaps we just have to take those on faith.

Under further questioning, the Heart Foundation revealed to my correspondent that the source of the graph was the research conducted by Alan Barclay (the chap who helps the folks slapping low-GI stickers on packets of sugar). They referred him to theDietitians Association press release about Dr Barclay’s study for confirmation.

Unfortunately, Dr Barclay’s paper has not been published, so figuring out how he arrived at the graph is a little difficult. Just about the only thing that is clear is that the graph produced by the Heart Foundation bears no relationship to the data on sugar availability (there is no current consumption data) from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (a government department).

ABARE seems to think that Australian domestic sugar availability has gone the way we might have expected it to (from about 45 kilograms per person in the mid-‘80s to about 62 kilograms per person in 2009).

But even if the Heart Foundation’s graph was entirely correct, what would it prove? Well, nothing really. No one is suggesting that sugar consumption today results in instantaneous population-wide obesity.

The science says that (one of the ways) fructose makes us fat is by interfering with our appetite control over decades of continuous consumption. The cumulative effect of this is steadily increasing weight and concurrent metabolic dysfunction (which make us prone to Type II Diabetes and Heart Disease).

The increase in obesity statistics we are seeing now is likely to be a result of the appetite disruption (caused by sugar) between the Second World War (or even earlier) and now. So comparing today’s obesity statistics with today’s consumption is a pointless academic folly (even if it were accurate).

That would be rather like looking at this graph of lung cancer death versus cigarette consumption in 1980 and concluding that there was no correlation (because the lines had gone in opposite directions since 1960). But this is exactly the scientific method that the Australian Heart Foundation has deployed in justifying its stance (that sugar is not a relevant criteria for its tick program).

That’s not just bad logic, it’s not even bad science, it’s just straight out deceptive. I guess this all raises the question, why would anyone (least of all the Heart Foundation) be attempting to prove we eat less sugar now? One glance at the local supermarket (especially the breakfast cereal aisle) will tell us that is patent nonsense, so what would motivate someone to suggest it is so?

I hope it’s not just the lousy few million smackeroos the foundation makes every year from this little jape. Because if that’s the sole motivation behind this pathetic denial, then it is a dreadfully low price to pay for the health of a nation. The cynical lawyer in me suspects somewhere, somehow, someone is making real money out of this, but the father in me just wants the deception to stop — now.


December 24, 2010
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How Fructose makes you AGE.

By | Sugar | 3 Comments

The fructose half of sugar causes irreversible cellular damage. And this damage may just be the thing which links most of the diseases of the Western World (oh, and makes us prematurely elderly as well). But there is a way to limit the damage. No its not a drug (although plenty of people are trying to find one). All you have to do is stop eating sugar.

Enzymes control chemical reactions in our body. If we need a sugar (like glucose or fructose) to be attached to a protein for some purpose, the appropriate enzyme will make sure the sugar gets attached to exactly the right part of the protein (or fat). The process of attachment is called glycosylation and we are only just beginning to understand the enormous array of uses our body has for glycosylated proteins (such as fending off disease and even inhibiting the development of Type II diabetes).

It is however possible for sugars to accidentally attach themselves to proteins without an enzyme’s help. When that happens, the process is called glycation. Glycation can result in sugars being attached in all sorts of unpredictable (and haphazard) ways.

Glycation happens by accident and is really only likely to happen when our blood sugar levels are high (the more sugar molecules there are floating around the more likely some of them are likely to crash into a protein). The good news is that in normal circumstances glycation is reversible. As soon as blood sugar levels drop, most of the sugars and proteins will disengage and no harm is done.

But if blood sugar stays high (as is the case with someone who is diabetic or pre-diabetic), the sugar-protein combo will undergo a series of reactions that will result in the creation of an Advanced Glycation End-product (AGE).

All sugars can form AGE’s, but the glucose half of sugar is the least reactive of all sugars. This is a good thing because it is the primary sugar in our bloodstream. The bad news is that the fructose half is ten times more reactive than glucose.

Eating sugar gives us a big shot of fructose and a big (and immediate) increase in AGE production. Making things much worse, fructose consumption also leads to an increase in insulin resistance. Over the long term the insulin resistance creates an environment where our blood glucose levels are persistently elevated. And this creates a second major source of AGE’s.

If your doctor suspects you of being diabetic, they will often test your HbA1c (or A1c for short) level. The test measures the level of a glycated form of haemoglobin (the protein which transports oxygen in your blood). A high A1c level indicates that there are significant AGE levels. That is taken as a sure sign that your blood sugar is persistently too high.

Our body’s are used to garden variety (glucose-produced) AGE’s. And we are pretty good at breaking them down and disposing of them. But even so, over time they accumulate in our organs and tissues and we, well, age (the acronym AGE is very much on purpose).

Unfortunately the AGE’s made with fructose molecules are resistant to our disposal system. So not only they made at 10 times the rate, they hang around like John Farnham on a comeback tour.

