Not So Sweet

It’s the sugar, stupid!

Fed Up, a recent documentary film narrated by TV journalist Katie Couric, says it. A number of excellent books say it. Food writers including Dr. Mark Hyman and the New York Time’s Mark Bittman say it. SUGAR IS KILLING US. Most disturbingly, it is killing our KIDS.

What is it going to take to convince us? Forty years ago, a fat child was a rarity. Today, one in seven white children (ages 2–19) is obese. One in 5 Black children is obese. One in four Latino children is obese. That’s obese, what the dictionary defines as “grossly fat or overweight.” We’re not talking “plump” or “husky” or “big-boned.” We’re talking overweight to a degree that has life-threatening consequences. We’re at the point that today’s kids—for the first time in 200 years—have shorter life expectancies than their parents. They will die, young, from heart disease, kidney failure, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes, a disease that until recently was so rare among children it was called “adult-onset diabetes.” Now Type 2 diabetes is common among adolescents and teens.

So what has changed in the last 40 years that has made such a drastic difference in kids’ health? Two things have happened. First, with both parents working outside the home in the majority of families, many Americans have turned away from cooking meals from scratch to preferring convenient “processed foods.” Second, as the competition for shoppers’ dollars heated up, processed-food manufacturers made an earth-shaking discovery: The more sugar they put into their products, the more sugar consumers wanted. As the website for Fed Up says, “Sugar is added to food for one reason only. To make it taste better and make you eat more of it. It is addictive, and when you consume too much, you want more, which makes you buy more of the food industry’s products. Better for them. Bad for you.”

Whether it is called glucose solids, agave nectar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, sucrose, molasses, or any other of the 50-plus alternate names for sugar found on food labels, it’s all the same stuff, and it’s all equally deadly. “Sugar is poison,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of clinical pediatrics° at the University of California in San Francisco, and the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease.

How does sugar poison us? It’s not hard to understand, but it does require a very basic understanding of how our metabolism° works. When we eat, our digestive system breaks food down into its various nutrients°—proteins, vitamins, minerals, etc. Those nutrients are then used by different parts of the body—the brain, the muscles, etc. But sugar goes straight to our livers. That’s not a problem when humans consume small amounts of sugar, as they did for thousands of years, mostly in the form of fruit. Our livers were designed to cope with that. But people following the Standard American Diet (so fittingly abbreviated as SAD) don’t consume small amounts of sugar. They eat enormous quantities of it, because it’s included in literally almost everything they eat. And when we eat large quantities of sugar, day after day, the liver can’t keep up. Overwhelmed, it turns the sugar into fat—not only the fat that makes you look fat, but internal fat, liver fat. And a fatty liver is a sick liver. It is at risk for developing cirrhosis°, liver scarring, and even liver cancer. It releases fats into the bloodstream, raising our “bad cholesterol” and increasing our risk of heart disease. It causes us to become insulin° resistant, a condition that can result in Type 2 diabetes.

That, in a nutshell, is what sugar does to us.

So clearly, we all need to eat less sugar, right? Right! But good luck with that, Jack. Because you and I might as well be living in a giant sugar bowl. Virtually every processed food we purchase is packed with the stuff.
Many of the worst offenders, the real sugar bombs, are obvious. For instance:

• A 20-ounce bottle of Coke contains about 17 teaspoons of sugar.
• A “venti”-sized Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino contains 16 teaspoons.
• One original size 3 Musketeers candy bar contains 7.3 teaspoons.

But you’ve always known that stuff like soda and candy is bad for you. If you’re washing down your daily Krispy Kreme with a giant Mountain Dew, you probably aren’t surprised to learn that you’re taking in a whole lot of sugar.

What is surprising—make that horrifying—is the huge amount of sugar hidden in innocent-sounding processed foods°. The challenge is finding products that do not contain added sugar. Check out the labels on your next shopping expedition. And remember—sugar has more than 50 names. Whether it sounds “natural” and “healthy” (Honey! Agave nectar!) doesn’t matter—to your body, it’s all exactly the same toxic stuff. Here are just a few of sugar’s aliases to aid you: Anything ending with ose—glucose, maltose, fructose, sucrose, etc. Then there’s barley malt. Beet sugar. Blackstrap molasses. Cane juice crystals. Caramel. Corn syrup. Dextran. Diastatic malt. Fruit juice. Maple syrup. Refiner’s syrup. Rice syrup. Sorbitol. Sorghum. Turbinado sugar.

So start reading ingredient lists. You’ll be astonished where you’ll find significant added sugar. It’s in almost everything, including foods that we don’t think of as tasting sweet. You’ll find it in ketchup. Baby food. Bagels. Spaghetti sauce. Pickles. Boxed macaroni and cheese. Bread. Instant oatmeal. Frozen pizza. Canned soups. Frozen waffles. Salad dressings. Boxed skillet meals. Deli meats. Even dog food! (And yes, our pets are getting fat and sick as well.)