AGE’s are junk, litter on our body’s interstate highways. But this is not a burger wrapper chucked out the window. This is more like the (exploding) roadside litter our troops encounter in Afghanistan. AGE’s are dangerous because they bond easily (and randomly) to each other and to other proteins in a process called cross-linking.

AGE’s accumulate pretty much everywhere in the body, but in some places they do much more damage than others. When they pile up in the lens, cornea and retina of the eye they result in cataracts and macular degeneration (the leading cause of blindness in Australia). They also accumulate in the fine tubules of the kidneys – resulting in loss of kidney function.

They cross-link the collagen which otherwise gives our arterial walls (and our skin) their elasticity (hence the term, hardening of the arteries and the ‘aging’ of the skin). They cause the oxidation of LDL cholesterol particles, making them much more likely to become trapped in arterial walls (leading to heart disease and stroke). And they accumulate in the brain.

Neurons ideally last a lifetime. This means they are much more likely to accumulate AGEs. When researchers start looking at the tangles of twisted proteins which accumulate in the neurons of Alzheimer’s patients, they discover AGEs in abundance. This is likely to be the reason why other researchers have picked up on the association between Alzheimer’s (and other dementia) and high blood sugar.

Observational and controlled studies have linked fructose consumption to Type II Diabetes, Heart Disease, stroke, blindness, kidney disease and even Alzheimer’s (to name just a few of the more delightful ones). AGE research has come a long way in the last decade (and is still in its infancy), but it might just provide a unifying mechanism which explains why the incidence of these diseases is exploding in the Australian population – we eat way too much fructose.

So if aging slower (than you otherwise might) will be top of your to-do list in the New Year, you could buy a tub of hand cream sourced exclusively from the sweat of left-handed, French, mermaids – or you could just ease back on the fructose this Christmas.

December 2, 2010
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If only we could fix obesity with passion alone

By | Sugar | 21 Comments

I don’t know of anyone who brings as much passion to the obesity problem as Jamie Oliver. He has a talent for whipping (normally docile) politicians into action for a good cause. It’s just a pity the advice Jamie is dispensing is so unlikely to change anything.

Last month, Jamie Oliver announced his first foray into correcting the diets of Australians. He plans to set up his ‘first’ Australian Ministry of Food (MoF) operation in Ipswich, just outside sunny Brisbane. The Ipswich MoF will host classes which allow up to 14,000 folk a year to sign up for (what is essentially) a home economics class once a week (over 10 weeks). The punters pay $10 for the lesson but they get to keep whatever they cook (not necessarily an advantage in my case).

Jamie’s MoF Australian ‘manifesto’, tells us that there will be an “extra 6.7 million obese Australians by 2025” and this demonstrates “an urgent need for action!” The cause (according to the Naked Chef) is that we have “a complete lack of cooking knowledge.”

Apparently cooking skills “used to be passed down” but now “women go out to work” and we no longer have compulsory cooking lessons in school. So “about two generations” have missed out on acquiring cooking skills. In a nutshell, Jamie believes that “there’s a serious lack of knowledge about food and cooking, and the result is the modern-day epidemic of obesity and bad health.”

But, will teaching “single parents, young mothers, teenagers, families and older people” to cook, fix the problem? Many more Australians (around 4 million on a good night) than will ever darken the door of Jamie’s MoF have been learning to cook over the last few years. They’ve been watching a little show called Masterchef. And just in case you don’t think anyone is paying attention, a quick look at Coles’ cash register receipts will swiftly change your mind.

The company’s sales data (as reported by Smart Company) reveals that it achieves massive sales increases on everything from pistachios (up 125%), red cabbage (up 89%) to fillet steak (up 56%) the day after the ingredients feature on the show. And the drive to cooking your own food is much stronger and deeper than that. Coles attributes much of its sales growth to people discovering that it’s cheaper to eat at home than in a restaurant (who knew?).

But figures released yesterday suggest that all that home cookery has had no visible effect on our trouser size. The Health of Queenslanders report shows 61 per cent of adults (an increase of more than 14 per cent in the preceding eight years alone) and 26.9 per cent of children in Queensland are now obese or overweight.

In 2009, Jamie established the first MoF in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham and shortly afterwards opened shop number two in nearby Bradford. The aims (and the ‘manifesto’) were almost identical to the Aussie version (which will be the third site in the world).

Rotherham was set up as part of a TV Series and then funded (to the tune of £130,000 a year) by the British Government (for two years). Bradford is costing the local council £120,000 a year. And while thousands of people have attended learn to cook classes in both places, Rotherham is clearly not convinced it’s worthwhile. In September, the government refused to commit to renewing the funding when it expires in March 2011.

There’s no obvious scientific foundation to Jamie’s claims. He doesn’t cite any studies of the relationship between cooking skills and obesity (or indeed any science which might support his case at all).

There is however plenty of science to say that sugar consumption is the cause of obesity (and much much more). Just yesterday, yet another in a long line of studies was released. This one, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Society of Nephrology reviews the recent clinical and experimental evidence and concludes that excessive amounts of fructose (one half of sugar) plays a significant role in high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease.

More than three quarters of the sugar we eat is buried in foods we would never attempt to make ourselves. Soft drinks, Breakfast Cereals, Muesli Bars, Confectionary and packages sauces and condiments. And nothing about Jamie’s program will change that reality.

Oliver’s ‘home ec’ teachers are not showing us how to replace the softdrink (or fruit juice) we have with the home cooked meal or the packaged breakfast cereal (or muesli bar) we feed the kids. They’re focused on Carrot Salad and Lemon Rice.

When Jamie does stray out of the salad aisle, things get pretty sugary, pretty fast. The Mega Chocolate Fudge Cake (featured in the Ministry of Food TV Series) serves up 120g (30 teaspoons) of sugar, 200g of Chocolate and 100g of Fudge.

There’s no plausible reason why cooking something yourself would result in weightloss and there’s no credible evidence that it does. But that hasn’t stopped the Queensland Government handing over 2.5 million taxpayer dollars to set up the MoF in Ipswich.

Jamie Oliver might as well be telling us that wearing a foil hat will reduce our waist size for all the effect the MoF is likely to have on obesity. And that’s a pity.

Oliver is a blur of energy, with an extraordinary ability to prise open government coffers in the name of health. Imagine what could be achieved if his efforts were backed by science.

Image by really short from NYC, USA (Jamie Oliver in Union Square) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

October 28, 2010
2

Do we really want our Nutrition advice sponsored by the Food Industry?

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 98 Comments

The Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) is just like a union for dietitians. And like all unions, its priority is to represent the interests of its members. So when it starts handing out advice on what to eat we should be cautious. We should be especially cautious when that advice is funded by some of Australia’s most powerful food companies.

In Australia there is nothing to prevent anybody declaring themselves to be a dietitian (or a nutritionist). The barrier to entry is the price of a stack of business cards.

Other professions have managed to protect themselves (and their customers) by requiring qualifications and the observation of professional standards. Some professions have even managed have the barriers enforced by law (because when a lawyer or a doctor stuffs up the results can be catastrophic).

One of the primary roles of the DAA is to perform this ‘professional’ function for dietitians. It has created a certification process which produces Accredited Practising Dietitians (APD). And it has successfully lobbied to ensure that Medicare and private health fund rebates are only payable for APD services. In short their message is, make sure your dietitian is an APD.

One of the main sources of work for APDs is referrals from doctors (often just after they diagnose you with pre-diabetes and advise you to adjust your lifestyle). The nature of the work is telling people what they should eat. So a food company would be mad not to help the DAA. And help they certainly do.

The DAA’s list of corporate sponsors reads like a who’s who of the Australian food industry. Kellogg’s, Nestle, Unilever (the maker of Street’s Ice Cream and Flora margarine to name a couple of its brands), Nutricia (baby formula makers), Jalna yoghurts and the Meat and Livestock Association all feature prominently on the list of corporate ‘partners’.

That corporate support is significant. The DAA’s annual report reveals that (in 2009) advertising and sponsorship ($686,249) was the third largest source (after membership dues, $1.5m and seminar fees $833k) of revenue for the association. If the money from the food industry weren’t there, it’s likely each of the 4,100 members of the DAA would be facing considerably higher fees.

The DAA’s partners help with much more than mere cash. For example, Kellogg’s is a big supporter of the DAA’s (or is it the other way round?) National Breakfast Week, a campaign to ensure we eat breakfast (guess what features prominently). Kellogg’s also helps run the DAA Media Program, which “seeks to provide accurate nutrition and health information to the Media.”

The DAA’s policy on accepting sponsorship is that it “will not be influenced in any statements, positions or opinions by its commercial agreements.” And we would expect no less, but the same policy adds a somewhat cynical twist by saying that that DAA will take on sponsorship only where the “benefits for DAA outweigh any assessed risks.”

The fructose half of sugar is a dangerous (and addictive) addition to our diet that helps to sell many of the products made by the DAA’s corporate supporters. So what is the DAA’s position on sugar?

In May this year, a DAA press release trumpeted “Sweet truths: Eating sugar may not make you fat.” The release reported on a ‘study’ presented to DAA’s annual conference by DAA spokesperson, Dr Alan Barclay.

Dr Barclay reported that “consumption of fructose has decreased by nearly 20 per cent in Australia since the early 1970s, while overweight and obesity has doubled.” He went on to say “Much to everyone’s surprise, it looks as if, unlike in the US, sugar is not the culprit here …”

What the DAA’s press release did not say was that Dr Barclay is employed by Glycemic Index Ltd, an outfit that collects a royalty on CSR sugar sales. The DAA also neglected to mention that the sugar consumption figures presented by Dr Barclay stand in stark contrast to similar numbers maintained by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (a government department). ABARE seems to think that Australian domestic sugar consumption has more than doubled since the mid-eighties.