Even more maddeningly, another category of sugar-stuffed foods includes ones that we’ve been led to believe are “healthy.” You know all those “low-fat” versions of food that you’ve been feeling righteous about buying? Sorry, Charlie. You’ve been had. The sad truth is that fat makes food taste good. And when you reduce the fat content of many processed foods, you end up with a product with all the taste appeal of cardboard. So what do manufacturers do in order to make the low-fat version tasty? You guessed it—they add sugar to it! Lots of sugar. Low-fat versions of cookies, crackers, peanut butter, muffins, frozen meals, salad dressings, candies, etc. contain an average of 20 percent more sugar than their full-fat counterparts. Twenty percent! And you know that when you eat a “low-fat” snack, you feel justified° in having a second or a third helping, because hey! It’s low-fat! That means healthier, right?

By this point, certain questions may be forming in your mind. You may be wondering, “If the food industry knows how bad sugar is for us, why do they put so much of it in foods? Don’t they care that kids are getting fatter and sicker? And what’s the government doing about all this? Aren’t they supposed to protect us from things that hurt people, especially kids?”

Well, those would be very good questions. And the answers will make you angry. At least they should.

Because, yes. The processed-food industry knows exactly how bad much of their food is for us. They have the best food chemists in the world working for them. Those chemists have worked tirelessly for years to discover the exact combinations of sugary, salty, and fatty tastes that make the pleasure center in the human brain light up like a pinball machine, much in the same way that cocaine does. And just as cocaine addicts require more and more coke to get the same pleasure rush, sugar addicts need larger and larger doses of sugar to feel satisfied. This is particularly disturbing news when we consider the fate of children who begin eating a sugar-heavy diet at a very young age. As they grow up, those children are doomed to crave ever greater amounts of sugar, leading to ever more devastating health consequences.

The other result of sugar’s addictive qualities, of course, is that food manufacturers are making enormous profits. And when challenged to take more responsibility for the obesity epidemic and its related health problems, industry executives hide behind a litany° of weasel words and patriotic-sounding rhetoric°: We’re just giving people what they want. Americans are capable of making their own choices. No one wants a “nanny state” in which food choices are made by the government.

And to a shameful extent, our government lets them get away with it. The processed food industry has some of the highest-paid and most influential lobbyists° in Washington, and they and the politicians they wine and dine and help get re-elected have fought food reform efforts every step of the way. When First Lady Michelle Obama decided to use her influence to battle childhood obesity, she came out of the gate strongly. She laid it on the line in an address to the Grocery Manufacturers Association:

We need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children. . . . While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn’t. And it doesn’t mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones— for example, adding a little bit of Vitamin C to a product with lots of sugar, or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat doesn’t suddenly make those products good for our kids. . . . This isn’t about finding creative ways to market products as healthy. As you know, it’s about producing products that actually are healthy— products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation.

That was in 2010. Since then, food manufacturers have put out sugar-coated—oops, make that pleasant-sounding—statements about how very concerned they, too, are about children’s health. And in the meantime, they’re putting the same poison on the grocery shelves and making empty gestures like applauding Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign, which encourages children to become more physically active.

But as made heartbreakingly clear in the documentary Fed Up, children cannot exercise their way out of obesity. As producer Laurie David says, “Exercise is essential for good health. But . . . just look at one small stat from the movie, which is a child who drinks one soda a day would have to be on a bicycle for an hour and 15 minutes to get rid of that soda. There really aren’t enough hours in the day to exercise this food off.” Food manufacturers also wage endless battles against food reform in schools. In December 2014 they succeeded in watering down standards for school lunches aimed at lowering their salt content and requiring that pasta and tortillas be made with whole grains. Meanwhile, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, the branch of the government that oversees food safety) is so cowed by the might of the food industry that it hasn’t even set a recommended daily allowance for sugar in our diet—a simple move that would make food labels much more meaningful to the average American consumer.

All of which leaves us, American consumers who care about our own health and those of our children, pretty much to our own devices. Our best option for saving ourselves from the sugar epidemic is to divorce ourselves from the Standard American Diet. Cook meals from scratch, concentrating on the non-processed or lightly processed foods that are found in the outermost aisles of the supermarket: meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, whole grains. But doing that requires an investment of time and know-how that many Americans are unwilling or unable to invest. The other option is to become far more savvy about the processed foods we do choose to buy. Learn to read ingredient lists and to recognize added sugar where it hides. Don’t be fooled by misleading labels that suggest food is “healthy” because its ingredients have been tweaked in some meaningless way. Begin tracking how much sugar you actually consume in a day. If you’re eating too much sugar, consider taking the “Fed Up Challenge,” which supports participants in eliminating sugar from their diet for ten days. The details are here: http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/fedupchallenge.

Eliminating excess sugar from our diets, as individuals and as a nation, isn’t going to be easy. But it’s absolutely necessary. Our future—our kids—depend upon it.