I suspect Dr Barclay would say his employer’s relationship with CSR doesn’t influence his view of the science about sugar. And I’m sure the DAA would say the same about all of its sponsors. But I prefer messages about the safety of sugar not to be sponsored by the folks who make billions out of selling it.

Australians don’t like people in positions of trust accepting kickbacks. We constantly worry whether drug companies are trying to influence our doctors. We demand that lawyers refuse to act on both sides of a real estate purchase. And we even get our undies in a twist at the thought of our PM accepting a dodgy ute.

We trust the DAA (and our Medicare and health insurance premiums pay its APD’s) to tell us what to eat. In that context, accepting significant payments from the food industry is a flagrant conflict of interest.

I don’t know whether the DAA just hasn’t caught up with its reading on sugar or whether the money is colouring its advice. But the existence of significant food industry sponsorship should cause all Australians to discount anything the DAA says about nutrition. And that is a disgraceful state of affairs for Australia’s “peak body of dietetic and nutrition professionals.”

October 8, 2010
1

How about we stop Kidney Disease?

By | Sugar | 2 Comments

What will put the most Australians in hospital this year? Car accidents? No way. Heart attacks? Nup. Cancer? Not even close. No, it’s Kidney Disease. But a series of recent studies suggest there is a very simple way to turn that statistic around.

Chronic kidney disease is now responsible for more than 1 in every 7 hospitalisations. And that rate has gotten very bad, very quickly. Between 2001 and 2008, hospital admissions for kidney dialysis alone increased by 71 per cent.

The news is even worse for indigenous Australians. At the end of 2007, they were being treated for kidney disease at six times the rate of the rest of the Australian population. This is why the number hospitalisations in the Northern Territory increased by an incredible 120 per cent (almost 20 per cent per year) in the same period.

The NT has another interesting claim to fame (aside from Croc Dundee). According to Coca-Cola it has the highest per capita consumption of Coke in the world. Increasingly the science is starting to suggest that is more than a mere co-incidence.

We don’t know what causes most forms of kidney disease and we certainly can’t cure it (other than by replacing the kidneys). But there is a line of studies going back over half a century that suggest the answer (to the mystery of the cause and the cure) might lie in something called uric acid.

Uric acid is a waste product created when we digest red meats. Like most waste products circulating in our blood stream, it is removed from our systems by our own little pool filter system, the kidneys.

Simply put, the theory goes that if you have too much uric acid, you end up clogging the filters in the kidneys and (over time) this degrades their capacity to work at all. There’s a line of rat studies you couldn’t jump over to prove exactly that cause and effect relationship. But rats process uric acid differently to humans (and other higher primates) so there’s always been a question mark about those studies.

In 2008, a major study conducted by the Vienna University went a long way to answering the question in humans. In that study 21,475 (initially) healthy subjects were tracked for 7 years. Their uric acid levels were compared to the occurrence of kidney disease. The outcome was an unequivocal correlation. The higher a person’s uric acid levels, the higher their likelihood of developing kidney disease. Full stop.

If eating meat was the major cause of increased uric acid production, you’d expect to see a steep increase in the amount of meat we eat over the last few decades (to go along with the sharp rise in kidney disease). But according to the CSIRO, our red meat consumption has been steadily falling since the 1970s.

It turns out though, that there’s another truly excellent way to increase the amount of uric acid in a human’s bloodstream. Feed them sugar.

In 1989, the US Department of Agriculture’s carbohydrate research team proved that they could cause a significant spike in uric acid levels just by feeding people the fructose half of sugar (it is half glucose and half fructose) at the levels (then) normally consumed by the average US citizen (20 per cent of calories – exactly the same as the current Australian suggested intake).

A much larger 2008 study of 4,867 US school children (unsurprisingly) found the same strong association between increased sugary drink consumption and uric acid levels. And an analysis published in the same year took that further by linking sugary drink consumption with the onset of kidney disease in adults using a similarly large database of results.

Uric acid is a by-product of the way our livers metabolise fructose. And unlike meat, sugar (and therefore fructose) consumption figures have all been one way traffic (up, big time) in the last five decades.

While all of that evidence is strongly persuasive, it isn’t proof. No-one has purposely fed a large group of people fructose (and kept it away from a similar group) to see which ones died of kidney disease first. But I rather suspect, sadly, we are inadvertently conducting our own little experiment on the indigenous population.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders consume around twice as much sugar-sweetened soft drink as the rest of us (which is very high because Australians are in the top ten per capita consumers in the world anyway). So (given their high indigenous population) it’s no wonder the Northern Territory featured so prominently in Coke’s statistics. And it’s even less wonder (given what the science is saying about fructose) that it features so prominently in our kidney disease statistics.

Kidney disease is massively debilitating. The only effective ‘treatment’ is getting hooked up to a dialysis machine three times a week. Meanwhile the number of people needing that treatment is growing at the rate of 6 per cent every year.The only ‘cure’ is replacing the kidneys (if you’re lucky enough to get to the head of the transplant queue (currently the wait is about four years) before you die.

Kidney disease is now killing more Australians than either breast or prostate cancer and more than twice as many as die on the roads every year. But the evidence is mounting that there is a very simple preventative measure. Don’t eat (or drink) sugar.

So how about we give that a go before the next generation destroys their kidneys too?

Image courtesy of bejim / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

September 2, 2010
0

Why we shouldn’t put up with sportspeople advertising sugar.

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar | 5 Comments

I’m not very good with subliminal advertising, but (apparently) eating sugar makes you look like Eamon Sullivan – which I guess would be good. Or perhaps it just makes you take your clothes off – not so good (in my case). Either way, the latest CSR sugar advertisement sends a pretty damn (‘scuse French) irresponsible message about sugar.

The purpose of the ad is to sell CSR sugar. And so I guess the reason they didn’t use a nude Matt Preston (for example) was that they wanted us to believe that eating CSR sugar would give us (or our significant other) abs like Eamon’s.

Maybe I’m just jumping to conclusions. Maybe Eamon always noods-it-up for a spot of baking (although I can’t say I noticed that when he won Masterchef). But there’s no shortage of research to tell us that eating sugar (in our birthday suit or fully clothed) is the single least effective way to get a washboard stomach.

And you don’t need to look too hard to find that science. Even CSR’s own website warns us “There is some evidence to suggest that [the fructose half of sugar] is handled differently in the body and may be associated with obesity and other health issues.”

Eamon must have missed the memo (that sugar makes you fat) because when asked about his role in the advertisement, he is quoted as responding “statistics showed that while obesity rates were rising, sugar consumption was falling.”

Really? What statistics would those be? The only ones I could find show exactly the opposite (a consumption increase of over 50 per cent since 1990). But that data is maintained by the Australian Government’s Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) – what would they know?

Eamon went on to say “the CSR sugar in the ad was in fact low-GI.” Well, yes (maybe), but all sugar is low(ish) GI. And the worst for making you fat and sick (pure fructose) is the lowest of the lot. In fact it is one of the lowest GI carbohydrates known to man.

That alone should make us suspicious of the use of the GI rating at all. GI Symbols lost any credibility when they started turning up on packets of pure sugar. They are a symbol of nothing more than the food manufacturer’s willingness to give up profit (they pay a percentage of sales for the right) in return for our gullibility.

CSR should know the GI Symbol is a spurious health claim and it knows its product is dangerous (to human health). It admits as much on the website. This is why it doesn’t make any claims to the contrary in its ad (lawyers can be so annoyingly literal about these things). It just leaves it to us to use our imagination and imply benefits which are never actually claimed.

CSR’s candid admission as to the dangers of fructose is far more than any tobacco company ever managed (before they were forced to). We banned cigarette advertising at sporting events almost 20 years ago because we didn’t want our kids accepting an association between cigarettes and sport. For exactly the same reason we shouldn’t put up with CSR pushing its way under Eamon’s healthy halo.

Sugar will not make you look like Eamon. CSR knows it, (hopefully Eamon knows it) and you know it too. So let’s stop this farcical advertising before someone gets hurt.

August 25, 2010
0

Sugar accelerates cancer growth

By | Sugar | 4 Comments

Cancer is our biggest killer (yep, even worse than heart disease). And sugar consumption has been in the frame as a cancer risk for a while now, but a study released last week appears to have put the matter beyond doubt (at least for pancreatic cancer).

A 2002 a study tried to find which food had the greatest association with pancreatic cancer, and fructose (remembering sugar is half fructose and half glucose) got first prize.

The study conducted by the US National Cancer Institute identified 180 cases of pancreatic cancer from among 88,802 women who were monitored for 18 years as part of the Nurses’ Health Study. Women who were overweight and sedentary and had a high fructose intake were shown to have a 317 per cent greater chance of developing pancreatic cancer.

A 2006 study published by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden decided soft drinkers were in significant jeopardy, and had warnings for anyone eating sugar at all.

In the Swedish study, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the risk of developing pancreatic cancer was directly related to the amount of sugar in the diet. The people who said that they drank soft drinks twice a day or more were 90 per cent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those who never drank them.

And then a study published in February this year found that we are 87 percent more likely to contract pancreatic cancer if we have two cans of soft drink a week (about 10 grams of sugar a day on average).

These were all population studies. And while they are good for suggesting there may be a problem, they give no clue as the possible mechanism. Why does consuming fructose mean you are at greater risk of pancreatic cancer?

Last week a study out of the University of California (UCLA) nailed down the likely reason.In the study, human pancreatic cancer cells were exposed to solutions of pure glucose and pure fructose in the lab.

Sugar is half glucose and half fructose. The researchers knew that consistently high blood-glucose levels (such as that suffered by a Type II Diabetic) will accelerate the growth of cancerous cells. They also knew that eating fructose directly increases circulating fatty acids which reduces the effectiveness of insulin in clearing the blood of glucose.

The persistently increased blood glucose leads to type II diabetes and feeds cancer. But in this new study, the researchers were trying to determine whether fructose had a more direct involvement in cancer growth.

To find out they tagged the sugars with radioactive carbon (so they could see what the cells were doing with them).What they found was that the fructose was metabolised very differently by the cancerous cells.

Cancer is out-of-control cellular reproduction.The fructose was being used by the cells to create a much higher output of the genetic material which cells need in order to divide and proliferate (nucleic acids used to make DNA and RNA).

The difference between glucose and fructose appeared to be that while both could be used for energy, only one supplied significant quantities of the building materials for tumour growth. A tumour treated with fructose grew much more aggressively than one in a bath of glucose.

Having lots of fructose in the diet appears to create a perfect environment for cancer growth. The persistently high blood glucose caused by the metabolism of fructose by the liver (into fatty acids), provides fuel. And the fructose itself provides the DNA and RNA required for multiplication. What a perfect storm!

Studies of cells in a lab setting are not overly persuasive on their own. There are a lot of checks and balances in a living organism that simply do not exist when you isolate one type of cell. But these tests on pancreatic tumours combined with the strong line of population studies (coming to pretty much the same conclusion) is worth paying attention to.

These studies are all on cancer of the pancreas, the organ most involved with detecting the presence of sugar in the blood. But according to the authors of the study there is no reason that the observations about fructose should not apply to any kind of cancer.

In 2007 almost one in three (29 per cent) deaths were caused by cancer. Breast cancer (the biggest cancer for Australian women) incidence has increased by 32 per cent in the last two decades. And the incidence of prostate cancer (the biggest cancer for men) has more than doubled in the same timeframe.

There is no higher priority in our health system than slowing (or stopping) the accelerating trend in cancer suffering. This study suggests that sugar (a major component of the average Australian diet and the primary source of fructose) is directly implicated.

Fructose is not a disinterested bystander in the development of cancer. Our renegade cells use it directly (and significantly) to accelerate their reproduction. There is no sane reason for fructose (and therefore sugar) to be part of our diet. And there is no sane reason for the health hierarchy not to be saying exactly what I am saying – stop eating sugar immediately!

 

March 11, 2010
0

How to sell bottled sweat – make it sweet.

By | Sugar | 5 Comments

In 1965, Dr Robert Cade (a kidney specialist), noticed that if he fed Gators a drink which mimicked human sweat they could play American Football better than before. The Gators in question were not of the large bitey variety. They were his beloved University of Florida football team.

American football in Florida required very fit boys to run around (dressed in a space suit) in a climate similar to North Queensland for three hours at a time. And as you might imagine this took its toll on performance. The players were sweating up to 3 litres of fluid per hour and while they could (and did) drink water, their salt (sodium and potassium) levels were so diluted (by all the water) that nerve and muscle function became impaired.

Coaches routinely handed out salt tablets to combat this problem, but Dr Cade found that if he dissolved the salts in water, it was much more effective. He also theorised that since fatigue was a very real problem for the players, it would be good to slip some instant energy into the drink.

Cade chose to use glucose because that’s the sugar we use for energy (our ‘blood-sugar’ is glucose and most carbohydrates are eventually converted to glucose before we can burn them). He figured pure glucose would provide an instant energy boost. There was just one wee problem with that ‘solution’, it tasted a lot like, well – wee (at least according to the players). The glucose was not sweet enough to overpower the taste of the salts.

The answer was to chuck in an artificial sweetener – and Gatorade was born. Unfortunately Cade chose cyclamates as his sweetener just before the US Food and Drug Administration banned them. An urgent reformulation resulted in the glucose being replaced with sugar.

Sugar was less than ideal because it took the body time to split it into its constituent fructose and glucose. Even worse, the fructose half impaired the uptake of the glucose (because of its lower glycemic index). But hey, now it tasted great! And a great tasting drink that could be legally sold was better than an ordinary drink that contained a banned ingredient.

Gatorade (now owned by PepsiCo) has not looked back. It now controls 77 percent of the $11 billion US Sports drink market. Even Coke’s Powerade is struggling to dent its brand. Apparently no self respecting American athlete would be seen drinking anything else.

Australians are less sensitive to the footballing heritage of Gatorade, so here the sports drink market is a practical duopoly shared by Gatorade and Powerade. We still manage to put away over 300 million bottles of Sports Drink every year (and growing fast), so it’s a market the big boys take very seriously.

Both the major brands (and their minor competitors) are sweetened with sugar and as a result are largely indistinguishable from the carbonated brethren dispensed from the mother ship. Only one brand had (until last week) stuck faithfully to Dr Cade’s original idea (water + salt + glucose + artificial sweetener).

Staminade powder had resisted the pressure of competing with sugar sweetened goliaths. This made it a great option for people trying to avoid the harmful half of sugar (fructose). Glen was one of those people, so he wrote to the makers to protest the change.

In response the makers explained that glucose on its own was not sweet enough, so rather than continue to use an artificial sweetener they switched to sugar. Regarding Glen’s concern about sugar containing fructose, they patiently explained that “Sucrose is a disaccharide containing a molecule of Glucose & a molecule of Fructose. It’s like calling Water (H2O) as having hydrogen and Oxygen gases-once bonded to form water . Water becomes totally different to Hydrogen & Oxygen.”

Well, there you go. Chemistry 101. And that would be all well and good except humans are mighty handy at splitting sucrose into glucose and fructose. In fact we can’t use sucrose at all until that little job is done. Water on the other hand is pretty darn useful to us just the way it is. Which is I guess, why we’ve never troubled ourselves to create a home electrolysis unit in our tum-tums.

The really ironic thing about sports drinks is that there is precious little science to suggest they are necessary at all. And any potential positive effects are enormously outweighed by the negative effects of consuming the sugar (such as the $20,000 of dental work former competitive triathlete Jacinta Worland is now facing).

Whenever we exercise we will need to drink water (hydrogen and oxygen to some). If we exercise (and drink water) for two and a half hours at a time, the water should contain some salts or we risk (potentially fatal) water intoxication. If we expect to be able to perform well for more than the first half hour of strenuous exercise, then it would be a good idea to include some glucose in that water.

Since very few of us meet the criteria for elite athletic performance, water will do just fine should we decide to don the lycra. The science says we don’t need to drink sugar and ordinarily we’d need some convincing that it was healthy to down a Coke or Pepsi. But colourful, flat, soft drinks like Gatorade and Powerade are more dangerous than their fizzy cousins because they come wrapped in a health message.

Even if you aren’t sporty, you’ll probably feel sporty with one in your hand. But they still pack a dangerous punch with 9 teaspoons of sugar in the average bottle (about the same as a can of Coke).

The reality is that Staminade had to go the way of its competitors for precisely the reason that they are competitors. We can’t expect them to fight an addictive sweetener like sugar with one hand tied behind their back.

And so, as the last fructose friendly sports drink retreats from our shelves, let us say R.I.P. good health.

January 12, 2010
3

Attack of the Chocolatier

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar | 171 Comments

On Sunday, ABC’s Ockham’s Razor program aired a piece by a chap called Chris Forbes- Ewan. Chris is a nutritionist who works for the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) in Tasmania. He has spent the last few years making high melting point chocolate for DSTO. This stuff allows Aussie troops to still enjoy a choccy even when sitting in the hot Arabian sun.

DSTO says they “work closely with industry … through a range of … mutually beneficial arrangements.” Interestingly they have been ‘working closely’ with Nestle on Chris’s project. DSTO explain “Nestlé’s transformation from a general food company into a health, nutrition and wellness company meant that they were more closely aligned to DSTO in the area of nutrition.”

Nestle has been transformed into a health and wellness company? I must have missed the memo. I’m sure DSTO (and Chris) are not in any way influenced by ‘closely working’ with Nestle for years, but it would have been nice to disclose the relationship so we could make up our own mind.

It’s true I have no formal qualifications in nutrition. But apparently none are necessary, beyond being a human that eats. And I understand that to someone (like Chris) who has worked in this area for ‘more than two decades’ it could be a little confronting to deal with someone qualified by nothing more than a thirst for knowledge.

After reading 208 pages of summarised research in Sweet Poison, he decides the thing worthy of attack (beyond my credentials) is my claim that we now get almost 20% of our calories from fructose.

For the record the average Aussie consumes about 50 kg of sugar a year. On top of that, they gulp down approximately 10 kg of sugar in fruit juice concentrate (used to sweeten ‘healthy’ food like Nestle’s fruit fix), honey and fruit juice. The fructose half of this equates to 16.4 percent of the recommended adult male’s diet (2,000 Calories per day) or 18.2 percent of an adult female diet of 1,800 Calories. To me, that looks like ‘almost 20 percent’ and a lot more than the 6 percent Chris calculates.

But even if he were absolutely right, it wouldn’t change my argument one little bit. Unlike Chris (and coincidentally Big Sugar), I don’t believe (and there is no credible research to suggest) that there is any safe level of fructose consumption (beyond that which is contained in two pieces of fruit per day).

Even Chris concedes that “many Australians do eat excessive amounts of sugar, and would do themselves (and their waistlines) a favour by reducing sugar intake.” His real concern seems to be that people won’t voluntarily give up sugar, reducing his argument to: I know it’s bad but people won’t change, so let’s not worry about it.

His only other concern was about a human trial (of fructose feeding) I mentioned in the book. It had to be abandoned due to some of the participants suffering heart problems.

I mentioned the study to make the (I thought, rather amusing) point that humans have better lawyers than rats which is why (perhaps) there are less human studies on fructose. But Chris claims that I completely misinterpreted the study’s findings. He implies that the heart problems were no more attributable to fructose than to starch (the two diets used in the trial).

I didn’t do the study, so I have to rely on what the researchers themselves concluded. They say that even though the link between the fructose and the heart attacks could not be proven, the probability that it “was due to chance was was < .0005” (less than five hundredths of a percent).”

Sweet Poison is stuffed to the brim with examples from the (over 3,000) studies that show the damage being done by fructose, but Chris doesn’t have problems with any of the rest. This one (somewhat oblique) reference is the only one he questions.

He has however personally found 12 studies which show feeding people fructose has no effect or is beneficial (no less). He doesn’t cite (or describe) any of them, so we’ll just have to take his word on that. Perhaps next time Chris, you could give us some clues? Maybe even mention the name of the researchers? Ockham’s Razor is a science show after all.

Despite his newly discovered (and unnamed) studies, Chris finishes his piece by saying that “recent studies suggest that high fructose intake may increase the risk of conditions such as gout, kidney stones, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, and may also lead to blood lipid profiles associated with greater risk of heart disease.” Oh ok, so we agree then?

And that’s it. That’s all he had. The End.

I’ve put the evidence out there and the best a chocolatier-come-critic can come up with (after six months) is (incorrectly) suggesting I misinterpreted an abandoned study from 1984?

Sugar purveyors (including the DSTO’s partner, Nestle) have billions in revenue and resources coming out their ears. Sweet Poison cites endless studies and there are even more on my blog. But so far not one study has been cited which contradicts any of it.

If the science is wrong and fructose is harmless (as Chris starts to imply but then changes his mind), then surely it can’t be that hard to prove. Just cite some credible studies.

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

December 7, 2009
0

Sugar, not salt, causes high blood pressure

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 11 Comments

A study published in last week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ) seemed to confirm what our health gurus already know. Apparently salt is not good for you.

The paper reviewed a series of studies on salt intake conducted between 1985 and 2007. The results were all over the map. But the authors said if you looked at them just the right way, they showed that if you ate more salt your risks of stroke and heart disease were much higher than otherwise.

The theory goes that if you eat less salt, less water will be drawn into your bloodstream and you will have lower blood pressure. And blood pressure is a known risk factor for heart disease and stroke. So they concluded we should all continue to try harder to reduce our salt intake.

Huh? Didn’t we already know this? Isn’t this old news? Why on earth would anyone need to confirm something that we’ve been told since at least 1979? Well it seems the dangers of salt are nowhere near as certain as we have been led to believe.

According to the salt industry, the results are questionable because two of the study’s authors are members of a strident anti-salt group, but didn’t disclose this to the BMJ. And it doesn’t take long to find major studies which flat out contradict those results. Just last year, a significant study showed that (at least in the US), low salt levels actually increase your risk of death from heart disease.

Some small salt studies have shown that decreasing salt will lower blood pressure (and quite a few haven’t). But the favourable results (of less than 2% decrease) are hardly earth shattering. In fact, it’s possible to get similar effects just by decreasing the amount of water someone drinks prior to having their blood pressure taken.

Whether salt really increases (or reduces) your risk of death from a heart attack is clearly far from settled. But that hasn’t stopped nutritionists, Food Standards Australia and the Heart Foundation lobbying furiously for decreases in our daily salt allowance.

Meanwhile the link between sugar (well, at least the fructose half of sugar anyway) and high blood pressure has been growing stronger by the day. A study released last month confirmed that fructose directly causes high blood pressure. The researchers were able to raise participants’ blood pressure by 5 percent in just two weeks by giving them the amount of fructose contained in 3.5 litres of softdrink per day (about 3 times the American average).

The blood pressures returned to normal after two months off the high sugar diet. The study is clearly not a real world example but the effect was pronounced and very, very quick. No study of salt intervention has ever produced anything like it.

Another study released last month backs up the link. In that one, the soft-drink consumption habits of 4,528 people were analysed. Participants who consumed more than 74g of fructose a day (about the same as in 1.3 litres of soft drink and bang on the American average) significantly (87%) increased their risk of having dangerously high blood pressure. Once again, no salt study has ever shown anything like that effect.

But while the Heart Foundation campaigns against salt, it hands out ‘ticks’ to high sugar products like fruit bars and fruit juices. And when salt concerns are put to food processors they respond with good intentions – oh dear, yes there is too much salt in food – we must do better. But try saying that kind of thing about sugar and you get letters from the legal department.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s got something to do with the fact that reducing salt (from anything to anything) is a great marketing claim and it probably won’t affect the sales of the product. But reducing sugar (when your competitors don’t) will probably cost you serious money. Unlike salt, sugar is highly addictive.

It’s time we suspended the phoney war on salt and started a real war on the real culprit: sugar.

Image courtesy of Mister GC at FreeDigitalPhotos.net